Leonardo and the Death Machine
by Robert J. Harris
Published on September 21st
There is so much wrong with this book that I normally would not bother to review it. But the publisher's knee-jerk strapline on the press release "The Da Vinci Code for kids" has stung me into doing so. It has absolutely nothing to do with the content of Dan Brown's best-seller - no Vatican, no Mary Magdalene, no conspiracy theory and certtainly no Last Supper, since this is about an imagined incident in Leonardo's childhood. So, just lazy bandwagon-jumping by the HarperCollins publicity team.
Still, the book is so full of its own innacuracies that another won't hurt. Where shall I start? The mistakes in the map, where we have Via Largo [sic] and the Palazzo Vecchio is labelled the Signoria (a body of people not a place) instead of Palazzo della Signoria and the picture of the church of Santo Spirito muddles it up with Santa Maria Novella? These could be the artist, Fiona Land's, mistakes. But at least she gets the name of the Ponte delle Grazie right, while Harris himself repeatedly writes Ponte alla Grazia.
Crucial to the plot is the notion that Leonardo and Sandro Botticelli are near contemporaries and good mates, whereas Botticelli was seven years older and Leonardo's only recorded references to him are quite disparaging, particularly about his landscapes and use of perspective. And Harris changes the famous infant memory that Leonardo has of a kite visiting him in his crib. Artistic licence? Maybe. But listen to this: "Leonardo's heart missed a beat. He wondered at once if any portrait could do justice to those dark, almond-shaped eyes... Leonardo felt a flush come to his cheek and hoped Lucrezia was not aware of it."
Does that make you think of an artist's response to human beauty? Or a young man's reaction to a pretty girl? Leonardo was unequivocally homosexual; there is no longer any dispute about that and Harris is either sanitising here or unbelievably ignorant.
The story itself is a taradiddle about the young da Vinci discovering a plot to murder Piero de' Medici with an unlikely mechanised thunderbolt in the hand of a statue of Jupiter. It certainly has the reader turning the pages, except where it stops for long gobbets of undigested Renaissance history lessons in which citizens of Florence tell each other things they would all have known.
But I am coming to the conclusion that page-turnability is a sine qua non; there should be so much more to a book than its plot and a series of violent shocks and encounters does not a story make.
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