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    Searching for Leonardo da Vinci in ‘Leonardo’

    Our critic finds that a new biopic series on the CW prefers contemporary clichés to exploring what actually made the artist fascinating.Leonardo da Vinci discovered how to capture life in his drawings. And he found new ways to topple a castle. But the one thing he could never come up with was a good recipe for shampoo.That, at least, is the main message I took away from the eight episodes of “Leonardo,” a biopic series premiering on Tuesday on the CW. Following in the footsteps of “The Lord of the Rings” and “Game of Thrones,” the makers of “Leonardo” seem to have decided that old-time heroes need to have greasy locks.But then, “Leonardo” seems so indebted to “Game of Thrones” that it could hardly have gone its own way on grooming. Its music riffs on “GoT,” complete with drumbeats and a twinkly harp, and it includes gratuitous nudity and a pointless beheading. Think of it as a “CSI”-style spinoff — “GoT: Florence.” It shows how deeply our sense of history is essentially aesthetic, even pictorial: Our understanding of the past is based on the fantasies and images our own culture has already built up about that past — greasy hair and all — rather than on any real historical thinking. And that means we reject the true foreignness of history in favor of the comforting stories we’ve told ourselves about it, all rooted in today’s reality — or in Westeros, which is much the same thing.Despite its debt to “Game of Thrones” fantasy, “Leonardo” has the backbone of a 21st-century police procedural. The first episode, and then each one that follows, begins with its hero in prison for murder. As the artist (played by Aidan Turner) is interrogated by a Renaissance cop named Stefano Giraldi (Freddie Highmore, who, I’m glad to say, was permitted to wash his hair), flashbacks reveal how the artist ended up in such straits. Spoiler alert: In the final episode, when Leonardo is about to be hanged for the crime, we and Giraldi discover that he did not do the deed. Viewers who didn’t see that twist coming ought to have their Wi-Fi revoked.The series will most likely get away with the platitudes of its invented plot, since most viewers will probably be watching “Leonardo” less for its storytelling than for a glimpse of a certain Renaissance genius who, though dead for half a millennium, has become one of our current art stars. (It helps that his “Salvator Mundi” sold for $450 million in 2017.) But even though “Leonardo” is set in Italy around 1500 and purports to talk about a real man, this program’s grasp on history is as weak as any dragon drama.The murder plot is pure fiction, but that’s forgivable: Today’s biopics aren’t expected to stick to the facts. Watching “Rocketman,” we didn’t think that Elton John could really float above his piano. What I can’t forgive is the false picture “Leonardo” paints of Leonardo. As played by Turner (“The Hobbit,” “Poldark”), the artist seems a neurotic heartthrob with attention deficit disorder. In reality, Leonardo’s genius was systematic in the extreme: He’d take the time to understand and portray every hair on a woman’s head, every twig and leaf on a tree.Giorgio Vasari, the great Renaissance biographer, described Leonardo as a charming conversationalist, a deeply courtly being “whose personal beauty could not be exaggerated, whose every movement was grace itself” — a man “filled with a lofty and delicate spirit.” In “Leonardo,” he comes closer to Kurt Cobain. It’s as though, here in the 21st century, we have a single model for what creativity might look like, and the creators of “Leonardo” don’t dare ask us to imagine another one. I guess they could be right: We might be so completely stuck in our own times that we simply can’t inhabit the past’s deeply different realities. Or maybe history could offer an example of progress we might want to see.Matilda De Angelis as Caterina da Cremona, an invented character with whom Leonardo has an all-but-sexual romance.Angelo Turetta/Sony Pictures TelevisionThis biopic series could have moved in that direction when it came to the artist’s sexuality. Even though Leonardo da Vinci is one of the earliest gay creators we know of, “Leonardo” has him drawn most powerfully to women. Sure, the series shows him kissing a man or two, but the entire plot is built around his stormy, steamy, all-but-sexual romance with an invented character named Caterina da Cremona, played by Matilda De Angelis. (She’s the one we keep seeing naked for no reason.) In the 21st century, not to play one of history’s famously gay figures as notably gay seems borderline homophobic. “She was love,” says Leonardo about his invented girlfriend. Why not let us hear this gay artist say, “He?”When it comes to capturing the past’s foreignness, the show even misses little details it should have been easy to get right. Rather than drawing with a goose quill, Leonardo uses a metal nib — which only came into use centuries later. Candles, a pricey commodity in the Renaissance, burn by the dozen in every room, as though Leonardo had a side hustle in aromatherapy. (Maybe his vanilla-cinnamon pillars made Mona Lisa smile.) When he paints his “Last Supper,” the show breaks away to a computer-generated animation of how perspective works in the painting — then gets that perspective wrong.About halfway through the series, I took off my art critic’s hat, abandoned my interest in seeing yesterdays that are different from now, and tried pretending the show wasn’t about any real artist at all, let alone a gay one from the Renaissance. What if I changed the title from “Leonardo” to “Tony”? Would that help me enjoy it?Not much.Since the plot of “Tony” — sorry, “Leonardo” — is just an excuse for telling the story of a great artist’s life, the writers, Frank Spotnitz, Steve Thompson and Gabbie Asher, never bother giving it any real momentum or patching its holes. And since this is, again, the story of a great artist’s life, they make sure to stuff it full of every “great artist” cliché they can find: “A man like Leonardo — his genius is forged by pain,” says one typical line of dialogue. “And that pain can drive a man to commit terrible acts.” Leonardo van Gogh, you might call him — a hybrid creature that doesn’t even reflect how real artists think and act today, let alone how they did in the Renaissance. It’s a screenwriter’s fantasy of how old-time artists ought to be.In “Leonardo,” a Renaissance master tells his pupil, “You’ve drawn only what you saw. You must learn to draw what you feel.” That’s a bromide born centuries after Leonardo’s day — drawing “only what you see” was actually one of his most radical inventions — but it’s not clear we have much appetite for understanding how cultural foundations can change over time.To grasp how and why art got made in the past, we might need to unlearn our current ideas about artists. And you can’t blame “Leonardo” for not even trying. We’re all just so addicted to the dirty hair. More

