If you want to see Leonardo da Vinci’s great mural of the last supper in Milan, you will have to reserve at least three months in advance. It wasn’t always this way. Back in 1983, when I was an undergraduate in history of art at Trinity College Dublin, you could simply show up the same day. At the Louvre, where thousands of people crowd every day around the Mona Lisa, taking selfies and perhaps wondering what all the fuss is about, things were a lot calmer as well: there was no timed entry system, you could get closer, and there was a day every week where artists could set up their easels to make their own studies of the painting.
Our image of Leonardo seemed, like his works, to have the brownish patina of the old master – part of an unchanging constellation of past geniuses, at once familiar and remote.
All of that changed with the turn of the 21st century. The world was now getting its information and entertainment online, giving the art market and its culture of hype an unprecedented exposure. Add to that some controversial restorations (including of The Last Supper), sensational art sales, a bestselling thriller by Dan Brown that spawned multiple conspiracy theories, and Leonardo was suddenly ubiquitous. He had become one of us in the way we want 21st-century celebrities to be one of us: a tech entrepreneur, a creative, a misunderstood visionary who had more to do with our moment in history than his own.
Teaching art history at a college in the US, I found that my course enrolments increased if the class had Leonardo’s name in the title. And a different kind of student was signing up – the engineers, the physicists, the pre-meds, some of them Brown fans, some of them LGBTQ.
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I learned from those students, and I strove to meet their expectations. My interest in this historical figure grew as a result, but so did my curiosity about his strangely belated and ever-increasing celebrity. I was troubled but also fascinated by the seemingly insatiable media market not only for supposed new “masterpieces,” including improbable self-portraits of the artist, an unlimited supply of new versions of the Mona Lisa, as well as incessant new identities proposed for the painting’s sitter. We seemingly weren’t satisfied with her being the Florentine housewife Lisa del Giocondo: more worthy of the mysterious genius Leonardo to claim that it depicts his Chinese mother, or his teenage lover Salai, or even the artist himself.
There were breathless proclamations by reputable arts journalists that the Salvator Mundi, a damaged painting that Leonardo was certainly involved with, was a “fake”. And legacy media were giving a platform to preposterous, supposedly science-based claims: that the artist’s bodily traces had been discovered in the form of fingerprints on his paintings, or the residue of DNA on his drawings, or (since some believe Mona Lisa to be Leonardo) in the disinterred bones of Del Giocondo herself.
And this is how I began to write about Leonardo. Not just because, as an art historian, I needed to speak up and try to dispel the noise, but because I wanted to understand the whole phenomenon. What does our Leonardo obsession tell us about ourselves, in the 21st century? Not only do we seemingly want a Leonardo who resembles us, but a Leonardo on to whom we can project our obsessions with genius, synonymous in the post-Steve Jobs era with tech innovation. And we need him to have the pathologies and outsider identities we associate with genius. Leonardo – based on scraps of information taken out of context – is constructed as obsessive or neurodivergent, as an atheist, as a vegetarian or animal rights activist, or as an isolated or even persecuted gay man.
This last misconception requires historical contextualisation. We know that as a young artist Leonardo was prosecuted for sodomy, but that was the case with numerous Florentine men under 30 in the 1400s, when their sexual initiation was with older males who were often married. Yet in disputing the relevance of modern categories of sexual identity for an individual who lived half a millennium ago, we do not have to discard the undeniable queer allure of several of his paintings and drawings. Images of the nude St Sebastian or John the Baptist, smiling youths, elicit a response from their beholders – attraction or, perhaps, aversion – but as to the inner, personal and private world of the artist himself, we can only make inferences, without a solid factual grounding.
When we turn figures from the past into fully known and familiar phenomena, they become banal. It is as if they die a second time
I wrote about Leonardo’s paintings and drawings more than I expected to. When I began in 2018, I envisioned a journalistic account about the contemporary commercial exploitation of an extremely famous historical individual, by tech companies and the art market, in popular entertainment, and frequently by self-appointed experts whose claims to have solved a Leonardo “mystery” seemed guaranteed instant media attention. I was interested too in the proliferation of books (several hundred since his quincentennial in 2019), often biographies that purport to reveal the artist’s inner life, his distinctive genius psychology, and his intimate personal relationships, invariably with the paintings as evidence. In these, there’s a clear need constantly to retrace the same ground, solve the same mysteries, scrutinising random jottings in notebooks as if they were intimate personal disclosures.
One conclusion to be drawn is that it’s hard to locate the Leonardo we desire in the records of his life or in his works or writings, yet we fill in the gaps in the sources with spurious data about DNA and fingerprints and portrait identifications to gratify our craving for a flesh-and-blood Leonardo, one that would be knowable and familiar, one we can relate to.
