Universal Genius Par Excellence



Horse's Head by Giorgio Vasari.
[in exhibition]

In search of cultural refreshment, I visited the new Leonardo exhibition in Oud Sint Jan on Sunday morning. It is billed as a World Premiere as, after Brugge, it travels Europe-wide. I do vaguely remember a similar idea for a Leonardo exhibition which featured models of some of his sketches, in the Poor Priests’ Hospital in Canterbury as part of the Festival 1985. This current exhibition is mind-blowing in its extraordinary scope and size; there are over a hundred models made from Leonardo’s sketches and demonstrate the quite extraordinary genius of the man. Indeed, Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists, 1568, describes Leonardo [1452-1519] as: an example of an artist transcending nature when, ‘a single person is marvellously endowed by Heaven with beauty, grace and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men behind.’

 

One can imagine that illegitimacy was despised and ridiculed during the fifteenth century but Leonardo was saved from ignominy in his mother, Caterina's, peasant family because his father, a rich notary living in Vinci near to Firenze, took him into his household and provided a basic school education. Ser Piero da Vinci, eventually recognising his son's extensive talents, persuaded friend, Andrea del Verrocchio, to take the boy into his workshop to shape his creativity. So, good fortune in his early days provided Leonardo with creative training and his matchless curiosity and innate creativity carried him per ardua ad astra.

 Ginevra de' Benci  1474/8

His painting was almost faultless with its wonderful use of sfumato and chiaroscuro though he did acquire a reputation for not always finishing commissions. In spite of Leonardo's mastery of portraits

 Lady with Ermine
Accomplished portrait of
Cecilia Gallerani
1490

and his astonishing anatomical drawings in surviving notebooks, the exhibition is memorable chiefly for the superlative array of wooden weapons and defensive models constructed from his drawings.

There are inventive and enormous catapults and several cannon ball-launching machines; assault cars and any number of ingenious devices involving ladders, projectiles and protective armour for the mediaeval soldier. One cone-shaped assault car is credited with being the inspiration for the modern tank.
Walking round wondering is to be in the skin of a mediaeval general, given the key to a mediaeval gallery of prototypes of weapons and armour designed to make him ecstatically impregnable on the battlefield. Leonardo was an Engineer Extraordinaire and an Inventor of Defence and Weaponry Par Excellence. And this doesn't touch on his genius with hydraulics, aeronautics, architecture, measurement.

One tends, now, to think of Leonardo da Vinci as, primarily, an artist, though he left quite a small body of work behind; 15 or 16 paintings in total though containing wonderfully realised compositions such as the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper but my favourites are Lady with Ermine and Ginevra de’Benci [1474/8] However, contemporaneously, he was admired and sought principally as an engineer and inventor, especially in the realms of warfare. The art of warfare ranked first in the list of arts and clearly Leonardo was entranced by it for most of his life.



Cone-shaped armoured car surmounted
by a small tower. Armoured
wooden exterior defended by  
low perimeter cannons.

Many of da Vinci's sketches were clever dreams, unrealisable at the time because of the weight of the materials available. But, this Renaissance Man's inventions often pre-dated by hundreds of years, the actual appearance of machines imagined by him. His 'aerial screw' drawing has notes ....' If this instrument made with a screw be well made -- that is to say, made of linen of which the pores are stopped up with starch-- be turned swiftly, the said screw will make it spiral in the air and it will rise.'
His idea of compressing air to obtain flight is similar to the principle behind today's  helicopters, the first of which was made in the 1940s.


 Leonardo da Vinci, self portrait, 1512/15

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

                              

 The matchless beauty of Ginevra de' Benci,
as portrayed by Leonardo in 1474/8