THAD: Leonardo da Vinci
Research Paper Topic: Leonardo’s Legacy
Professor Matthew Landrus, Faculty of History, University of Oxford
Submitted: November 15, 2020
Edited for Portfolio: December 9, 2022
Living with Leonardo:
epigraphs
“As a man is, so he sees.”
--William Blake
“Shun those studies in which the work that
results dies with the worker.”
--Leonardo
Research Paper Topic: Leonardo’s Legacy
Professor Matthew Landrus, Faculty of History, University of Oxford
Submitted: November 15, 2020
Edited for Portfolio: December 9, 2022
Living with Leonardo:
An Analysis of Legacy
epigraphs
“As a man is, so he sees.”
--William Blake
“Shun those studies in which the work that
results dies with the worker.”
--Leonardo
Taking on the subject of Leonardo’s legacy entails jumping into a sea of superlatives so deep that one risks exhaustion and disorientation. The student-seeker is faced with the impossible task not only of selecting what segment of this “universal genius” (Benito) to pull forward but also of choosing in the context of our present time and its mandate to reconcile that choice with disruptions to the legacy notion altogether. What legacies have been overlooked, or, worse, erased, we ask in face of an unknown body of global artistic and artisanal efforts uncloaked by inherited Western tags of greatest, first, father of, or genius? There is not one list of so-called great minds on which Leonardo’s name does not appear. The ‘legacy’ Leonardo left behind in 1519, when he passed away in the arms of France’s François I, as legend goes, is by no means a blank slate, yet it has inspired a phenomenon wherein each generation composes upon it precisely what it seeks to see--or not to see--in itself.
The ‘legacy’ task is complicated yet interestingly enhanced by the fact that in all the ‘work’ the unwed and childless Leonardo left behind, only a small number of attributed ‘completed’ works--paintings mostly--rests alongside an enormous quantity of ‘uncompleted’, mostly manuscript pages--some 6000 sheets--that is also miniscule, representing only a quarter (or a fifth--depending on the source) of what is believed Leonardo produced (Richter v). Indeed, generations continue to confront “a potential consequence of this missing legacy,” as Matthew Landrus reminds readers in an introduction to one of thousands of publications designed to introduce and reintroduce the “enigmatic genius” to ever-widening audiences, which is “the extensive discussion and scholarship that--so to speak--reads between the lines.” 500 years on, Leonardo’s legacy is best understood as the story of an amassed motivational blindness ignited by the notebooks, haunted by their absent pages, and the accompanying “strange vicissitudes” of their journey through time (Galluzi 5).
Something more complicated than years separates me and my search for Leonardo’s legacy than it may have, say, for Vasari, when some 30 years after his fellow Florentine’s passing, he set off to collect, write, and first publish The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in 1550.
To have included these men’s biographies--mostly Florentines of the quatro and cinquecento, men who would have been dismissed in previous generations, all the way back to Aristotle, as pursuing “[work] with the hands,” which was not one of “the so-called Liberal Arts such as grammar, logic, rhetoric, or geometry” but “‘manual’ and therefore ‘menial’, and thus below the dignity of a gentleman” (Gombrich 223)--was itself a revolutionary gesture. While not the stuff of historical biography, then an exclusive club of poets, philosophers, and emperors, inclusion further credits the ambition of the writer who created it, setting the West and its scholars on a path of contemplating and redefining the very notion of influence, even if Vasrai’s own ‘scholarship’ was rife with “readings between the lines” and worse. Vasari, the descendant of a family of potters who chose a different path, described as “one of the foremost artists of 16th-century Italy, renowned...as a painter, draftsman, and architect” (Wood) and the “father” or “inventor” of the field of art history (Soloman 52), justly believed it was time for the painters, sculptors, and architects to claim their due.
