By Trevor Fairbrother

This book is an anti-biography that argues Leonardo had little interest in autobiographical self-promotion and claims that the many gaps in the historical record prevent him from cohering as a biographical subject

Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life by Stephen J. Campbell. Princeton University Press, 352 pages, $37.

Stephen J. Campbell, a professor of art history at Johns Hopkins University, has a sleuth’s acuity about the “misinformation, cliché, and myth” that has always distorted biographical accounts of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). His interest took root when he began teaching courses on Leonardo in the late 1990s. Now, in an erudite treatise, he argues that this species of wishful thinking has intensified dramatically over the last two decades. He targets cultural influencers who trick out the High Renaissance polymath as a “character” who resonates with many a current concern: the bastard; the loner; the religious agnostic; the vegetarian; the left-handed misfit sexually attracted to people of the same gender. Likewise, he scolds pundits who designate technological trailblazers as latter-day Leonardos.

Campbell coins the phrase “Da Vinci Worlds” to characterize 21st-century ventures that commodify Leonardo. He envisions a burgeoning “industrial complex” whose front runners include “journalists, documentary producers, bloggers, curators, ‘scientific experts,’ and professional biographers,” and he says “Da Vinci Worlds” happened in tandem with the explosion of the internet “in all its truth-shaping and mind-altering ubiquity.” At times, Campbell’s rhetoric made me think of William Morris, the Victorian poet, designer and social activist whose work inspired new waves of aestheticism and capitalist critique in the 1960s. Morris spoke of “Mammon-worship and want of taste” in 1878 when publicly decrying urban developments that destroyed London’s architectural heritage. When lamenting the suppression of expertise in books written for the largest audience, Campbell draws a parallel with mass tourism and likens such publishing to a “mega cruise ship mangling fragile historical environments.”

“The Leonardo Cover-Up,” Melinda Henneberger’s essay for The New York Times Magazine in 2002, heralded the cultural sea change that Campbell recounts. Henneberger, a correspondent in the paper’s Rome bureau, looked at Maurizio Seracini, an engineer obsessed with using new medical imaging technologies to investigate famous old paintings. She detailed the recent controversy regarding Seracini’s claims that much of the surface of Leonardo’s The Adoration of the Magi was painted in modern times. Henneberger’s article intrigued novelist Dan Brown, who was working on his mystery thriller The Da Vinci Code (2003). He duly parroted her description of Seracini as an “art diagnostician” and praised his “earthshattering discovery” about The Adoration. In hindsight Campbell hints that the greatest impact of Seracini’s various Leonardo projects was as catnip for tourist initiatives.

Campbell’s cause célèbre is Salvator Mundi, a painting on a walnut panel measuring about 28 x 16 inches. It surfaced at a New Orleans auction in 2005 as an anonymous copy “after Leonardo,” and was purchased by New York dealers for about $1,750. Six years later, the National Gallery, London, presented the newly cleaned and restored panel as an autograph work in an important Leonardo exhibition. In 2017 it became the world’s most expensive painting when it commanded $450 million at a Christie’s auction. (The firm touted it as “the Holy Grail of old master paintings” and chose a “New York Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale” to make the splashiest offering.) In 2019 the Louvre Museum honored the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death with a blockbuster exhibition, but its plan to display the privately-owned Salvator Mundi was thwarted at the last minute. Campbell deems the work an authentic Leonardo and downplays the likelihood that it was executed in large part by studio assistants. He nonetheless recognizes that it sustained heavy damage over the centuries, tacitly allowing that most of what we see now was fashioned after 2005.

Dust jacket of Leonardo Lives (Seattle Art Museum, 1997, designed by Marquand Books). Photo: Trevor Fairbrother.

Less than 20 paintings are definitely attributed to Leonardo and none is signed. Their quasi-sacred allure benefits art tourism and Campbell nimbly scrutinizes the circumstances. The Louvre Museum houses the Mona Lisa in a concrete and bulletproof shrine that allows over 6 million people to visit it every year. Campbell writes, “[The portrait] now appears almost monochrome, its original colors veiled in several centuries’ application of coats of varnish. Huge risks would accompany any attempt to restore the painting by detaching these from Leonardo’s subtle glazes, applied in multiple layers.” Then there’s the plaster wall in a Milanese convent decorated with The Last Supper. Leonard’s experimental technique proved susceptible to dampness and the work had deteriorated seriously when he died in 1519. There have been multiple treatments intended to revive and restore the ruined mural. Campbell agrees with the conservators who say that only 20 percent of its surface can be identified as the original work of Leonardo. He also mentions social media reports from 2023 claiming it was easier to get a ticket for a Taylor Swift concert than one for a visit to The Last Supper.