When we turn figures from the past into fully known and familiar phenomena, they become banal. It is as if they die a second time. One problem in a beautifully made documentary by Ken Burns, from 2024, is that Leonardo is treated as a known quantity, not as an open and controversial field of inquiry. Most airtime went to professional biographers, who presented an industry view of Leonardo based on a decades-old consensus. Viewers would not realise not only how lacunose is our knowledge of the artist’s life and career, but also that our understanding is constantly shifting and rendered more complicated by new data and new readings of the sources.
New discoveries tend to create mysteries as much as they solve them. In recent years, it has become less than certain that Leonardo’s great battle mural in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence’s town hall, ever got beyond the design stage, or which version of the Virgin of the Rocks – that in the Louvre of circa 1490 or that in London from circa 1508 – is actually based on Leonardo’s original design. By treating Leonardo and his work as an open set of questions, rather than a solved problem, we preserve a sense of vitality and value: what does this extraordinary body of texts and images want from us?
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I came to believe that it was only by demonstrating the basis of our claims to know anything about Leonardo that we can help our readers to take a stand against the spurious and sensational claims about “timeless genius” and “hidden mysteries” and “lost masterpieces rediscovered”.
I also started to reflect on biography as a valid means of treating lives and life worlds remote from our own. The modern biography is an outcome of the era of Romanticism, and it arose alongside the novel – long-form psychological fiction. Biography aims for a fully-rounded portrayal of a historical individual, assembled from life events and experiences, but also exploring actions in psychological terms, and the emergence of “personality” on a timeline. You often get the sense that certain artists, poets, performers and public figures of the 1700s and 1800s were living their lives in accordance with a biographical posterity, with a curated legacy of letters, diaries, publications, portraits and mementos.
But before the 1700s, Europeans did not think of life-writing – or even of their own lives – in that way. The “individual” is a much overvalued concept for understanding the Renaissance as a period distinct from what came before. Premodern people were taught that they possessed an individual, immortal soul, but in their physical everyday lives they saw themselves as formed in crucial defining ways by parents, spiritual advisers, teachers, patrons, patron saints, bosses and colleagues. When Leonardo writes about the soul, it is as an animating power that moves the body and relinquishes it at the moment of death – it is devoid of individualising qualities: if he saw any continuity with a resurrected material self in the afterlife, he did not say so.
The vita of an artist or writer in Renaissance Italy was the record of professional successes and failures, written to model conduct for others. References to a person’s character, based on the medical theory of bodily humours (the biochemistry of fluids such as blood, bile, phlegm), were generic and moralising. Of course, poets in the tradition of Dante and Petrarch produced highly stylised, confessional forms of life-writing, grounded in introspection, experiences of loss and mourning, sometimes conversion. Among artists, perhaps only Michelangelo lays claim to this poetic subjectivity, fashioning a record of his intimate life as a literary enterprise, through sonnets and letters and drawings. Leonardo, famously dismissive of poetry and no friend of Michelangelo’s, could not be more different in this respect. It would never have occurred to him to stage his life in lyric terms as Michelangelo did – and Leonardo in that respect was only typical of both fellow artists and men and women of the mercantile and artisanal world.
Leonardo’s copious archive of notebooks is abundant in the minutiae of everyday life but short on the kinds of information that provides the typical scaffolding for a biography. We have scattered evidence of social and professional networks, fragmentary glimpses of the clamorous worlds of the workshop – a space of collective making and know-how, of writing and reading, populated by mainly male apprentices and assistants known only by their first name. We learn a little about his life on the road with the army of Cesare Borgia, but very little about his relations with courts, princes and warlords. For much of his first four decades, there is a significant shortage of information on major life events, beyond a move from Florence to Milan in 1481 or 1482.
This compulsive keeper of notes never comments on his own emotions, physical wellbeing or illness, comfort or discomfort. For all his painstaking scrutiny of the bodies of humans and animals, he barely mentions his own.
Biographers have been zealous in filling in the gaps in these patchy records, and supplying them with a psychological coherence. The biographers’ Leonardo needs to be seen as a fictional construct, like a character in a historical novel, and one we can relate to. This is not to say that on reading Leonardo’s writings, we don’t get the powerful sense of a mind at work – albeit a disembodied one, seemingly reduced to an eye.
He fashioned an artistic identity – we can even call it a “brand” – that was transpersonal: it was extended through artists who collaborated on or who copied and adapted his works, in Milan and in Florence – especially in Lombardy. And it is this art, in its arresting strangeness, that creates the powerful sense of a persona, that beckons to and engages us with an extraordinary immediacy, half a millennium after its making. And it is attending to this strangeness, to Leonardo’s fundamental non-familiarity, his resistance to instrumentalisation, that we find the sources of his value.
Stephen J Campbell teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US. He is the author of Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life (Princeton University Press)