Leonardo’s reputation as “a great artist” and a rare sort of genius--who in peacetime promised to “give as complete satisfaction as any other in the field of architecture” and “[l]ikewise in painting” (Sforza letter), who entertained with “mechanical toys of his own invention, and with the designing of new effects for stage performances and pageantries,” and who in wartime became the “wizard” (Gombrich 222) who could generate visual plans for portable bridges, canons, and “covered vehicles” (Sforza letter)--was already well-established for his contemporaries, especially the early-modern dukes, diplomats, monarchs, popes, and cardinals of southern Europe, intrigued and easily sold by Leonardo himself on the value of his “secrets” (Sforza letter). Later in his lifetime, after a career of few yet notable collaborations, constructions, and commissions, one might imagine the ecstasy unleashed by a visit to the Master’s workshop, such as he would have been able to set up at Cloux near Amboise--a new kind of pilgrimage born--and by the chance to leaf through his sheets with their mixing of superbly rendered visual representations and mysterious text--a new kind of “illuminated” manuscript. Much more chaotic and difficult to ‘read’, the notebooks are the ‘innovation’--encyclopedic long before encyclopedias, Wikipedia long before the internet.
Never before had a seeing man seen what and how Leonardo saw or risked excommunication and other censure in recording, ostensibly so that others could also see, as the oft-cited 1517 journal entry by Antonio de Beatis, chaplain on a voyage with Cardinal Luigi of Aragon, attests:
This gentleman has written of anatomy with such detail, showing by illustrations the limbs, muscles, nerves, veins, ligaments, intestines and whatever else there is to discuss in the bodies of men and women, in a way that has never yet been done by anyone else. All this we have seen with our own eyes; and he said that he had dissected more than thirty bodies, both of men and women, of all ages. He has also written of the nature of water, of divers machines and of other matters, which he has set down in an infinite number of volumes all in the vulgar tongue, which if they should be published will be profitable and very enjoyable. (MacCurdy 13)
The “Introductory Note” of the momentous 1939 The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci: Arranged, Rendered into English and Introduced by Edward MacCurdy, Volume I, offers the ‘modern’ reader Beatis’ witness as the gateway to many of those same illustrations and “vulgar tongue” writings characteristic of the notebooks, signaling the McCurdy publication’s contribution to what scholar Martin Kempe referred to in his intriguing memoir Living with Leonardo: Fifty Years of Sanity and Insanity in the Art World and Beyond as the “inner workings of” what would become and perhaps still is “the Leonardo business” (6). How best “to publish” the notebooks had been since the very first handoff of the manuscripts to Leonardo’s “faithful pupil Francesco Melzi” (Galluzzi) the subject of much debate: by individual manuscript or by some manner of selection and classification (MacCurdy 15)? MacCurdy settles on a middle ground.
For the MacCurdy generation, it had been only 50-some years earlier that the “work of transcription of the Leonardo manuscripts was first commenced,” as the 1939 “Preface” explains, referring to the ‘Victorians’ into whose hands “a new influx of Leonardo documents” (Galluzzi) had fallen, offering revised answers to questions of authentication and classification. In the decade after 1867, Walter Pater, a self-professed “lover of strange souls,” and author of the ground-breaking The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, could still “analyze for himself the impression made on him by those works, and try to reach through it a definition of the chief elements of Leonardo’s genius. The legend, as corrected and enlarged by its critics, may now and then intervene to support the results of this analysis” (Pater). A new hero is born, one who could, at least for Pater, challenge rather than conform to the “exact modern formulas” of his industrially (mechanically) prosperous Victorian age. “If we think of [Leonardo],” Pater continues,
as the mere reasoner who subjects design to anatomy, and composition to mathematical rules, we shall hardly have that impression which those around Leonardo received from him. Pouring over his crucibles, making experiments with colour, trying, by strange variation of the alchemist’s dream, to discover the secret, not of an elixir to make man’s natural life immortal, but of giving immortality to the subtlest of most delicate effects of painting, he seemed to them rather the sorcerer or the magician, possessed of curious secrets and a hidden knowledge, living in a world of which he alone possessed the key.
With images and prose reminiscent of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus first published some 50 years earlier, Pater’s lengthy and stylized account of Leonardo’s life and work does a fine job of advocating for his generation’s avant garde “art for art’s sake” Aestheticism movement. Not immune to the forces of rational classification, Pater segments Leonardo’s life into “three divisions”: “thirty years at Florence, nearly twenty years at Milan, then nineteen years of wandering, till [Leonardo] sinks to rest under the protection of Francis the First.” Leonardo’s job application letter to Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, supports the claim that before his “wandering” and “sinking” years, Leonardo sought a “steady salary” such as a court appointment would guarantee, and the freedom from commissions that came along with it (Wells in Richter xvii). Leonardo’s life in Milan would prove productive, but for Pater it was also “a life of brilliant sins and exquisite amusements...and it suited his genius, composed, in almost equal parts, of curiosity and the desire of beauty, to take things as they came.” His “reading between the lines” settles its gaze on “La Gioconda” as “in the truest sense, Leonardo’s masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work” (Pater).
