leonardo da vinci walter isaacson review

The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington (Virago £20) is a funny, touching account of Joanna Moorhead’s unexpected friendship with the wildly imaginative painter and writer who happened to be her long-lost cousin. Art served as Renoir’s medicine, the only alleviation of his pain, and he emerges here as a brave stoic rather than a sweet-toothed connoisseur of female flesh. Renoir’s creamy nudes encourage us to think of him as an unabashed hedonist White, however, emphasises his grim battle with rheumatoid paralysis, which left him scarcely able to manipulate a brush.

Barbara Ehrlich White’s Renoir: An Intimate Biography (Thames & Hudson £24.95) is equally startling. James Hamilton’s Gainsborough: A Portrait (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25) presents the painter of the Georgian aristocracy as a riotously ungenteel character – a rake whose hell-raising habits prompt Hamilton to call him “Jerry Lee Lewis with a paintbrush”. His Leonardo is a human being with foibles and frailties, whose great mind ultimately goes into a “tailspin” in his late drawings of an apocalyptic deluge: the intelligence that wondered at the miracle of creation took an almost crazed delight in the spectacle of destruction. Isaacson marvels at the infinite curiosity of a thinker who set himself to “describe the tongue of the woodpecker”, yet refuses to babble about genius as a supernatural gift. T he definite article in the subtitle of Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci: The Biography (Simon & Schuster £25.50) says it all – but why should the bestselling biographer of Benjamin Franklin, Einstein and Steve Jobs pretend to false modesty? Isaacson is uniquely well-equipped to write the definitive account of a universal man who was a painter and a musician, a scientific theorist and an engineer, a designer of military hardware and a theatrical impresario, and he makes Leonardo’s technological contraptions – a hoist, a perpetual-motion machine, a needle-grinder – seem every bit as fantastical as the effeminate saints and enigmatic sibyls he painted.

Leonardo da vinci walter isaacson review