Carmen Bambach on Leonardo Da Vinci’s Groundbreaking Work

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Carmen Bambach is a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art who, in 2017, shaped the most historic and expansive exhibit of Michelangelo. And now she dives into Leonardo’s groundbreaking work on the 500th anniversary of his death in her book “Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered.” And she sits down with our own Leonardo expert, Walter Isaacson, to discuss the Italian master’s genius.

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WALTER ISAACSON: This is really a Leonardo moment. And I have to begin by saying thank you, because those of us who write what try to be popular biographies of Leonardo, like I did, we depend on the deep scholarship of people like yourself. And you have this four-volume work that’s now come out that goes through every single thing he did. So I hope you understand how important scholars are to those of us who try to write general history and how great your book is.

CARMEN BAMBACH, AUTHOR, “LEONARDO DA VINCI REDISCOVERED”: Thank you, Walter. That’s very, very kind of you, very generous. It’s been a really amazing year to be able to bring out this book and also enjoy all the fanfare around Leonardo. I was in Vinci, on May 2, when he was — when he died and the 500th anniversary was being celebrated. It’s pretty amazing to see actors dressed up as Leonardo and the Mona Lisa cookies and Leo car.

ISAACSON: And then your four-volume work. And then we have the Louvre show, which I know you were helpful in helping them think through.

BAMBACH: It’s a stupendous exhibition. It’s beautiful, and then also full of new ideas and thoughts. It’s a very — it’s a scholarly exhibition, but also really attractive for a general public.

ISAACSON: You started your career as a graduate student doing art. And you discovered a Michelangelo drawing, in the sense that you figured out what it was. Nobody quite knew, because they had it turned upside-down. And it was a drawing for Haman on the Sistine Chapel.

BAMBACH: That’s right.

ISAACSON: Tell me about that.

BAMBACH: Well, it was really very exciting. As you know, undergraduates wait until the last minute to write their thesis. And so late at night, I was going through all the books on Michelangelo’s drawings for the Sistine ceiling. And I see this drawing upside down. And it’s described as an armpit. And so I said, well, let me turn it around. And it was really quite amazing, because it turned out to be full-scale — a full-scale design for the Sistine ceiling. So this is the only full-scale design that we have left. And the only reason it survived is because the other side of the paper has this beautiful study of Haman and whereas the design is — it’s a working drawing.

ISAACSON: So you have loved both Leonardo and Michelangelo throughout your career. You did a great show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on Michelangelo few years ago. And they were rivals in Florence, Leonardo being a little bit older, Michelangelo being the young up-and-comer. Tell me about that rivalry.

BAMBACH: It’s kind of interesting, because Florence is really a laboratory of creative activity, especially in the Renaissance. And there is this era of competition that I think also fuels artistic creativity. So, Leonardo Joe was quite a bit older than Michelangelo, and he’s commissioned to do the Battle of Anghiari. And Michelangelo gets called in a year later. Clearly, Leo was not finishing his design. And Michelangelo had just finished carving the monumental David.

ISAACSON: We can see that rivalry begin — and it’s in your four-volume work — when Leonardo’s even doing a sketch of Michelangelo’s David. And Leonardo, I think, is on the committee to try to figure out where to put it.

BAMBACH: Yes. Yes. As you know, Leonardo picked the place that was not so conspicuous.

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ISAACSON: He wanted to hide it away.

BAMBACH: So, underneath the Loggia dei Lanzi where, as we know, it was placed in front of the Palace of Governments, so — as a symbol of the republic, so for everybody to see. So, yes, Michelangelo embodies this new spirit in Florence. And it’s basically also when the sun is setting on Leonardo and his career.

ISAACSON: Compare and contrast for me Leonardo da Vinci’s work and Michelangelo’s work, their artistic styles.