One wonders if Pater could have gotten away with this assessments of Leonardo, “Homo Minister et Interpres Naturae,” had Jean Paul Richter’s 1883 two-volume Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci been published, a mighty work of transcription and translation, the result of what Martin Kemp characterizes as “[trawling] through Leonardo’s horribly illegible texts, most unpublished, making a telling selection,” one that effectively “revealed an unknown Leonardo” (Richter v-vi). Richter’s late nineteenth-century art historian and dealer prejudices meant the volumes “weighted more towards the arts than sciences and technologies,” leaving room for McCurdy (1930s) and Richter’s daughter Irma (1950s) to “redress the balance” (Kemp).
By mid-century, the taboo against valuing “private ‘notebooks’ or ‘papers’ of great individuals’’ as providing insight into “a great mind at work” (Richter v)--or in Pater’s words, “mode of thought”--had been definitively lifted. “Which Leonardo do we present?” became open game and even more profitable business: “[t]he artist, the scientist, the engineer, the natural philosopher, the author of literary snippets…?” (Richter vi). Similarly, in an age of technological reproduction and specialization, the notebooks now offered both scholars and a mass of general readers the opportunity to name, claim, and classify (and commercialize) their Leonardo.
C. Truesdall’s 1968 Essays in the History of Mechanics takes issue with what evolved as claims too easily trucked as “science” or “experimental method” in the mechanical sketches and notations of Leonardo’s notebooks, by taking jabs at the “busy modern” who “calls for culture in predigested pills, packaged in abridged paperbacks, explained by folksy prefaces in pellet-paragraphs of sugared baby-talk, lullabies to smugness” (3). In a prescient subsequent line, Truesdall offers, “Suggestion to a general audience that historical facts must precede if not replace historical enthusiasms may exact only oblivion, the palm of dullness” (3). This mentality, designed to curb further inquiry into, complication of, or challenge to the ‘fable’--“Leonardo as the lonely creator”--or the ‘legend’--“The one scientist whom the common man can name, though he may well never have heard of Newton or Leibnitz”--certainly gives pause (Truesdall 3).
The problem is that while we lack the content of Leonardo’s missing notebooks, we lack seemingly more from his contemporaries who were working in the then uncategorized scientific and mechanical fields for satisfactory comparisons. It suffices that one earlier collection exists, according to Truesdell, Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s 1475 Trattato di Architectura, so that “[a]s the number and variety of machines he drew suggests, Leonardo is now seen as illustrating the common or extraordinary technology of his day and projecting improvements upon it” (5). The genius of Truesdall’s meticulously evidenced and organized commentary, breaking down every aspect of Leonardo’s mechanics, rests in its unabashed exposition of bias and motivated scholarship (get students to take a class!) in Leonardo studies and criticism: “A good artist’s drawing of an existing machine carries the same forthright veracity as his drawings of an existing man, giving us no reason to presume that he invented either” (5). Truesdell indicts lazy reasoning and disciplinary territorialism, perhaps the very “business of Leonardo,” as having made it impossible “to say anything about Leonardo that will not outrage one or another segment of the audience. For peaceful co-existence with the standard view, shared with the general semiliterate mass by ninety-nine percent of university professors, he must be labelled a ‘genius’ straight off and described by no adjective of less than superlative degree” (Truesdall 40). In order to find its conclusion, the current essay now locates energy in the thought that, indeed, “contrary to Vincian folklore, Leonardo did not discover everything,” but “he did discover something...of solid if limited achievement” (Truesdall 40). Leonardo, the personification of the Renaissance Man, became the prototype of modern man.
