U of L alumnus cracks da Vinci
July 3rd, 2006
Matthew Landrus
By Kevin Hyde
What did you think of “The Da Vinci Code”?
It’s a common question in the summer of 2006, a season kicked off by director Ron Howard’s movie adaptation of Dan Brown’s ridiculously popular worldwide best-seller. 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 in the 1990s and recently defended his DPhil thesis at the University of Oxford, 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. He even ventured into Windsor Castle’s library with its impressive collection of Leonardo drawings.
A specialist in the early modern history of art and science in Italy, Landrus has published several articles on Leonardo. 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, where he earned a doctorate. He now 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 research. 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 does a man with such a world-class knowledge of Leonardo think of “The Da Vinci Code”?
“I thought they [book and film] were fun, inaccurate though they may be,” he said.
There is so much to study about Leonardo, Landrus said, that he’s the perfect subject for looking for “hidden matters and major truths” about life.
Leonardo himself was looking for such things, he continued. “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 “Treasures” — 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 with his book.
“You rarely see a book that has broad appeal plus recent academic material,” he said.
And too many times writers don’t take into account something that should be absurdly obvious: Leonardo was a very visual man.
“(He made) a great number of drawings — some 7,000 drawings exist today and that’s only a quarter of what he really had,” Landrus said. “He came up with his analogies for everything visually. He was a visual thinker, a diagrammatic thinker.”
Take for instance, Leonardo’s drawing of a giant crossbow, the subject of Landrus’next book.
“I’ve analyzed the geometry and looked at metal point marks that are on the paper,” he said. “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 said. “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 Brown’s characters Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu might surmise, maybe it’s a code.
