3/10/2023 0 Comments Charles leonhard![]() His enduring subject, whoever he's writing about, is "the realities of life as it was lived by that person". Nicholl is, in his unassuming way, a dedicated iconoclast – committed not to denying the greatness of Shakespeare or Leonardo's work, but to demonstrating that great work is produced by ordinary people. For a moment we see him not from the viewpoint of literary greatness." In the introduction to his biography of Leonardo, he writes that "it is the task of this book to try to recover something of Leonardo the man – that is, Leonardo the real man, who lived in real time and ate real bowls of soup, as opposed to Leonardo the superhuman, multi-disciplinary 'Universal Man' with whom we are more habitually presented." According to Nicholl: "I think it was the marvellous banality of this phrase that first sparked my interest in the case. The Mountjoys' maid refers in her deposition to "one Mr Shakespeare that laye in the house". ![]() The Lodger (2007) comes to Shakespeare by way of a court case involving his old landlord, Christopher Mountjoy of Silver Street in Cripplegate. Biography offers a new kind of map: "When you go off on one of these biographical research trips, those are the untrodden paths, that's what I love about it: you end up in places that as a traveller you would never intend to go."Įven when pursuing more famous quarry – as well as Leonardo, he's written books about Shakespeare, Marlowe and Rimbaud – Nicholl prefers to approach them from an oblique angle. "I feel the travel book is a bit of a played-out genre," he says. "The same things attract me to the Elizabethan back streets as attracted me to the back streets of Bogotá," he says, "though in the Elizabethan ones you travel a little more safely." To look for Coryate he travelled to India, to Mexico for Cravan, to the Czech Republic after Kelley. "Its precise route cannot be traced, its circumstances cannot be recovered … One glimpses him out of dusty bus windows: a ragged man walking alone down a road."īiography as Nicholl writes it is also a form of travel writing. Nicholl has followed their trails both literally and figuratively, on the ground and in the archives, displaying a remarkable eye and ear for the telling detail, until those trails run cold: "Almost everything about Coryate's last journey is uncertain," he writes. Cravan was a French boxer and poet who disappeared in Mexico in 1918, Thompson a British silk tycoon who disappeared in the Malaysian jungle in 1967. Kelley was an English "alchemist, clairvoyant and conman" who died in a Bohemian prison in the 1590s. The same could be said of Nicholls's books, which occupy an uncertain but appealing ground between academia and journalism.Ĭoryate, c1577-1617, was "a kind of comedian, a learned buffoon, a butt for courtly wits and poets such as John Donne and Ben Jonson", as well as "an immensely tough and courageous traveller", who walked across much of Europe and Asia. (And no, if it weren't for Nicholl I'd never have heard of them either.) They're slightly shady, marginal characters, who existed in two or more worlds at once but ultimately belonged to none. ![]() The subjects range from Thomas Coryate and Edward Kelley to Arthur Cravan and Jim Thompson. His 12th and most recent book, Traces Remain, published this month, is a collection of essays written over the past two decades. He's variously described as a historian, biographer and travel writer, though most of his work doesn't fall straightforwardly into any of those categories. ![]() ![]() His conversation, like his writing, follows where his curiosity leads, and it's as likely to take him off up an unmarked goat track as along more familiar routes. Sitting with Nicholl in his Tuscan farmhouse, up in the hills not far outside the walled medieval city of Lucca – on a clear day, he says, you can just about see Vinci from his front garden – I find it hard to imagine him being railroaded into anything. But I did manage to blurt out before the credits rolled over the top of me that one shouldn't be railroaded into these things." But because the programme over-ran, he "ended up sounding like I was the only person in the entire National Gallery" who didn't think the recently attributed Christ As Salvator Mundi was by Leonardo, "which wasn't quite what I wanted to say. Charles Nicholl, whose acclaimed life of Leonardo was published in 2004, "was supposedly in this rather honourable position of being the last person to talk on the programme". O n 8 November, the day before the opening of the blockbuster Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at the National Gallery, Sky Arts broadcast an 80-minute film about the show. ![]()
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