In 1974, The Unesco Courier published an entire issue devoted to two “rediscovered manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci” considered to have been lost and containing hundreds of drawings. Some dedicated library catalogue sleuthing made the 1967 Madrid discovery possible at about the same time Truesdall was collecting, editing, and publishing his Essays. Modern Leonardo scholars found themselves once again encountering a mind “like a moving searchlight, constantly probing into the darkness, illuminating one subject, then rapidly passing to another” (Courier inside cover). “Crammed with brief notes and sketches, done with unfailing precision,” the Madrid Codex offered “deeper insight than ever before into Leonardo’s work in mechanics, military engineering, geometry, perspective, optics, casting, and many other subjects” (Courier 3), excellent selling-points for a generation in the throes of computational and technological advancement, inventing all manner of petroleum-based plastic, for instance, that was making living better but perhaps not necessarily more beautiful or sustainable. Yet, Codex Madrid continues to lay bare Leonardo’s process, his professed approach to art and the purpose of his “penetration into the most secret parts of nature” (Pater):
Limbs, which are not in exercise must be drawn without showing the play of muscles. And if you do otherwise, you have initiated a shock of nuts rather than a human figure. (Pedretti 45)
While this statement may have been conceived by Leonardo as an inside jab at rivals such as Michelangelo, they establish that “the human body was not an excuse for the artist to show off his skill in depicting bulging muscles unnecessarily” (Pedretti 46) but essential knowledge required to move away from “the appearance of things” which Leonardo pursued relentlessly in drafting “to stress form: form which is defined by sharp contours and by lines of shading which curve around it with deliberate slowness” (Pedretti 46). “Seeing” is difficult yet profitable business.
Codex Madrid’s notes on painting also treat “the problems of light, shadow, and contour” aligning painting with optics, wherein Leonardo records his discovery that reflected and refracted light define the human face and body (Pedretti 46). The unseen is brought to light, and no darkness is depicted here as having been ‘penetrated’, a curious word choice, suggesting violence and which carried in the Victorian era a moral judgment. If there is one thing the 6,000 sheets accomplish, it is to forward a legacy that is acceptable and valuable precisely because the notebooks are unresolved and chaotic. They ignite dialogue, model modes of inquiry that center the visual through acts of drawing, the last of the several “lower” forms, modes, or métiers in this story due to be lifted out of subordinate obscurity.
As an industrial design major concentrating in drawing, which was not an option as a “major” and has never been, but only recently established as a “concentration” or minor for students at the Rhode Island School of Design, I am particularly interested in this aspect of Leonardo’s legacy and its impact on my practice, thinking, and future. “Drawing,” as it is viewed today, has come a long way, and perhaps its most distinguishing aspect is its eschewing of disciplinary boundaries, while it remains paradoxically foundational, subordinated to all the established majors, a prerequisite.
Leonardo produced “a number of drawings several times greater than those of the most-active 16th-century draftsmen” (Landrus), a practice he is said to have picked up as a child, put to use in Verrocchio’s workshop as “underdrawings” for painting (Dunkerton 15) and refined thereafter. In the notebooks, scholars revel in Leonardo’s own privileging of the mode--manuscript image, unfinished, traced, sketched--of seeing over writing and reading as expressed in this passage:
O writer, with what words will you describe with a like perfection the whole arrangement of that of which the drawing is here? For lack of knowledge, you will describe it confusedly so as to convey but little perception of the true shapes of things; and deceiving yourself you believe that you can satisfy the listener completely when you speak of the figure of anything that has body and is surrounded by surfaces.
I recommend that you do not cumber yourself with words unless you are speaking to the blind, or if you wish to demonstrate to the ears with words rather than to the eyes of men speak of things of substance or of nature and do not busy yourself in making enter by the ears things which have to do with the eyes for in this you will be far surpassed by the work of the painter.
With what words can you describe this heart without filling a whole book? (Richter 152; Lefevre 67-68).
