Leonardo Da Vinci: An Untraceable Life by Stephen J. Campbell

Leonardo Da Vinci: An Untraceable Life

By Stephen J. Campbell

Princeton University Press 2025

Johns Hopkins art professor Stephen Campbell is certainly correct in the central animus of his new book Leonardo De Vinci: An Untraceable Life, that a “biographical optimism” permeates the cottage industry of Da Vinci biographies, and he presents his own book as a kind of corrective, concentrating on “Leonardo’s resistance to becoming a subject of biography, as well as the gaps in the historical record that have invited projection and fictionalization.”

But isn’t it the case, he imagines his readers asking, that the historical record provides us with more details about Leonardo than about any of his contemporaries? “Yes, his written legacy vastly exceeds the output of any other premodern artist, but assembling a ‘life’ from these thousands of sheets poses a challenge,” Campbell writes. “Leonardo’s own charting of life events seems oddly sporadic and pointless.” There are the famous notebooks, of course, and there’s the artwork and the poetry, but the record alone doesn’t flesh out the man, he contends, let alone explain how “a convergence of circumstances turned a long-dead Renaissance artist and part-time engineer into a twenty-first century media celebrity.”

It's inevitable that if a writer uses a term like “media celebrity” about Leonardo Da Vinci, that same writer is going to complain about the modern experience of viewing the Mona Lisa behind bulletproof glass, and Campbell duly obliges. Far more interesting are this author’s complaints about both the current mechanisms of academic research and, of course, the products of the aforementioned cottage industry. He echoes recent calls from other quarters, for instance, about the need to digitize sources. “I was able to writer this book because I had access, through my university affiliation, to a comprehensive research library, with the essential added benefit of stack browsing,” he writes, and everyone who’s ever researched anything will nod gratefully at stack browsing rightly being called essential. “Independent scholars, professional authors, and the public at large often struggle to obtain this kind of access to key research materials, very little of which are on open access.”

But the main thrust here, the title of one of the book’s chapters, is “Leonardo and the Biographers.” Walter Pater, for instance, in his 1873 study The Renaissance, clearly saw that same resistance to the Leonardo materials to be assembled into a conventional biography. “There is not the remotest claim to be biographical,” Campbell writes about the Leonardo in The Renaissance. “Pater self-consciously stages his imaginative generation of a persona from a corpus of works of art, one that speaks at least as strongly as the author’s own thoughts and emotions as of the sensibility of a historical period.”

Some recent biographies, excellent books by Charles Nicholl and Serge Bramly, for instance, escape with only slight dings or dents, but others are soundly scolded for one facile shortcoming or other. Campbell quotes Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo book, for instance: “We have so much to learn from Leonardo. His ability to combine art, science, technology, the humanities, and imagination remains an enduring recipe for creation.” And then comes the polite but thorough deconstruction:

It would be less interesting to dwell once again on the confident anachronisms here – chiefly the way that fields of human activity are treated as more distinct than they may once have been, so Leonardo can be singled out for ‘combining’ them – than to note the resonance with the rhetoric of creativity and interdisciplinarity as it manifests itself in the corporate boardroom and in the administrative sectors of the contemporary university.

Leonardo Da Vinci: An Untraceable Life is entirely free of “confident anachronisms,” and readers long accustomed to the cottage industry might thus find Campbell’s book scattered and unsatisfying. It’s a spikey book, sometimes unbalanced, sometimes oddly pointed, very much in tune with Campbell’s conception of the Leonardo sources themselves. It’s a sharp disinfectant to biographical piety, and since a great many readers prefer their pieties, its reception might be uneven.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News