Leonardo da Vinci (10 page)

Leonardo da Vinci died on May 2, 1519, sixty-seven years old. According to Vasari, King Francis held his dying friend in his arms and propped up his head in the final moments, a scene portrayed in two romanticized nineteenth-century French paintings. But considering that a royal proclamation was issued in a town two days’ ride from Amboise at the time of Leonardo’s death, it is unlikely that the king was at his friend’s bedside in his final hours. Leonardo himself would have insisted on an unflinching examination to find the truth. Lesser mortals may decide that if the story wasn’t true, it should have been.

That’s a suitably enigmatic note to close out the life of a man who will be forever at least a little opaque to the rest of us. For all his achievements, he was a private man who never tried to explain the workings of his mind or his core beliefs. How do we reconcile the painter of all those saints, angels, and Madonnas with the flinty rationalist who sought only the truth, no matter what dogmas were shattered in the process? Vasari observed that Leonardo “had a very heretical state of mind. He could not be content with any sort of religion at all, considering himself in all things much more a philosopher than a Christian.” And, in fact, the defining feature of Leonardo’s religious paintings is not their spiritual quality, but their spontaneity and human appeal - from “The Benois Madonna” playing with her baby to the homoeroticism of “St. John.”

As a homosexual, Leonardo lived his whole life outside his society’s conventions of morality and religion and learned not to talk about it. But what he did say was heretical enough. The human soul, he once wrote, “desires to remain with its body,” and “takes its leave of the body very unwillingly . . . because without that body it can do nothing and feel nothing.” Death is “the supreme hurt, which kills the memory together with life.” These are not the musings of a man looking forward to an eternal afterlife.

Being gay was hardly a casual lifestyle choice. Homosexual acts were theoretically (and occasionally in practice) capital crimes, punishable by burning at the stake. The records show that more than 10,000 Florentines were charged with sodomy in the seventy-five years ending in 1505; some 2,000 were convicted. Only a few were executed, but the rest were exiled, branded, fined or publicly humiliated.

Vasari says that before his death Leonardo lamented that he had “offended God and mankind by not working harder at his art.” Vasari also tells of an unlikely deathbed conversion, in which Leonardo “earnestly resolved to learn the doctrines of the Catholic faith . . . and then, lamenting bitterly, he confessed and repented, and though he could not stand up, supported by his friends and servants he received the blessed sacrament from his bed.”

Perhaps it happened. Perhaps, like the rest of us, Leonardo sometimes doubted his own beliefs; perhaps he was afraid that, after all, he might be wrong. We will never know for sure, and he leaves us with that mystery along with all the others. But that also offers a morsel of reassurance for the rest of us, craving some common bond with him: Leonardo da Vinci may have been the smartest man who ever lived, but, like us, he was human.