In her 2011 Doctor of Philosophy dissertation “The Sketches of Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, and Leonardo: Eye, Mind, and Hand in Renaissance Florence,” Jessica Louise Stewart sets out to accomplish for the ‘discipline’ of drawing or sketching what Vasari accomplished for “painters, sculptors, and architects.” Her “fresh perspective” interprets “carefully selected drawings of Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, and Leonardo containing varying degrees of spontaneous and exploratory mark-making” as “sites of invention, rather than purely practical tools to service other media” (3). Thus, for Stewart, “an examination of Florentine draftsmanship from the 1460s to 1490s readjusts the standard history of drawing and is a crucial step in creating a revisionist history of Renaissance drawing that acknowledges a continuous evolution in the conception and reception of drawing, rather than the single moment of revolution attributed to Leonardo and Michelangelo around the year 1500” (3).
Reclaiming a legacy for Leonardo palpable to the contemporary student of any field would benefit from efforts to connect modern philosophy and cognitive science (Stewart, Lefèvre), forging not a division but a set of unities: of mind with body, of knowing with doing, of mark maker with viewer, of man with nature. For the eye, “drawings call for closer, more intellectual looking that reconstructs paths of vision and asks the viewer to envision the process as it occurred in the artist’s mind” (Stewart 5-6). For the contemporary aspiring artist or designer, perhaps the most encouraging understanding of this immense and valuable legacy recognizes “the explicit indexical trace of the artist’s hand” and dismisses “standards of finish seeking to erase evidence of making” (Stewart 6). Drawing invites “[recalling] the physical act of creation, to trace again each mark as it is made, to acknowledge that, at the most basic level, ‘art is made by the hands’” (Stewart 6). Valuing Leonardo’s notebooks as the “true masterpiece” frees them not only from his paintings, as subordinate to them, but also from romantic notions of their having “fathered” modernity (science, mechanics, innovation) and possibly the ills that have emerged from that. In the sketches, there is no “guarantee of easy legibility or clarity” and no “neat and tidy understanding of drawing” (Stewart 6, 49), which does less to propagate the ‘Leonardo business’ and more to get on with the much needed and desired ‘humanity business’.
Bibliography
Dunkerton, Jill. “Leonardo in Verrocchio’s Workshop: Re-examining the Technical Evidence.” National Gallery Technical Bulletin, vol. 32, no. Leonardo da Vinci: Pupil, Painter, Master, 2011, pp. 32-31.
Gombrich, E.H. The Story of Art. Phaidon, 2006.
Jose, Benito. “Leonardo da Vinci, The Universal Genius.” The Unesco Courier, vol. V, no. 4, 1952, pp. 6-11. The Unesco Courier, https://en.unesco.org/courier/april-1952.
Kemp, Martin. Living with Leonardo: Fifty Years of Sanity and Insanity in the Art World and Beyond. New York, Thames & Hudson, 2018.
Kemp, Martin, and Margaret Walker, translators. “A Letter from Leonardo da Vinci.” Leonardo on Painting, Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 251-3.
Landrus, Matthew. Leonardo da Vinci. London, Carlton Books Unlimited, 2006.
MacCurdy, Edward, editor. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. vol. I, New York, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939.
Paolo, Galluzzi. “The Strange Vicissitudes of Leonardo’s Manuscripts.” The Unesco Courier, vol. 27th Year, no. Two Rediscovered Manuscripts of Leonardo, 1974, 5-7, 50. The Unesco Courier, https://en.unesco.org/courier/october-1974.
Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Authorama: Public Domain Books. Authorama, http://www.authorama.com/renaissance-7.html.
Pedretti, Carlo. “The Glory of Painting: Reflections on Art in the Madrid II Manuscript.” The Unesco Courier, vol. 27th Year, no. Two Rediscovered Manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci, 1974, pp. 45-49. The Unesco Courier, https://en.unesco.org/courier/october-1974.
Richter, Irma A., and Thereza Wells, editors. Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks. New York, Oxford University Press, 2008.
Schoepflin, Urs. The Power of Images in Early Modern Science. Edited by Wolfgang Lefevre and Jurgen Renn, New York, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 2003.
Soloman, Deborah. “How Giorgio Vasari Invented Art History as We Know It.” New York Times [New York], 1 December 2017, p. 52, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/books/review/collector-of-lives-giorgio-vasari-biography-rowland-charney.html.
Stewart, Jessica L. The Sketches of Pollaiuolo, Verrrocchio, and Leonardo: Eye, Mind, and Hand in Renaissance Florence. Dissertation ed., Department of History, University of Virginia, 2011.
