Interview with Martin Kemp
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 Kemp 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.