Surprisingly, An Untraceable Life makes no special mention of Inventing Leonardo, the landmark study by A. Richard Turner, an art historian who wrote brilliantly for general readers conversant with literature and visual culture. (To be fair, Campbell cites Turner’s 1993 book a few times in his 45 pages of back matter.) Turner sought to explore “the cultural consequences of Leonardo.” He presented the “layers of the legend of Leonardo,” from the charismatic genius in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550) to the fraught versions of the artist conjured by Sigmund Freud (1910) and Bernard Berenson (1916). In particular, Turner made a stimulating analysis of 19th-century texts by Théophile Gautier, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Paul Valéry. Campbell reprises all of this (sans Wilde) in his third chapter, “Leonardo and the Biographers.” Following Turner, he stresses that Valéry was skeptical of any reviving historical enterprise and argued that it was impossible to retrieve Leonardo’s thinking and personality from beyond the grave.

Leonardo da Vinci, The Head of An Old Bearded Man, black chalk on paper. Royal Collection Trust © His Majesty King Charles III 2022

Campbell’s concluding chapter is a knotty text that positions his book as an anti-biography. He claims that Leonardo had little interest in autobiographical self-promotion and insists that the many gaps in the historical record prevent the artist from cohering as a biographical subject. He emphasizes unconventional writers, such as Álvaro Enrique, Amy Sackville, and Ali Smith, who “work with a self-consciousness that steers clear of claims to know or discover” a given historical personage. Tellingly, Campbell says his interest in the drawing by Leonardo illustrated on the cover of his book hinges on its power to convey “a degree of biographical inconvenience.” A few of the facial features it depicts may be those of Leonardo around 1515, but Campbell is more drawn to the enigmatic strangeness of the unusually shaped nose and the “Botticellian braids” of hair pinned decoratively at the back of the head. He observes that the drawing is “so queer, in effect, that even partisans of a gay Leonardo can’t find a place for it.” Earlier in the volume, Campbell declined to label his subject a homosexual, arguing that it is improper to ascribe a modern sexual identity to a man living in a pre-modern milieu. On the other hand, he grants that it is “entirely probable” that Leonardo “engaged in sexual relations with younger males.”

For a finale, Campbell muses on how to resist the prevailing hype-driven Leonardo circuses by developing alternative approaches to his legacy. One such enterprise, he posits, would be an exhibition designed “to challenge rather than to reaffirm the gimmickry and cliché of Da Vinci World appropriations.” The show would feature thought-provoking modern and contemporary responses to Leonardo’s work. Campbell fancies a roster ranging “from Malevich and Duchamp to Warhol to Mary Beth Edelson, Vivan Sundarum, and Jenny Saville.” This caprice jolted me because in 1997 Chiyo Ishikawa and I co-curated a project with a unit that staged a visual and interpretive dialogue of the kind Campbell now imagines. We worked at the Seattle Art Museum, where we presented Leonardo Lives: The Codex Leicester and Leonardo da Vinci’s Legacy of Art and Science. The concluding section included art by Robert Arneson, Joseph Beuys, Jerome Caja, Marcel Duchamp, Mary Beth Edelson, Jasper Johns, Howard Kottler, Man Ray, Robert Rauschenberg, Andres Serrano, Mark Tansey, Pavel Tchelitchev, Kiki Smith and Andy Warhol. The catalogue that Ishikawa and I co-authored illustrated works by most of those artists.

Our boss at SAM was Mimi Gardner Gates, the stepmother of the local tech prodigy who in 1994 had paid $30.8 million at auction for a Leonardo manuscript known as the Codex Leicester. (The seller, industrialist and art collector Armand Hammer, had purchased it in 1980 for $5.1 million.) Concurrent with the 1997 exhibition in Seattle, Corbis (the local tycoon’s privately owned image company) released Leonardo da Vinci, an interactive CD-ROM game allowing users to examine English translations of the Codex Leicester superimposed onto facsimiles of the manuscript pages. All this was pre-millennial, of course, and the CD-ROM’s cutting-edge technology must now be antediluvian. For whatever reasons, Campbell’s book does not mention Leonardo Lives and Bill Gates.

Trevor Fairbrother is a curator and writer. If you’re up for a morsel of time-traveling Leonardo-driven diplomatic propaganda he recommends this Pathé newsreel about the Mona Lisa‘s arrival in the U.S. in 1962. © 2025