BAMBACH: I think, in the case of Michelangelo, he believes in the dificulta, the difficulties. So, this is an artist who is profoundly concerned with technical virtuosity. And for him, the anatomy of the body is really the great reflection of divine creation. And that is his vehicle to tell the story. It’s all about the nude human, male human body. In the case of Leonardo, it’s very much about the creativity and the process of searching. There is this sense that, in the case of Leonardo, that he searches, changes his mind, and there is the sense of being engaged with the energy itself of the creative act. And this is also a why his drawings, for instance, have so many reinforcement lines, and it looks like electrifying outlines. And then he’s interested in this mysterious chiaroscuro. And so Leonardo also believes in this…

ISAACSON: You mean sort of the blurry lines.

BAMBACH: Yes. He — Leonardo loves to reveal as much as he loves to hide, in the case of forms. So, there is this very organic way of looking at the composition of a painting in the case of Leonardo. It sort of starts like an amorphous cloud, and then, gradually, it takes form.

ISAACSON: Some people who are critics of Leonardo da Vinci say he wasted a lot of time doing science and flying machines and anatomy and geology, and that if he had focused just on his paintings, he would have produced more paintings. And, of course, he probably would have. But do you think that all of that science made him who he was and made his art the way he was?

BAMBACH: Absolutely. I think that that is a great sort of summary of the ethos of Leonardo. If we look at, say, a painting like the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, which probably began around 1506, and which is still unfinished, it’s a painting that is at Musee du Louvre in Paris. It is really extraordinary. It’s a small painting, and you can see him refining tone, the refinement of the sfumato, the refinement of the landscape. And it is almost as if he brings everything that he has learned about geology, save for the foreground, where the stratified rocks are, what he has observed of water and the transparency. There is actually a pool of water that we now can appreciate because the painting was cleaned. And then we look at the landscape, that mysterious landscape that looks so blue and gray, that disappears into the haze of the atmosphere. If he had not been studying the horizon in a scientific way, he would not have come up really with that understanding of atmospheric perspective as a way to create this almost mystical composition. So, the painting, that particular painting, I always see as a summation of your Leonardo’s science as a painter.

ISAACSON: In your four-volume work, you spend a lot of time on the Saint Anne, because it’s sort of the core of who Leonardo is. And we actually have lots of drawings and versions that you can lead up and see. Explain what you learn from all of the sketches and drawings and cartoons, as they call it, which is a full-scale drawing for a painting.

BAMBACH: Yes. Well, what is really interesting is that this subject, the subject of the painting is relatively simple, Saint Anne, the mother of the virgin, the virgin, the Christ child, and a lamb. And it is interesting that this subject was something that Leonardo pondered for his entire career as a painter in different compositions. So, what is really amazing about the drawings is that they allow us to see the progression of his ideas, whether he’s going to move the child and the lamb to the left or to the right. This is an artist who continues to also think about the overall form of the composition. And then, if we really sort of like take a long view out, we can see that there is a solidity almost, a geometric solidity, to the arrangement of the figures. And so we also see that in the drawings. And then we see these fantastically beautiful, ethereal qualities at transparency of the veils in the closing of the figures, which he first tested in the drawings. So there is a sense that all that gracefulness of the gestures of the figures comes through this extraordinary exercise in drawing, that he observes the children playing, say, with a cat, he knows how the movement can become natural. And then he goes through this process of idealizing the figures, idealizing the clothing. And they stop communicating as if they were studies observed from life. So there is a complete transformation. And here is where the scientist, the painter scientist , comes into play.

ISAACSON: Tell me why the Mona Lisa is such a great piece of art.

BAMBACH: I think the ability that it has to communicate and the timelessness of the way that the figure is presented, that psychological precedence, the fact that this artist has also used the landscape in the background as yet another means of amplifying the story. We really think about it, the landscape, for example, on the right-hand side of the composition, you get a level of water that’s very high. On the left side, you get it very low. So, clearly, the mind and eye of the viewer has to make some connection. There is quite a question mark. The face has so much mystery, the smile, the gaze. It is almost as if Leonardo conjures everything that he knows to create this fiction that means so much. And he, in fact, writes about painting being the supreme creative act, comparable to divine power of creation. And I think that that is really the arsenal of devices, all of them so mysteriously deployed in the Mona Lisa.

ISAACSON: You have held the Mona Lisa in your own hands and seen it even without the protective glass on that one day every year or so that they open it up. Do you think the Louvre should clean it and take the varnish off, so we could see it more the way it was in the original?

