QI The Book of the Dead

Whatever the reason, it’s the perfect physical representation of his awkward genius. Leonardo didn’t really care about fitting in or what others thought. He was a vegetarian when almost no one else was because he empathised with animals (one of his obsessions was setting free caged birds). Despite being commissioned by some of the most powerful grandees in Europe, he rarely finished any project he started. What mattered to him was to be free to do his own thing, toachieve the control over his life that had eluded him as an abandoned child:
    It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things .
     
    Most of us picture him as he appears in the one authenticated self-portrait: a sixty-year-old, bald and bearded sage, a loner. But the young Leonardo was something quite different. His contemporary, the biographer Giorgio Vasari (1511–74), was unambiguous: he was a man ‘of physical beauty beyond compare’. And that wasn’t all, he was freakishly strong:
    There is something supernatural in the accumulation in one individual of so much beauty, grace, and might. With his right hand he could twist an iron horseshoe as if it were made of lead .
     
    And a charmer:
    In his liberality, he welcomed and gave food to any friend, rich or poor… his speech could bend in any direction the most obdurate of wills .
     
    But cross him and you’d have to deal with his ‘terrible strength in argument, sustained by intelligence and memory’. This is Leonardo the gay Florentine about town, who was anonymously accused (and acquitted) of sodomy, whose teenage pupil and companion was known as Salai (‘limb of Satan’), the precocious artist whose collection of pornographic drawings was eventually stolen from the Royal Collection in Windsor Castle, according to the art critic Brian Sewell, by a distinguished German art critic in a Sherlock Holmes cloak:

    There is no doubt that the drawings were a considerable embarrassment, and I think everyone was very relieved to find that they’d gone .
     
    The older sage and the racy young Adonis were both products of the same self-confidence. It was driven by study, by his attempt to come up with his own answers, the process he calls saper vedere , ‘knowing how to see’. ‘Learning’, he once wrote, ‘never exhausts the mind.’ It was what had sustained him as a child and there were times when it still gave him childlike pleasure. Once, in the Vatican, he made a set of wings and horns, painted them silver and stuck them on a lizard to turn it into a small ‘dragon’ which he used to frighten the Pope’s courtiers. On another occasion, he cleaned out a bullock’s intestines, attached them to a blacksmith’s bellows and pumped them up into a vast malodorous balloon, which quickly filled the forge and drove his bewildered onlookers outside.
    Leonardo was brilliant, but he was not infallible. He didn’t invent scissors, the helicopter or the telescope, as is frequently claimed. He was very bad at maths – he only ever mastered basic geometry and his arithmetic was often wrong. Many of his observations haven’t stood the test of time: he thought the moon’s surface was covered by water, which was why it reflected light from the sun; that the salamander had no digestive organs but survived by eating fire; and that it was a good idea to paint his most ambitious painting, The Last Supper , directly on to dry plaster (it wasn’t; what you see today is practically all the work of restorers). Also, because his fame in the years after his death was almost exclusively tied to a small body of thirty completed paintings, he was to have almost no impact on the progress of science. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that his notebooks – and theirrevolutionary contents – were fully deciphered.
    Leonardo died in France at the age of sixty-seven. The legend has it that his new patron, King Francis I, sat by his bedside, cradling his head as he lay dying. It’s tempting to see this symbolically as the abandoned child finally getting the parental love he never had as a boy. But whatever he lacked, he had more than made up for it. As the king said: ‘There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo.’

     
    In theorising about the effects of a difficult childhood, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) heads the field. He wrote a biography of Leonardo in 1910