“The Travel Journal of Antonio de Beatis.” The Mona Lisa Foundation, http://monalisa.org/2012/09/08/the-travel-journal-of-antonio-de-beatis/. Accessed 10 November 2020.
Truesdall, C. Essays in the History of Mechanics. Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Springer-Verlag, 1968.
Witoszek, Nina. “Leonardo da Vinci Our Contemporary? The ‘Ecohumanist’ Code of Renaissance Sages.” Worldviews, vol. 18, no. 2, 2014, pp. 122-142. jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/43809507. Accessed 18 October 2020.
Wood, Kelli. “Giorgio Vasari.” National Gallery of Art, 2020, https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.3269.html. Accessed 10 November 2020.
The ‘legacy’ task is complicated yet interestingly enhanced by the fact that in all the ‘work’ the unwed and childless Leonardo left behind, only a small number of attributed ‘completed’ works--paintings mostly--rests alongside an enormous quantity of ‘uncompleted’, mostly manuscript pages--some 6000 sheets--that is also miniscule, representing only a quarter (or a fifth--depending on the source) of what is believed Leonardo produced (Richter v). Indeed, generations continue to confront “a potential consequence of this missing legacy,” as Matthew Landrus reminds readers in an introduction to one of thousands of publications designed to introduce and reintroduce the “enigmatic genius” to ever-widening audiences, which is “the extensive discussion and scholarship that--so to speak--reads between the lines.” 500 years on, Leonardo’s legacy is best understood as the story of an amassed motivational blindness ignited by the notebooks, haunted by their absent pages, and the accompanying “strange vicissitudes” of their journey through time (Galluzi 5).
Something more complicated than years separates me and my search for Leonardo’s legacy than it may have, say, for Vasari, when some 30 years after his fellow Florentine’s passing, he set off to collect, write, and first publish The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in 1550.
To have included these men’s biographies--mostly Florentines of the quatro and cinquecento, men who would have been dismissed in previous generations, all the way back to Aristotle, as pursuing “[work] with the hands,” which was not one of “the so-called Liberal Arts such as grammar, logic, rhetoric, or geometry” but “‘manual’ and therefore ‘menial’, and thus below the dignity of a gentleman” (Gombrich 223)--was itself a revolutionary gesture. While not the stuff of historical biography, then an exclusive club of poets, philosophers, and emperors, inclusion further credits the ambition of the writer who created it, setting the West and its scholars on a path of contemplating and redefining the very notion of influence, even if Vasrai’s own ‘scholarship’ was rife with “readings between the lines” and worse. Vasari, the descendant of a family of potters who chose a different path, described as “one of the foremost artists of 16th-century Italy, renowned...as a painter, draftsman, and architect” (Wood) and the “father” or “inventor” of the field of art history (Soloman 52), justly believed it was time for the painters, sculptors, and architects to claim their due.
Leonardo’s reputation as “a great artist” and a rare sort of genius--who in peacetime promised to “give as complete satisfaction as any other in the field of architecture” and “[l]ikewise in painting” (Sforza letter), who entertained with “mechanical toys of his own invention, and with the designing of new effects for stage performances and pageantries,” and who in wartime became the “wizard” (Gombrich 222) who could generate visual plans for portable bridges, canons, and “covered vehicles” (Sforza letter)--was already well-established for his contemporaries, especially the early-modern dukes, diplomats, monarchs, popes, and cardinals of southern Europe, intrigued and easily sold by Leonardo himself on the value of his “secrets” (Sforza letter). Later in his lifetime, after a career of few yet notable collaborations, constructions, and commissions, one might imagine the ecstasy unleashed by a visit to the Master’s workshop, such as he would have been able to set up at Cloux near Amboise--a new kind of pilgrimage born--and by the chance to leaf through his sheets with their mixing of superbly rendered visual representations and mysterious text--a new kind of “illuminated” manuscript. Much more chaotic and difficult to ‘read’, the notebooks are the ‘innovation’--encyclopedic long before encyclopedias, Wikipedia long before the internet.