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    Christopher Coover, Auction Expert in the Printed Word, Dies at 72

    At Christie’s, he managed sales of rare books, manuscripts and documents by the likes of da Vinci, Lincoln and Kerouac. On TV, he lent his eye to “Antiques Roadshow.”Christopher Coover, who made a career out of reading other people’s mail as an expert in rare books and manuscripts at Christie’s Auction House, where he oversaw the authentication, appraisal and sale of documents ranging from the original texts of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” to George Washington’s annotated copy of the Constitution, died in Livingston, N.J., on April 3, his 72nd birthday.The immediate cause was pneumonia complicated by Parkinson’s disease, his son, Timothy, said.As a connoisseur of curios, Mr. Coover was enlisted as an appraiser for the PBS program “Antiques Roadshow,” where at a single glance he could transform an all-but-forgotten autographed book or letter, retrieved from a starry-eyed guest’s basement or attic into a valuable historical heirloom.“The sense of discovery never fails,” he told The Colonial Williamsburg Journal in 2011. “I like the challenge of seeking out the larger background, the hidden meanings and connections of a given document. This means I am sometimes overworked, occasionally out of my depth, but never bored.”Mr. Coover in 2004 with letter from Abraham Lincoln to Ulysses S. Grant. “The historical nuggets in original manuscripts are often buried, but rarely deeply,” he said. Ruby Washington/The New York Times)For 35 years as senior specialist in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department at Christie’s in Manhattan, he would authenticate material offered for auction, describe its provenance and history for the catalog, and suggest the opening price.Among his career milestones was assisting in the sale of the oil magnate Armand Hammer’s copy of an early 15th-century scientific manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci — known as the “Hammer Codex” — to Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, for a record $30.2 million in 1994.Mr. Coover appraised and managed the sale of the publisher Malcolm Forbes’s collection of American historical documents in six auctions from 2002 to 2007. The sale set records for letters by 15 presidents and generated more than $40.9 million. The sale’s catalog included a manuscript of Abraham Lincoln’s last speech; Robert E. Lee’s message to Ulysses S. Grant, in which he said he was ready to discuss the “cessation of hostilities” to end the Civil War; and a 1939 letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraging the American effort to build the atomic bomb.Mr. Coover also wrote the catalog for the sale of Kerouac’s “On the Road” manuscript, typed on a 119-foot-long roll of United Press Teletype paper ($2.4 million); and appraised and managed the sales of Lincoln’s 1864 Election Victory speech ($3.4 million), Washington’s letter on the ratification of the Constitution ($3.2 million), Washington’s personal annotated copy of the 1789 Acts of Congress ($9.8 million) and the original manuscript of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”Christopher Coover was born on April 3, 1950, in Greeley, Colo. His parents left his middle name blank on his birth certificate so that he could choose one later himself. He selected Robin, from his favorite childhood books; his full name became Christopher Robin Coover.The family moved shortly afterward to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where his parents were hired by Vassar College — his father, James Burrell Coover, as a professor and music librarian, and his mother, Georgena (Walker) Coover, as a teacher and specialist in early childhood education.Chris attended Arlington High School in Poughkeepsie before his father took a teaching post at the State University of New York at Buffalo, bringing his family with him. Chris graduated from Kenmore West High School in Buffalo. He earned a bachelor’s degree in musicology from SUNY Buffalo in 1973.He subsequently formed a band that played at weddings and other receptions, drove a school bus, worked for The New Grove Dictionary of Music in London and in the rare books room of the Strand book store in Manhattan before he was hired by Sotheby’s in 1978.He left for Christie’s in 1980. While working there, he earned a master’s in library science from Columbia University. He retired in 2016 as senior specialist and vice president of the auction house.Mr. Coover also lectured on American documents and built his own collection of literary and historical books and manuscripts, which he donated to Columbia.Mr. Coover, who died in a hospital, lived in Montclair, N.J. In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Lois (Adams) Coover; a daughter, Chloe; and two sisters, Mauri and Regan Coover.In the authentication of documents, Mr. Coover said, most forgeries are readily apparent, typically because the paper cannot be faked. Such was the case with a supposed 1906 first edition of “Madame Butterfly,” purportedly signed and dedicated by the composer, Puccini, which a reader of The Chicago Tribune asked Mr. Coover to authenticate.Sight unseen, he was able to recite the dedication, in Italian (he said he had seen 10 to 15 copies of the score with the same words), and identified the reader’s find as only a photolithographic copy.Then again, he said, ordinary-looking documents can contain surprises.“An otherwise boring diary or series of family letters mainly recording weather and local news may contain a long description of an election campaign, demonstrations against the Stamp Act, the convening of the Confederacy to draft a constitution, or a raid by Pancho Villa,” he told the Williamsburg journal.“The historical nuggets in original manuscripts are often buried, but rarely deeply,” he added. “I once discovered an exceptional letter of Ethan Allen at the bottom of a pile of old deeds, copies of minor poetry and otherwise uninteresting papers.”Assessing the monetary value of an item is highly subjective, he said.“Family bibles and birth and death records are valuable for their genealogical information, but they have very little commercial value,” he was quoted as saying in Marsha Bemko’s book “Antiques Roadshow: Behind the Scenes” (2009), “and I think it is a shame to see little old ladies waiting in line for hours while hefting a 40-pound Bible that is worth very little monetarily.”“You have to trust your innate instincts and perception of the size of the potential market,” he said. “The value of some letters and documents can only be determined by letting the free market operate, at auction.”Mr. Coover recalled that in 1992 he was asked by the grandson of a woman who had recently died to appraise her collection of books. He visited her Manhattan apartment and immediately realized that the books were not very valuable, but as he was leaving, the grandson asked him to look at some papers in a tattered Manila envelope.Inside, Mr. Coover told The Times in 2004, he found an old black leather book with the word “autograph” embossed in gold on the cover. On the very first page, he recognized Lincoln’s signature, followed by the last handwritten paragraph of his Second Inaugural Address. He told the young man that that one page alone was worth at least $250,000. When it finally went to auction, it sold for $1.2 million. More

