A Man of Infinite Possibilities

Of the 900 or so drawings by Leonardo da Vinci known to survive in the world, some 600 have resided for centuries in the royal collection of Britain's monarchs. How they came to be there is not certain. Most of them seem to have been brought to England by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, known as "the father of English art collectors," who found them in Spain some time after 1637. The royal family acquired them some time before 1690. But apparently neither King William III nor Queen Mary was much impressed by their quality. A hundred years later, an official at Windsor Castle discovered them tucked away "in the bottom of a chest of drawers."

Ever since, they have been the jewels of the Crown's fabulous collection of 20,000 to 30,000 prints and drawings. In fact, they are so dearly prized that, in the words of Robin Mackworth-King, Windsor Castle's librarian, "the Queen feels her responsibility to posterity is too great to assume the risks of sending them abroad." A few are displayed in the Windsor Castle gallery on a rotating basis (scholars, however, may examine them in the archives any time). This summer, a huge sampling of the treasure has been put on view at the eight-year-old Queen's Gallery in Buckingham Palace.

With 163 drawings, it is the biggest Leonardo show ever, and has already drawn 36,000 visitors. Chronologically, the drawings run from studies of lilies done in 1478, when Leonardo was an apprentice in Verocchio's Florentine workshop, to the coarse drawings probably done after 1516, when he had moved to France and, in his 60s, had suffered a paralysis of his working arm. Most important, the exhibition encompasses the extraordinary diversity of Leonardo's interests and achievements. Armaments, navigation, map making, mathematics, anatomy, botany, astronomy--his investigations into all of them are graphically annotated. The continual restlessness of his great mind can be seen in the numerous sheets on which he had sketched, say, a gearwheel mechanism, only to move swiftly on to a series of male nudes or a study of ocean waves without even changing paper. Then again, he might use an empty corner to jot down a scientific observation or a moral speculation in his strange, backward-running "mirror handwriting."

Out of Patience. It is hard to imagine a man with a clearer eye or a more far-ranging mind. Leonardo might stop work on a painting to dissect a cadaver and make meticulous studies of its musculature so that he could better understand the twist of a body or the shape of an arm. He took as his province the total knowledge of mankind (which was then manageable), and painting was only a part of it. Even when he was famed the length and breadth of Italy and crowned heads and prelates were besieging him for paintings, he pronounced himself "out of patience with the brush" and turned for five years to other projects. Thus only a handful of paintings survive--or were ever completed.

Perhaps there is a reason; painting is essentially a more voluptuous mode of expression than drawing. To judge from 16th century copies of his now lost Leda and the Swan, he could depict sensuous nudes when he chose. But the drawing that survives of Leda's head shows a lady ethereal and detached. Surviving also are the austere and delicate silverpoint studies of hands, believed to have been made for the portrait of Ginevra dei Benci. The painting itself, in Washington's National Gallery, has been cut off just below the shoulders (though no one knows in which century the damage was done).

Legacy and Vision. Leonardo seemed to feel something like a passion for his human subjects only when he happened to view them with disgust or satirical malice. He was powerfully attracted by strange faces and would sometimes follow some chance passer-by all day long in order to memorize his countenance. His pen caricature of five grotesque heads shows five prototypes of stupidity, cruelty, narrow-mindedness, arrogance and rage.

His warmest and most sympathetic studies are often not those of human beings at all but animals, plants and natural forces. He was fascinated by horses, drawing them from life and from memory, from every angle.

Latter-day biographers, including Britain's Sir Kenneth Clark, have presumed that Leonardo was a homosexual, citing as part of their evidence the equivocal smile of the Mona Lisa and the faintly cold, faintly remote quality of his drawings.

Leonardo was supremely a man of infinite possibilities--so many that only a fraction of them were ever realized. He should have devoted himself to painting, say the painters. To engineering, say the engineers. To city planning, say the planners. To anatomy, say the anatomists. His drawings most completely preserve and record what he dreamed and was. His legacy, his inspiration and his exasperating, incomplete genius are all there.

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