BAMBACH: I think that’s a tough question, Walter. I would expect that the scientific investigation of the painting continues, and that we are at a stage where there is a confidence that this can be done. I don’t think we are there yet. I think that there is also, of course, the aspect of the press. The press will get very excited about this. And I think that caution is really probably the best approach here.

ISAACSON: In your book, you show a drawing he does for what may have been an intended portrait of Isabella d’Este. And you contrast it with what he does with the Mona Lisa. Why was that such a big transformation?

BAMBACH: Again, thanks to my colleagues at the Musee du Louvre, a summit years ago now, in 2009, there was this extraordinary meeting of just scientists and conservators and a select number of art historians. And we were in the room with the Mona Lisa, and Isabella d’Este side by side. And, of course, my heart pounded. That’s the first reaction one has. And it was really interesting to really think about these two portraits of women side by side, the same body scale. And I write about this in the book, because, for me, it was such a moving moment — the same body scale, both women in which the hands, the position of the hands play a role. And it was really quite interesting, because the Isabella d’Este, I consider a fairly experimental portrait. It’s the earlier of the two portraits. The profile view of the figure does not really allow us a great engagement with the gaze of the spectator. And then, of course, there is the problem of the arm, that particularly the right arm, that is very much bent, and it seems to come up on the border of the cartoon’s composition. And it really is not relaxed at all, whereas, in the Mona Lisa, especially when one examines it with infrared reflectography, and one can see the development of the underdrawing, you see the way in which the pose is resolved, that Leonardo understands that this is not really a situation where you do a sharp foreshortening of the anatomy, but it’s all about rest, the serenity. And that allows, of course, a proportional foreshortening of the arms, which is so beautiful and successful in the Mona Lisa.

ISAACSON: One of the things about Leonardo is the mystery and mystique that always surrounds him. We have just had the Salvator Mundi, disputed painting in some ways, sell for $450 million. How do you think he would have felt about all the hoopla and mystery around him these days?

BAMBACH: Leonardo’s personality was a bit of a showoff. So I think that he would be incredibly tickled pink, whether it is that thousands of tourists go see the Mona Lisa, or that his 500th anniversary of his death is being celebrated in so many different ways. We get the president of France and the president of Italy laying flowers at the pseudo tomb of Leonardo in Amboise. And , yes, any work connected to Leonardo’s name is bound to make incredible news.

ISAACSON: From his Ginevra de’ Benci, to the Mona Lisa at the very end of his life, you see him connecting sort of the distant creation of the mountains, and then the swirling river almost coming into the blood of us humans. And it seems he’s trying to say, how do we fit in?

BAMBACH: It is extraordinary. I think that, in the end, Leonardo was somebody who understood a great deal about human nature. And, again, this aspect — he’s somebody, as a theorist, who writes a lot about the mind itself. And it is interesting to what extent he also understood it as a possibility of artistic creativity and imagination. And it is interesting because, yes, his portraits, whether it’s the Ginevra de’ Benci or the Mona Lisa or, in fact, the Saint John the Baptist, which is not a portrait, there is a sense of the knowledge of humanity of the ages that one seems to encounter in those faces.

ISAACSON: I don’t see that in Michelangelo.

BAMBACH: Well, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. And it’s very interesting, because, in the case of Michelangelo, there is a — I don’t want to call it an feral approach to expression, but expression, facial expression, the body’s expression is really about the power, the forcefulness. His art really is a great deal about forcefulness. And this is, I would say, precisely the quality that, for Leonardo, is of less interest. And so, for Michelangelo, sometimes, indeed, the faces seem to have very straightforward emotions.

ISAACSON: Flat.

BAMBACH: I find them powerful. So, my Mickey, I feel it’s actually been one of the great privileges of my life to have been able to work intensely on Leonardo and Michelangelo, and sort of come to appreciate their very, very distinctive, almost confrontational personalities. It’s — it’s very moving to try to understand what it is that actuates the imagination of each of these just transcendental artists.

ISAACSON: Carmen Bambach, thank you so much for being with us.