The Memory Cathedral: A Secret History of Leonardo Da Vinci [Paperback]

The Memory Cathedral is a grand accomplishment, a novel rich in ideas and characterization. -- San Francisco Chronicle

Dann handles (the) juggling of fact, fiction, and fudging with a masterful hand, and it is quite possible da Vinci himself would have been well satisfied with his exoneration in this Secret History. -- Locus

Jack Dann is not wildly prolific but he has written some extraordinary SF. In The Memory Cathedral: A Secret History of Leonardo da Vinci, he turns the creative imagination that invented alien future cultures to the recreation of an alien culture of the past: the world, and especially the city of Florence, of that 15th century genius. Having discovered a two year period in da Vinci's life for which no documentation exists, Dann has chosen to create a new Leonardo myth, one based on research and something very like the kind of extrapolation associated with science fiction.

In The Memory Cathedral, Leonardo is heterosexual, ruined in love and life by accusations of sodomy (these accusations did in fact nearly ruin his life in 'reality'), and forced to leave his beloved Florence for the Middle East. While there, he ends up serving Ka'it Bay, the Caliph of Egypt and Syria, for whom he actually builds the machines of war, including gliders, that can be found throughout his notebooks.

The Memory Cathedral is an enthralling work, not least because of its major formal trope, that of the memory cathedral itself. This is a visualized mnemonic, a huge imagined space in which to store all memories, and through which one might walk to relive them. Indeed, Dann marvelously shifts from time to time, moment to moment, by constructing his novel around Leonardo's own movements through his memory cathedral, often in an attempt to evade the horrors of what he is experiencing at a particular time.

The great accomplishment of The Memory Cathedral is its ability to catch the reader up not just in the drama of the lives of Leonardo and his friends and enemies but in the grandiose and terrible world in which they lived. Florence exists in all its glory and degradation. I have seldom read a book in which the sense of smell plays such a powerful role. Dann renders the contradictory odors of streets, cathedrals, homes, with hallucinatory richness. Putrefaction and perfume commingle; rotting meat and delicate bodily parts exist side by side in some young gentleman's quarters when a party is in progress; even in a church, the eastern odors of incense mingle with the stench of new-spilled blood. But smell is not the only sense brought to heightened life in these pages: there are a continuing cacophony of sounds, an explosion of brilliant colours, all transformed by Leonardo's own sensitive and alert sensorium, in which sex and death forever conjoin.

There are also all the wonderful characters: the other artists, the brilliant and powerful Lorenzo de Medici, not to mention the Caliph and his retinue in Cairo and on the desert. They all, not least the women Leonardo loved, have important roles to play. But at the core of this moving and troubling study of genius are Leonardo's inventions. A fascinating Afterword informs us that in his drawings the most terrible weapons appear in a kind of Platonic purity; what the novel does is put that apolitical scientific 'innocence' to the test by letting Leonardo see his weapons work. In the carnage of warfare between the Caliph's troops and those of the Turkish Bey, Leonardo loses whatever innocence he had, and it is the story of how that happens that provides this novel with its tragic moral vision. The Memory Cathedral is a wonderful if dark fantasia on history as we think we know it, a brilliant vision of another time and place, deeply human for all its strange differences from our own. -- Douglas Barbour, Edmonton Journal

Jack Dann's latest offering, The Memory Cathedral: A Secret Life of Leonardo da Vinci, is at once a historical novel and one of the purest fantasy. Dann has written a grand adventure, bearing more than a mild resemblance to Alexander Dumas's The Three Musketeers, but with the familiar trip replaced by da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, and the young Niccolo Machiavelli.

Dann's recreation of Renaissance Italy abounds with intrigue, sword play, wild invention, and the wonders of mysteries yet to be unlocked. He deftly manipulates the gaps between what is known about da Vinci's life, enabling the artist to create the great machines depicted in his drawings, but at great cost to his own soul.... The worlds of Florence and the Middle East jump off the page with surprising immediacy....

The Memory Cathedral marks the return of a terrifically talented writer. -- SFRA Review

On my personal list of the greatest SF novels of all time (available upon request), Jack Dann's The Man Who Melted would be right up there--a beautiful, terrifying cri du mort for humanity and an absolutely unforgettable book. Now ten years later, Dann has given us The Memory Cathedral, another unforgetable novel that lays bare the harsh lineaments of Renaissance Italy and lets us see the bones of our own destructive age within the beauty of an earlier time....

But readers hoping for scenes of magickal flying machines and alchemical transformation will be disappointed. Dann's work is both more subtle and more demanding than that. Instead of going for the easy miracles of standard speculative fiction, he shows us the moral crisis of one of the greatest minds of all time, and in so doing casts a wary gaze upon our own dark century's dubious achievements....

Leonardo's charmed circle of friends and colleagues reads like the index of a Renaissance history textbook: Botticelli, Columbus, Machiavelli, de' Medici, Vespucci. It's difficult to avoid the perils of this sort of history-as-entertainment--Lawrence Olivier as Caligula! Cindy Crawford as Marie Curie!--yet Dann does so, deftly. His novel never becomes a set-piece for walk-ons by the immortals who populate it, a Merchant Ivory production in tights and silken gamurra. His characters are too richly drawn, from the tormented Leonardo the saintly Botticelli and Simonetta Vespucci, Botticelli's brilliant, ethereal mistress and model. And while the earlier Florentine portion of The Memory Cathedral is painted in gorgeous quattrocento colors, there are terrifying creatures crouching in the shadows: plague, mob justice, consumption, betrayal. Each of Leonardo's triumphs seems to hold within it the seed of its own destruction, just as his notebooks might have been compiled only to be given to the flames.... -- Science Fiction Age

The alienness of the world Dann portrays is remarkable: a brutal, colorful, and thoroughly fascinating patch of Renaissance history that the textbooks only hint at....

Dann is one of the major SF talents of his generation, and it is a pleasure to see him coming back with a book as strong as The Memory Cathedral. Highly recommended. -- Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine