Good Reads: novels about Leonardo

detail from the ceiling of the Palazzo Zuccaro, Florence

Historical novels are among my favorite indulgences.  Recently, I've read Lucille Turner's Gioconda.  A recommendation from Martin Kemp in one of his books (or was it a talk) set me to looking for this.  The treatment is poetic.  She weaves bits from the notebooks, descriptions of the Italian countryside, imaginary thoughts and conversations, into a narrative that rolls along like felt time.  I was a bit annoyed at the anachronisms, but laughed heartily at the ending, relieved to not have to read yet another account of his possible despair at his death at not finishing much.  But since they were about twenty odd years apart in age, surely it is unlikely Leonardo played with Lisa of the famous portrait when they were children.  I'm not giving anything away here for those who haven't read it; the book begins with that.  Another sort of disruption in the otherwise enjoyable story is exemplified in the misunderstanding of how one would go about making the clay sculpture from which a giant bronze horse would be cast.  A huge block of clay cut into?  No way.  You need an armature, and you need to build it up over that, not carve it down.  And since she has them wetting the clay it obviously isn't plastilina.  Terra cotta would need to be fired. Here the need for it to be hollow becomes obvious.  Solid clay would explode in the firing, if you could even get an adequate temperature around such a thing.  And if not fired it would melt in the rain long before anyone got to shoot it to bits.  And it would slump in the firing and shrink 10% when drying.  If not fired, drying would cause it to crack to pieces if solid. But even if hollow it couldn't hold up under its own weight.  But these are minor complaints.

So this is why I have trouble reading some historical novels.  I want to make adjustments.  I want technical exactness in the art making.  I want someone to do for Leonardo what Irving Stone did for Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy.  Nearly a thousand pages, tiny type, and thoroughly researched, that novel filled my mind for 1 1/2 years as I read it one or two tiny chapters at a time every other night.  That was back in High School and the first year that I was a college student.  I felt like I was living in Renaissance Florence.  Why didn't Irving Stone do Leonardo?  Surely he is just as interesting as Michelangelo or van Gogh (Lust for Life).  If I find myself unemployed, without anything to do (ha) perhaps I will tackle it some day.

Other novels of Leonardo include Leonardo's Swans, which is more about the d'Este sisters than Leonardo, and The Memory Cathedral, a sci-fi story about the lost years (years in Leonardo's life that are missing in the documentary evidence of the time.)  It has some disgusting and some gruesome parts.  I won't spoil it with details, but I suspect there is some realism in those, alas.  The bad behaviour is not on Leonardo's part, unless you fault his lack of response.

I've also recently read Ken Follett's Fall of Giants.  This is not something I would have purchased but a friend sent it as a gift.  Before she sent it I'd debated in my mind whether to get it because I had greatly enjoyed his saga of the coming of the Gothic age to England in the series that began with Pillars of the Earth.  But this new one took place during WWI.  I was surprised that I found it absorbing.  You want the people to survive, to return to each other, to reconcile their differences.  It weaves personal stories and historical action more believably than the medieval novels, but both series have that strength.