Tragic Pursuit

LEONARDO DA VINCI (561 pp.)--An-tonina Vallentin--Viking ($5).

Was Leonardo da Vinci a failure? A good many of his contemporaries thought so, and Leonardo gloomily agreed with them. It remained for posterity to decide that he was perhaps the most prodigiously gifted man who ever lived, the archetype of the Renaissance man.

Yet there is much ty be said for Michelangelo's accusation that Leonardo squandered the greatest of his gifts--his genius as an artist. Antonina Vallentin concludes, in her excellent biography, that it was the "tragic pursuit of perfection" that kept Leonardo moving restlessly from field to field. First published in the '30s, and re-issued now for the sooth anniversary of Leonardo's birth, the book comes at a natural moment for a valuation of the great Florentine's life & work.

Palette & Lute. Leonardo was the bastard of a peasant girl and a small-town notary who finally brought the small boy to live with him. For eleven years, however, Leonardo was not much more than another mouth at the notary's table. At 16, he was shipped to Florence and put to the painter's trade with Maestro (Andrea del Verrocchio because he had shown some flair for the palette.

In Verrocchio's workshops, to the awe of his master, Leonardo's genius unfolded. He learned in a few months almost all that Verrocchio could teach, and soared on through other arts and sciences. He soon played a lute, his countrymen said, more wondrously than any man alive; and the Florentine scientist, Paolo Toscanelli, found the country boy his most precocious pupil.

Leonardo in those days was a handsome young demigod, so strong that he could break horseshoes with his bare hands. In any group he would have been the center; it was his misfortune to become the center of a group which numbered several effeminates. At 24 he was indicted for sodomy. He was acquitted, but only after a relentless inquisition.

Lost in the Vaults. Restless and unhappy, Leonardo turned to study and speculation. He deserted Florence for Milan, left Milan for Mantua, tried Florence and Milan again, then Rome and finally France. Time & again he proposed to his patrons works of such colossal size that they could be executed only in the vaults of Leonardo's own vast imagination. It seemed almost as if he wanted his projects to be refused, so that he could go on brooding over more of them.

Yet from his dreams Leonardo wrung some amazing realities. He took up military engineering, and invented prototypes of the machine gun, the tank, the explosive shell, the submarine. Turning to municipal planning, he conceived a city with two-level highways. He designed the first power loom, the first rolling mill, the first differential gear, the first picture projector. His studies in anatomy, hydraulics, mechanics, optics carried him centuries ahead of his day. Even his amusements made history: he invented a musical instrument that anticipated the harpsichord; he improved the printing press, rigged a style of oil lamp that was used until the 19th century, wrestled with ideas for human flight, and built an ineffectual airplane with flapping wings.

Even when Leonardo turned his attention to painting, the picture was often brought to nothing by his passion for tinkering. The grand mural depicting the Battle of Anghiari was completely lost because an experimental lacquer, one of Leonardo's latest notions, dissolved. The Last Supper early began to fade, partly because Leonardo chose to use an experimental tempera. Of all his paintings, only two or three, including the Mona Lisa, survive relatively unimpaired.

Journey for Nothing. Leonardo comforted himself with violent denunciations of the world, expressed in some of the most savage cartoons ever drawn, and in cruel diatribes in his notebooks. "There are men," he would burst out, "who de serve to be called nothing else than passages for food, augmenters of filth, and fillers of privies!" He never married. He hated the ties of family. When his half-brother wrote him of the birth of a son, Leonardo congratulated him on "having provided yourself with an active enemy whose one desire will be for the freedom which cannot be his until you are dead." Yet all the while, in noble or spiteful silence and in a kind of childlike simplicity, Leonardo pushed his researches farther & farther into the unknown. It was an in tellectual journey as far and daring as any ever made by the human mind, but as far as his contemporaries were concerned, the trip was taken for nothing -- and Leonardo knew it. He died embittered, without having published any of the results of his studies.

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