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    ‘The Lost Leonardo’ Review: Art, Money and Oligarchy

    This documentary about the painting “Salvator Mundi” packs the fascination and wallop of an expertly executed fictional thriller.To paraphrase John Lennon, Leonardo da Vinci is a concept by which world civilization (such as it is) measures artistic mastery.“The Lost Leonardo,” a documentary directed by the Danish filmmaker Andreas Koefoed, is a disquieting confirmation of this idea. It’s the story of how a painting purchased for a little over $1,000 was soon identified — if not wholly authenticated — as a Leonardo, and eventually wound up in the hands of a Saudi oligarch who spent more than $400 million on it. Among other things, this picture freshly demonstrates that a conventionally structured documentary can pack the fascination and wallop of an expertly executed fictional thriller.The globe-trotting narrative begins with Alexander Parish, a self-described “sleeper hunter” — an art buyer who looks for catalog mistakes — purchasing the painting “Salvator Mundi” from a New Orleans dealer. Working with the renowned art historian and restorer Dianne Modestini, Parish and his financial partner Robert Simon determine they have a Leonardo on their hands. And so the movie moves from “The Art Game” to “The Money Game.”Into this narrative, “The Lost Leonardo” weaves coherent mini-treatises on restoration, art dealerships, free ports, the true nature of the auctioneering business and more. The art critic Jerry Saltz blusters that the painting is not just not a Leonardo, but that it’s garbage. The writer Kenny Schachter is more considered and rueful in expressing his doubts. Footage of spectators reacting to the painting suggests that one can produce a Pavlovian response to an artwork merely by labeling it a Leonardo. The movie also features F.B.I. and C.I.A. figures, the New York Times investigative journalist David Kirkpatrick and Leonardo DiCaprio.It’s a dizzying tale. And whether or not you believe “Salvator Mundi” to be a real Leonardo, it’s ultimately a disgusting one.The Lost LeonardoRated PG-13 for language. In English and French with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More