Drawing together a Leonardo trove. Pencil in a date to see Metropolitan's show of the genius at work by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 01-16-2003 Leonardo is coming to New York. Not the dashing young actor, who has lived and worked here and appeared on our movie screens. We're speaking of Leonardo da Vinci. Almost five centuries after his death, the mysterious Florentine remains on the short list of the most extraordinary human beings who have ever lived. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we are about to see why. On Jan. 22, a show called "Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman" will open, bringing together nearly 120 drawings. They come from more than 25 private and public collections, including the Louvre and Windsor Castle, and their range continues to astonish: drawings of infinite delicacy bumping against grotesques; studies of anatomy, botany, optics, drapery, clothing, trees, hills and rivers; designs for weapons and machines and stage settings; maps (including a bird's-eye view of the Arno River that looks as abstract as a Jackson Pollock); scary expressionistic images of a great deluge; cats, babies, horses, lions and even a dragon. It's unlikely that we ever again will see such a group of Leonardo masterworks in one place. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was, of course, a painter, and although only 12 paintings have been absolutely confirmed as his work, two of them — the Last Supper and the one we call the Mona Lisa — are among the most famous images ever made by a man. They've appeared in thousands of books and monographs. They've been copied and parodied. They've appeared on T-shirts, serving trays, calendars and wedding cakes. They've been used to sell everything from insurance to BMWs. The enigmatic Mona Lisa is surely the only work of high art that has inspired variations by the surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp (who gave La Gioconda a lovely mustache) and Nat King Cole. And yet, painting was only a relatively small part of Leonardo's genius. He left many paintings unfinished, as if he had grown quickly bored once the basic design was set. A Michelangelo matchup In the show at the Met, we can see the brilliant drawings he made for the unfinished mural "The Battle of Anghiari," now apparently forever lost. That was part of an undeclared contest in 1504 with his younger rival Michelangelo Buonarotti arranged by Niccolo Machiavelli, who was then chancellor of the Florentine republic. They were to paint separate sections of the west wall of the main government building, the Signoria. Michelangelo didn't finish his painting either. In this exhibition, we will see an earlier unfinished painting, "St. Jerome Praying in the Wilderness," on loan from the Vatican Museum. It was begun when Leonardo was 28, then abandoned, as if he could not bear the tedium of bringing it to a high finish. The result is a painting that today looks very modern. But the drawings were Leonardo's essential art, both as expressions of beauty or embrace, and as aids to his analysis of the concrete world. The basic subject of his draftsmanship was the natural world, and his scrutiny of it — from the structure of the human skull to the movement of waves — eventually filled many thousands of pages in what are called his notebooks. About 4,000 of those pages remain — survivors of wars, fires, vandalism, stupidity. Most are scattered around the world in museums and private collections, but in this exhibition — brilliantly organized by Carmen C. Bambach, the Chilean-born curator of the Department of Drawings and Prints — we see some of the greatest of them. Some drawings are charged with a dazzling speed of hand and line, as if sketched yesterday afternoon. Others are more finished. Here are pages where we can examine Leonardo's famous left-handed "mirror writing." We can stand as close to them as Leonardo stood when he made them, years before any European had settled in Manhattan. To be sure, they reveal little about the private life of a man whose biography contains so many holes. We do know he was born on April 15, 1452, in the town of Vinci, 20 miles west of Florence. He was the illegitimate son of a fourth-generation notary named Ser Piero da Vinci, then 27, and a woman known only as Caterina. It's believed that Ser Piero took the boy into his own household four or five years later, probably because Ser Piero's first wife was barren (he would marry four times and have nine other children). The theme of two mothers would become a motif in Leonardo's art. We also know that Leonardo was left-handed. In an essay in the Metropolitan Museum's catalogue ("Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman," which weighs 8 pounds on my bathroom scale), Bambach goes into great detail about the direction of Leonardo's pen and chalk strokes, visible in all the drawings. She does in this essay what great art analysis should do: make the work more visible. We know that Leonardo had a patchy formal education. He could read and write Italian, but knew little Latin, the formal language of the commercial, religious and civil elites. He learned simple arithmetic, using an abacus. In addition, his illegitimacy barred him from the notaries guild and from the university. These social stupidities turned out to be a gift to the human race. They helped save a great future artist from a life clerking bankruptcies and real-estate deals. And although he was barred from the university, with its worship of the classical past, he did something much more valuable: he turned himself into a one-man university. For the young Leonardo had several things going for him: curiosity, intelligence and the ability to draw. By 14, he was an apprentice in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, the finest Florentine sculptor between Donatello and Michelangelo. The exhibition contains some of the boy's apprentice work (studies of drapery, for example, that had been stiffened with clay or plaster), along with eight rare sketches by Verrocchio himself. We can see in Verrocchio's sketches some elements of the later Leonardo: a feeling for sculptural form, movement, detail. Scandal, then retreat There is one more thing about Leonardo's youth that we also know. On April 9, 1476, when he was about to turn 24, he and three other young men were denounced anonymously for having sexual relations with a male prostitute named Jacopo Salterelli. The charges were initially dismissed for lack of evidence, then revived in June, when they were again dismissed. Nobody knows who made the charges: some rival in the workshops, some enemy of Verrocchio, some nasty busybody. In accounts by contemporaries, young Leonardo was described as handsome, an extrovert with a beautiful singing voice, able to play a form of the lyre, and a life-of-the-party creator of puzzles, puns and practical jokes. After the public denunciation, he began to withdraw from the bohemia of Florence, and within five years had moved to Milan. There he began a long retreat into the mind. The notebooks became his workshop. In those thousands of surviving manuscript pages, Leonardo, the great scrutinizer of the world, rarely examines himself, and then only by implication, and never analyzes his own sexuality. Kenneth Clark and other scholars have little doubt that he was homosexual, based on analysis of his life and work. In the end, none of those things matter. Leonardo was not a genius because he was illegitimate, left-handed and gay, or the human race would have produced many more geniuses. What does matter about Leonardo da Vinci are the works we will see on the walls of Gallery B of the Metropolitan Museum from Jan. 22 to March 30, and the restless, unsatisfied mind that produced them. That work belongs to all of us, from the most refined connoisseur to the kid gazing at an art book in a public library. Go. Look. Feel. Think. These works, like all great art, make us more human. Originally published on January 16, 2003