Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [62]
Verrocchio was an organized man. Leonardo was not. He was an intellectual, more interested in ideas than people. He came from a background of well-to-do Tuscan notaries, though he was illegitimate and brought up by grandparents in a large extended family. We do not know much about his education, but it was clearly extensive, and in Verrocchio’s shop he was well trained to make his living in a variety of ways. Leonardo’s gifts were enormous, and nobody ever doubted them, at the time or since. He was the universal man, the epitome of the questing spirit of the Renaissance and its desire to excel in every possible way. As he grew older, people held him in awe: he was the sage, the magus, the Man of Genius. He was also difficult to work with or employ. His weaknesses were twofold, and they were important. Leonardo was interested in every aspect of the visible world—his earliest surviving work is a brilliant Tuscan landscape drawing—and he was fascinated by the varieties of nature, above all by the human body in all its forms and moods. But he was interested in these things as phenomena, and viewed them with scientific detachment. There was not much warmth to him. He may have had homosexual inclinations, for in 1476, when he was twenty-four, he was accused of sodomy, though this does not necessarily imply the practice of unnatural vice (the accusation was anonymous and nothing came of it).
Furthermore, although Leonardo’s interest in the human body was paramount, as befitted a Renaissance humanist-artist, his huge range of other preoccupations—with weather and waves, animals and vegetation and scenery, machines of all kinds but especially weapons of war and fortifications, all of them expressed in elaborate drawings as well as expounded in his Notebooks—meant that his time and energy were thinly spread. His priorities were unclear. No one can say for sure whether he regarded painting an easel portrait like the Mona Lisa or the Last Supper wall painting in Milan, or designing an impregnable fortress as the thing he most wanted to do, or felt was most worth doing.
Moreover, with such a range of interests, he lacked the ferocious concentration on any particular one, at any one time, that his younger contemporary Michelangelo could bring to bear. As we have seen, Michelangelo sometimes left things unfinished. Leonardo was a much more extreme case of the distracted and ill-disciplined polymath. As early as 1478, when he was still working in Verrocchio’s shop, he was given a personal commission to do an altarpiece in a chapel off the Piazza della Signoria. But he never got around to it or never seriously began work, and Filippino Lippi had to be called in to carry it out. No one who saw anything done by him, even a mere drawing, failed to admire him, and he was in constant demand by the mightiest patrons, from leading Florentines to the Sforzas of Milan, Pope Leo X and kings Louis XII and François I of France. But his glittering career was punctuated by rows over intolerable delays, disputes over money, presumably arising from his unbusinesslike methods, and repetitive simple failures to do what he had promised. He was not in the least lazy, as some artists are, or tiresomely perfectionistic. But his final public output was meager. There are only ten surviving paintings that are generally accepted as his. Three others are unfinished. Yet more were completed by other artists.
It is true that, at his finished best, Leonardo produced