Volume 41, Number 12 · June 23, 1994
Keeping Up with Leonardo
By Ernst Gombrich
Inventing Leonardo
by A. Richard Turner
Knopf, 268 pp., $27.50
The arresting title of Richard Turner's interesting reflections on the vicissitudes of Leonardo's fame is derived from the essay by Paul Valéry of 1895, 'Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci,' in which the French poet confesses that 'knowing very little' about him, he had 'invented a Leonardo of my own.' Valéry thus figures in a gallery of nineteenth-century authors such as Théophile Gautier, Jules Michelet, Edgar Quinet, and Baudelaire, who mused in various ways on the mystery they saw embodied in Leonardo's paintings. The account, which makes absorbing reading, forms the background to the author's discussion of the most famous of these effusions, Walter Pater's prose hymn to the Mona Lisa of 1869 with which W.B. Yeats opened his Oxford Book of Modern Verse of 1936:
Review, 2833 words
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