Searching for the Treasures of Leonardo da Vinci at Oxford
By Kevin Hyde
So, what did you think of The Da Vinci Code?
 Matthew Landrus |
Not an uncommon question in the summer of 2006, a season kicked off by director Ron Howard’s movie adaptation of Dan Brown’s ridiculously popular worldwide bestseller. But to ask that question of Matthew Landrus feels clumsy, even pedestrian.
The Louisville native earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art history at the University of Louisville and recently defended his DPhil thesis at Oxford University where he spent the last six years researching Leonardo da Vinci under the guidance of world-renowned Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp.
Landrus has crisscrossed Italy, examining Leonardo’s drawings and sketches in some of the world’s greatest libraries and galleries—the Ambrosiana Library in Milan to look at Leonardo’s Giant Crossbow; the Academia in Venice to study the Vitruvian Man; the Uffizi in Florence to scrutinize the Adoration of the Magi.
He even ventured into Windsor Castle’s library with its impressive collection of Leonardo drawings.
Landrus is a specialist in the early modern history of art and science in Italy and has published several articles on Leonardo da Vinci. As an associate lecturer for the Open University (the United Kingdom’s largest university for part-time higher education), he teaches a course on Leonardo and has taught Renaissance and medieval art history at Oxford. He currently is an adjunct professor at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design and also teaches a Leonardo course at Providence College.
Earlier this year, Landrus released The Treasures of Leonardo da Vinci, which partially recaps his six years of research at Oxford. The book tells the story of the artist/engineer’s life and times, and looks at the major themes that dominated his work.
So what’s the first thing you ask a man with such a world-class knowledge of Leonardo? Well ... what did you think of The Da Vinci Code?
Landrus has the same to say about the book and film: “I thought they were fun, inaccurate though they may be.”
He particularly enjoyed an early sequence in the movie dealing with Leonardo’s The Last Supper in which the image of St. John is compared with Christ. “The way they had cut out St. John and moved him across—I thought that was a really good way of doing it,” he says.
“There are things that all of us will take from the movie and the book, and I think that’s the value of it.”
Landrus says there is so much to study about Leonardo da Vinci that he’s the perfect subject for looking for “hidden matters and major truths” about life.
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“Because he was looking for such things himself. Today we would call him a scientist. He wanted to get a correct perception of things. He didn’t, for example, take a generalist view about the soul.”
That’s why Landrus enjoyed writing The Treasures of Leonardo da Vinci—there is so much to discuss.
When it comes to Leonardo, Landrus has found that writers and scholars either write for a broad audience and don’t include “some of the really interesting bits” of recent research or write solely for an academic source, which the general public “never sees, or doesn’t understand, or doesn’t pay attention to.”
He wanted to bridge that gap.
“You rarely see a book that has broad appeal plus recent academic material,” he says.
And too many times writers don’t take into account something that should be absurdly obvious: Leonardo da Vinci was a very visual man.
“[Leonardo made] a great number of drawings—some 7,000 drawings exist today and that’s only a quarter of what he really had,” Landrus says. “He came up with his analogies for everything visually. He was a visual thinker, a diagrammatic thinker.”
Treasures contains 30 beautifully illustrated items of rare memorabilia including Leonardo’s notes on machines that polish mirrors.
“You can say what you will in terms of getting the text right and explaining that to the general public. But without the images and without that portfolio display, it doesn’t really give a good sense of what was in Leonardo’s hands at the time. And that’s what I wanted to do with the book. I thought that would be much more interesting. It was for me anyway.”
Road to Oxford
Landrus didn’t spend his years at U of L hunkered down and hidden away in the art library. He worked in the fine arts department for 10 years, first as a student assistant before being promoted to program assistant. He was even chair of the Staff Senate and a member of the Board of Trustees from 1995 to 1997 and a member of the Alumni Association Board in 1996–97.
In 1996 he married Mallica Kumbera ’99GA, who encouraged him to apply to Oxford. His other consideration was Johns Hopkins. He wrote to professors at both schools and Martin Kemp, one of the top Leonardo da Vinci experts in the world, wrote back with enthusiastic encouragement.
“So I pursued that route and was accepted into Oxford’s department even though I didn’t have the funding,” Landrus recalls. “I was able to get a deferment, which was really rare.”
Kemp was impressed with a piece Landrus had published in a graduate journal looking at Chaos Theory and
the artistic process in which he used Leonardo as an example. The material had been a review of what he had been studying at U of L in the mid-90s under the tutelage of Dario Covi, now professor emeritus of fine arts.
“Martin had known about Dario’s extensive work on Verrocchio,” Landrus says. “That was one way in which Martin knew about the program at U of L.”
Having been accepted into Oxford with the opportunity to study under Kemp, all Landrus needed next was the money. He found the answer in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The Mary Churchill Humphrey Scholarship enables U of L graduates to pursue post-baccalaureate studies in the United Kingdom. Intended for academically distinguished seniors, graduate students and recent graduates, the scholarship covers transportation, tuition and fees (room and board). In other words, the perfect fit.
“Luckily, I got that scholarship for a two-year program, which would have been a master’s program, but I ended up staying six years.”
Now back in the States, Landrus has focused his attention on another Leonardo book—this one about his Giant Crossbow.
“I’ve analyzed the geometry and looked at metal point marks that are on the paper,” he says. “I want to explain the process that Leonardo used to make the drawing.”
Landrus believes Leonardo’s Giant Crossbow is among the first, if not the first, examples of an isometric diagram. An isometric diagram has the same dimensions at the foreground and the background but looks like it’s in perspective.
“In other words, rather than draw this in a normal bird’s-eye view perspective he had drawn it in such a way that an engineer would be able to make it,” Landrus says. “The drawing itself was not just a fancy object in his imagination like many have said.
“But it’s to scale. The fact that it’s a scale drawing is amazing because, you think, ‘He couldn’t have possibly meant to have this built.’ But apparently it was made so it could have been.”
Or, as Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu might surmise, maybe it’s a code.
