Image of Martin Kemp in the Ashmolean looking at Leonardo drawings. Photo by John Baxter. All rights
reserved.
This exclusive interview with Professor Emeritus
Oxford University, Martin was conducted by Nicola Linza and Cristoffer Neljesjö in Oxford, England
during July 2012
Why did you become an art historian and
researcher?
A series of accidents. I am a believer
in the contingency view of history and biography. As historians we look for
coherent patterns and intentions. We also do that when we look back on our own
lives. But very often it is the chance
event (a meeting, coming across
something ….) that changes out course in a way that is totally out of
proportion to the apparent significance of the event at the time. Such
contingencies tend to become lost during the process of recording history.
It’s rather like the way the course of a
mighty ocean liner can be can be changed by a small movement of the rudder.
Buckminster Fuller, the visionary and inventor, understood this perfectly:
“Think of the Queen Mary – the whole ship goes by and then comes the
rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab.
It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure
that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the
little individual can be a trim tab.”
I studied sciences at Windsor Grammar
School. There was a strong sense that science was “useful” thing to do. When I went to
Cambridge to study Natural Sciences, I discovered a wide world of culture,
above all the visual arts. Film was not just John Wayne slaughtering indigenous
Americans. The Fitzwilliam was a revelation: Titian, Rembrandt, Turner…
A mathematician friend, John Sharp,
asked, “would you like to hear Pevsner speaking
on William Morris?” Not wishing to admit that I knew of neither, I said
“Yes”. We haunted the lectures in the
nascent History of Art Department. The end result of these little things was
that I thrust the prow of my tiny boat into Part II (the third year) in the
History of Art, under the redoubtable Michael Jaffé. It was thrilling. I then, as the result of
suggestion from another friend, Charles Avery, applied for postgraduate study
at the Courtauld Institute of Art. I was on my way. John became a professor of
mathematics.
What led to your focus on the work of
Leonardo da Vinci?
Another accident. I studied Renaissance
art at the Courtauld under John Shearman, the most intellectually rigorous art
historian I have encountered, and British architecture of the age of Wren under
Peter Murray, an excellent teacher. When I had finished graduate work I was
approached by a trainee TV producer (whose name I have forgotten) who was
making his “graduation” programme on Leonardo da Vinci’s water drawings – a
surprising subject, and I don’t know why. He’d obviously asked the big figures
and eventually the project trickled down to me. Sir Ernst Gombrich, who later
became a mentor for my career, lent us his then-unpublished paper on Leonardo’s
water drawings. I had previously steered clear of Leonardo. He looked big and
difficult – the sort of research topic you either needed to do properly or not
at all. I’d also steered clear of perspective and optics in art for the same
reason. As it happens these were the two subjects that carried me through the
first half of my career.
When I read Gombrich’s paper, I thought,
“I really know what this is about”. I could see what he was doing, though his
study missed some important aspects of medieval science and their impact on
Leonardo. As a one-time biologist,
anatomy was a logical point to begin. I went systematically through Leonardo’s
anatomical studies, which, by good fortune, were almost all at Windsor Castle.
I had been born in Windsor.
The research lead to two articles in the
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (edited by Gombrich) on
Leonardo’s theory of mind and his changing views of the optics of seeing. I was
on my more specific way.
Please discuss the two latest works that
have come to light as being by Leonardo da Vinci?
By the beginning of this century no
generally accepted major works by Leonardo had been discovered for almost 100
years. The last was the Benois Madonna at the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Then two almost together. I’ll eschew the old
joke about buses.
What is now the better documented of
them, the profile portrait of a young woman on vellum had proved
“controversial” and is still rejected by some specialists. We know who she is
and where the portrait came from. She is
Bianca Sforza, the illegitimate daughter of the Milanese Duke, who married the
commander of his armies, Galeazzo Sanseverino in 1496. Within months of her
marriage the 13-year old bride had died. Her portrait has been excised from a
vellum book now in the National Library in Warsaw that was illuminated to
celebrate her marriage. Although quite heavily restored, everything now points
to its being by Leonardo.
The Salvator Mundi we know less about.
There are two Leonardo drawings for the drapery. There are many “copies” by
followers and an engraving from 1650. We know that a version was in the
collections of Charles I and Charles II. We do not know for sure that there
ever was a fully autograph painting by Leonardo himself, and there is no
continuous link back to the picture owned by the English Kings. The painting on
panel is also very heavily damaged. However, the visual, intellectual and
spiritual qualities indicate that is it indeed by Leonardo.
Why the discrepancy in their reception?
The answer lies very largely in the strategies through which the images arrived
in the public domain. The existence of the portrait emerged in piece-meal and
sensationalist fashion in the public media before full research was undertaken,
before scholarly opinion was steadily secured and before all the data available
for scrutiny. Important scholars were alienated and dug themselves into holes
from which they find it difficult to emerge. The Salvator was handled with
great care. It was shown to scholars - I
saw with other specialists it at the National Gallery in London - and
systematic research undertaken (mine still unpublished in a book a delayed
essays). It was then sanctified in the mega-show at the National Gallery.
I’m confident that they will both embed
themselves in Leonardo’s oeuvre in the long term.
What is the thrust of your recent book
on the artist?
In my two revised monographs, Leonardo
and Leonardo da Vinci. The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man (both Oxford) I
have striven to present the unity at the heart of his apparently diverse
activities. I want to convey a sense of the real Leonardo, as someone even more
remarkable than the legendary one. I am soon to begin a book called Living with
Leonardo, which will look in a personal way at more than 40 years in the often
insane Leonardo business.
If you were to start over what career do
you see yourself pursuing?
I don’t believe in “what ifs?” Coming
from where I did it has been the most enormous privilege to be in intimate
contact with some of the most wonderful things that human beings can do.
The
above interview with Professor Emeritus
Oxford University, Martin Kemp 2012 © Manner of Man
Magazine. All rights reserved. Reproduction is strictly
prohibited without written permission from the publisher.
