Charles Hope

The career of Leonardo da Vinci must be the most intimidating subject in the history of art. The paintings and preparatory drawings are a major topic in themselves, and any monograph on Leonardo the artist invites comparison with Kenneth Clark’s classic study, one of the best books of its type. Then there are the notebooks, a written legacy unparalleled in scale and range among surviving records of the Renaissance. The secondary literature is no less formidable, even excluding the many banal hagiographies and such eccentricities as the tedious claims of collectors to possess the original Mona Lisa. Simply to consult the facsimile of Leonardo’s largest manuscript, the aptly named Codex Atlanticus, in 12 vast and unwieldy volumes with an equally extensive commentary, is a major undertaking. Moreover, the recent scholarship on Leonardo, often of high quality, abounds with detailed observations and a mass of cross-references to one codex or another, but contains much less in the way of synthesis. To come to terms with this material requires not just time, but also the energy to master a whole range of subjects quite outside the bounds of conventional art history.

With the hyperbole typical of the guidebook writer, Francesco Sansovino asserted in 1561: ‘Take it from me, there are more pictures in Venice than in all the rest of Italy.’ This is obviously not true, but it is almost certainly the case that during the 16th century more oil paintings were produced in Venice than in any other city of Europe. Many were undistinguished, but virtually all of them, as contemporaries everywhere recognised, reflected a distinctive local tradition whose best representatives were among the outstanding artists of their day. Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, for example, were all active when Sansovino was writing: at that time nowhere else in Italy could boast of a group of painters of comparable stature. But not only have historians of this period devoted much more attention to the art of Florence and Rome: they have also tended to regard developments in these two cities as the norm, and painting in Venice as a deviant provincial phenomenon.

When the Archduchess Joanna of Austria made her official entry into Florence on 16 December 1565 as the bride of Francesco de’ Medici, one of the first things she saw, at the gate of the city, was a painting showing the famous artists of Tuscany. In the distance was Cimabue holding a small lantern, and nearby Giotto with a larger lantern, surrounded by his immediate followers; towards the foreground there were two groups of 15th-century artists, and finally, at the very front and in the full light of day, Michelangelo and his companions, the great masters of the modern period from Leonardo da Vinci to the immediate past. The basic arrangement was obviously derived from Vasari’s Lives, published in 1550, although there were some surprising differences in the detailed classification. As a scheme it reflected the conventional attitude of Italians in general to the art of their predecessors, the belief that the masters of the 14th and 15th centuries had worked to a greater or lesser degree in the dark, and that perfection had only been achieved in the High Renaissance.

Sir Ernst Gombrich is not only one of the very few historians of art now alive whose ideas have aroused wide interest outside his immediate discipline, but he is also an astonnishingly skilful lecturer. It is therefore only appropriate that he should so often have been invited to give those formal university lectures devoted to the discussion of general cultural issues. Most of the pieces included in his latest volume of collected essays originate in lectures of this kind, although in some cases the original texts have been greatly expanded. The themes that he examines will be familiar to anyone who has read his earlier work, but his arguments gain immeasurably by being presented in a single volume, even though this inevitably involves a certain amount of repetition, notably in his remarks on the PhD industry and the dangers of specialisation.