Taupō-based illustrator Donovan Bixley brings to life one of greatest thinkers of all time, Leonardo da Vinci, in his new picture book A Portrait of Leonardo.
While the pioneering 15th-century creator was usually portrayed as a "Renaissance Gandalf", Bixley says, he also wore blue sunglasses, played the viola and behaved more like a Renaissance David Bowie.
Photo: Supplied
A Portrait of Leonardo is the third in Bixley's series of profiles about history's greatest artists: following books on Shakespeare and Mozart.
He tells tells Kathryn Ryan he wanted A Portrait of Leonardo to show the real da Vinci - flamboyant, gregarious, incredibly famous in his own lifetime and a gay icon.
“The more I discovered about Leonardo, the more he was presented as this grey, old, bearded guy shuffling around in robes, what I kind of call the Renaissance Gandalf.
“It completely didn't marry up with the Leonardo that I was reading about, who was much more a Renaissance David Bowie, this guy who is really sexy, incredibly fashionable, gregarious, an entertainer, and probably, most importantly, is just totally full of reinvention throughout his whole life.”
Da Vinci took self-reinvention to the extreme, he says.
“Straight after he graduates as a painter in Florence and has just done his apprenticeship, already he's bored of painting and he wants to reinvent himself. So he takes himself off, in his early 30s, to Milan.
“This is where he wants to present himself as this great military engineer and we get all these amazing pictures of futuristic tanks and giant crossbows and chariots with sides and cannons that fire scattershot.”
This didn't quite work out for da Vinci, Bixley says.
“Milan's ruler goes 'Leonardo who? Aren't you that guy who doesn't finish paintings?'”
Once again, da Vinci had to reinvent himself, Bixley says.
This time he fell back on his primary talent, which, unbeknownst to most people, wasn't painting but performing.
"He goes into court, and he's telling jokes, he's playing on his lira da bracio, a type of viola, he's got this incredible renown as a performer and a singer, which is a completely different view of Leonardo, from this great old bearded Gandalf.”
Image from A Portrait of Leonardo - a picture book about Leonardo da Vinci by Donovan Bexley Photo: Upstart Press
At this point, da Vinci became a kind of modern impresario, Bixley says.
“He's working on theatre designs, backdrop paintings, he's writing and scripting music, he's a fiction writer. He's designing incredible sets that are like Les Mis or Miss Saigon, with mechanics that fly actors out of the stage and sets that open up and turn around.
“And he's designing costumes, and all of these amazing things that he's working on, go on to inform his entire career as a painter, as a guy who's interested in designing flying machines.
“I like to think of Leonardo in this period of his early life as he’s a little bit of a cross between Billy Connolly, David Bowie, fashion designer Alexander McQueen and a little bit of Stephane Grappelli, on his jazz violin there as well.”
Leonardo never lost this childlike curiosity about the world, Bixley says.
“He's never afraid to ask the most simple questions; why is the sky blue? How do ripples intersect on a pond without breaking apart?
“He's just relentlessly curious about everything. And I think often, Leonardo can be portrayed as just such an insufferable know-it-all. But I think, in reality, he was just insufferably curious. He's like that four or five-year-old kid.”
da Vinci was far from a lone wolf genius slaving away in his garret, Bixley says.
“He's got this massive workshop of guys working for him. They're working on all sorts of things from suits of armour and costumes to paintings. They're doing theatrical events with banners and graphic designs. They're painting backdrops and painting rooms. And of course, Leonardo's always off doing other things that he's really interested in like exploring flying machines or incredible military contraptions because that's something that might pay the bills one day to from his warmongering overlords.”
He was also openly gay, Bixley says.
“[Leonardo da Vinci's] sexuality has been hushed up over the years, probably pretty much by Victorian prudes, and I guess other people who just don't approve of the fact that one of the greatest thinkers of all time could have been gay.
“And yet an heir inherited all his work after he died and during the 30 or 40 years that they had all his notebooks no one tried to go through all his notebooks and cut out anything that was slightly, supposedly, unsavoury to a homophobic audience, because they were all totally happy with the fact that he was gay and gregarious and quite flamboyant about it.”
Da Vinci was somewhat guarded about revealing his personality in his own notebooks, Bixley says.
“In all those notebooks he kind of holds themselves at an arm’s distance, he keeps himself in this elusive style, he never really lets slip what his personal feelings are, so you have to do a lot of detective work, searching for tiny little elements within his notebooks that might reveal a bit about his personality.
“And you find those in lists, he has lists of clothes. I mean he's famous for wearing short scarlet tunics when the fashion was to wear long tunics. And he has lists of coloured tights that he wears, he has a turban that he wears, he has a pair of blue sunglasses, and you put all those things together and it comes up with an image for me that as an illustrator, it's great, awesome. I can see that Leonardo in my head and I want to present that Leonardo to the world.”
