‘Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life’
By Stephen J. Campbell
Princeton University Press, 252 Pages

What has been said of Shakespeare could be said of Leonardo: All of the verifiable facts of his life can be set down on a page. Of course, that has not deterred biographers from making book on these artists’ lives. Why that is so is the subject of Stephen J. Campbell’s provocative argument that we can learn as much about Leonardo by admitting what we don’t know than by stretching him beyond credibility into the kind of figure to be found in data-driven modern biography.

The sympathetic yet skeptical Mr. Campbell explains that his book is about biography itself, and why in the case of subjects like Leonardo, the urge to fill the gaps in knowledge about him is irresistible: “Somehow, these achievements need to be framed by a life story. I’d go further: we need the works and the writing to become that life story. We want a character somehow like ourselves, still living and breathing at the heart of that complicated legacy. An individual who can reconcile that legacy of achievement, to make sense of it all.”

Note the repetition of “somehow,” a word that signals the frustrations of biographers and the yearning to fashion an image of the artist even as he fashioned his own vision of the world. That, however, is the problem: Leonardo’s sense of himself — whatever that was — is not ours. To get closer to the man and artist, Mr. Campbell suggests, requires a careful examination of Leonardo’s historical context and his place within the continuum of his contemporary artists.

Certain chapter titles will give you the gist of Mr. Campbell’s approach: “Da Vinci: New, Improved, Reanimated,” “Managing Da Vinci Worlds: Conservators, Scientists, Entrepreneurs,” “The Art Market and the Da Vinci Supply Line,” “Eyewitnesses and the Rhetoric of Experience,” “Leonardo Biographies: The Industry.” Leonardo, in other words, is a confluence of varied and conflicting interests that can be harmonized or elided in biographies.

Take, for example, Vasari’s vivid description of the “Mona Lisa,” which did so much to enhance its mystique. Mr. Campbell quotes the art historian/biographer on the life likeness of the “eyebrows, through his having shown the manner in which the hairs spring from the flesh, here more close and here more scant, and curve according to the pores of the flesh,” which “could not be more natural.” 

As Mr. Campbell points out, “she has no eyebrows,” and he wonders whether Vasari was “just following the poetical formulas for the head-to-toe description of beautiful women in vernacular poetry, where eyebrows are often complimented.” Or was he “basing his account on an eyewitness description by someone else? Or — most likely — did he see a copy, perhaps even an alternative version, of the painting?”

Mr. Campbell also has his fun with Freud, who takes what Leonardo says about his study of birds in flight, which is related, the artist claims, to “my destiny, because among the first recollections of my infancy, it seemed to me that, as I was in my cradle, a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips.” 

Freud sees “sexual metaphors,” Mr. Campbell notes while suggesting the artist may be making up the whole story, which is so like legends of St. Ambrose asleep in his cradle when a sudden swarm of bees “flew in and covered his face and mouth so completely that the bees seemed to be moving in and out of their hive.” It is a foretelling of greatness, Ambrose’s father declares. 

What Mr. Campbell calls these “emblematic” episodes in Leonardo’s life do tell us much about the artist and his quest to incorporate himself into ancient mythology going back to the Greeks. But as biography, as statements of the personal, such stories bring us no closer to factuality. 

Such stories reveal how artists want to be seen and are like Norman Mailer’s suspicion that Marilyn Monroe made up the story about her grandmother trying to smother her in her cradle. In short, the very skepticism about what biography can accomplish can nonetheless be a contribution to our understanding of biography. 

Mr. Rollyson, author of “Norman Mailer: The Last Romantic” writes about famous artists in “Essays in Biography.”