Never before had a seeing man seen what and how Leonardo saw or risked excommunication and other censure in recording, ostensibly so that others could also see, as the oft-cited 1517 journal entry by Antonio de Beatis, chaplain on a voyage with Cardinal Luigi of Aragon, attests:
This gentleman has written of anatomy with such detail, showing by illustrations the limbs, muscles, nerves, veins, ligaments, intestines and whatever else there is to discuss in the bodies of men and women, in a way that has never yet been done by anyone else. All this we have seen with our own eyes; and he said that he had dissected more than thirty bodies, both of men and women, of all ages. He has also written of the nature of water, of divers machines and of other matters, which he has set down in an infinite number of volumes all in the vulgar tongue, which if they should be published will be profitable and very enjoyable. (MacCurdy 13)
The “Introductory Note” of the momentous 1939 The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci: Arranged, Rendered into English and Introduced by Edward MacCurdy, Volume I, offers the ‘modern’ reader Beatis’ witness as the gateway to many of those same illustrations and “vulgar tongue” writings characteristic of the notebooks, signaling the McCurdy publication’s contribution to what scholar Martin Kempe referred to in his intriguing memoir Living with Leonardo: Fifty Years of Sanity and Insanity in the Art World and Beyond as the “inner workings of” what would become and perhaps still is “the Leonardo business” (6). How best “to publish” the notebooks had been since the very first handoff of the manuscripts to Leonardo’s “faithful pupil Francesco Melzi” (Galluzzi) the subject of much debate: by individual manuscript or by some manner of selection and classification (MacCurdy 15)? MacCurdy settles on a middle ground.
For the MacCurdy generation, it had been only 50-some years earlier that the “work of transcription of the Leonardo manuscripts was first commenced,” as the 1939 “Preface” explains, referring to the ‘Victorians’ into whose hands “a new influx of Leonardo documents” (Galluzzi) had fallen, offering revised answers to questions of authentication and classification. In the decade after 1867, Walter Pater, a self-professed “lover of strange souls,” and author of the ground-breaking The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, could still “analyze for himself the impression made on him by those works, and try to reach through it a definition of the chief elements of Leonardo’s genius. The legend, as corrected and enlarged by its critics, may now and then intervene to support the results of this analysis” (Pater). A new hero is born, one who could, at least for Pater, challenge rather than conform to the “exact modern formulas” of his industrially (mechanically) prosperous Victorian age. “If we think of [Leonardo],” Pater continues,
as the mere reasoner who subjects design to anatomy, and composition to mathematical rules, we shall hardly have that impression which those around Leonardo received from him. Pouring over his crucibles, making experiments with colour, trying, by strange variation of the alchemist’s dream, to discover the secret, not of an elixir to make man’s natural life immortal, but of giving immortality to the subtlest of most delicate effects of painting, he seemed to them rather the sorcerer or the magician, possessed of curious secrets and a hidden knowledge, living in a world of which he alone possessed the key.
With images and prose reminiscent of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus first published some 50 years earlier, Pater’s lengthy and stylized account of Leonardo’s life and work does a fine job of advocating for his generation’s avant garde “art for art’s sake” Aestheticism movement. Not immune to the forces of rational classification, Pater segments Leonardo’s life into “three divisions”: “thirty years at Florence, nearly twenty years at Milan, then nineteen years of wandering, till [Leonardo] sinks to rest under the protection of Francis the First.” Leonardo’s job application letter to Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, supports the claim that before his “wandering” and “sinking” years, Leonardo sought a “steady salary” such as a court appointment would guarantee, and the freedom from commissions that came along with it (Wells in Richter xvii). Leonardo’s life in Milan would prove productive, but for Pater it was also “a life of brilliant sins and exquisite amusements...and it suited his genius, composed, in almost equal parts, of curiosity and the desire of beauty, to take things as they came.” His “reading between the lines” settles its gaze on “La Gioconda” as “in the truest sense, Leonardo’s masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work” (Pater).
One wonders if Pater could have gotten away with this assessments of Leonardo, “Homo Minister et Interpres Naturae,” had Jean Paul Richter’s 1883 two-volume Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci been published, a mighty work of transcription and translation, the result of what Martin Kemp characterizes as “[trawling] through Leonardo’s horribly illegible texts, most unpublished, making a telling selection,” one that effectively “revealed an unknown Leonardo” (Richter v-vi). Richter’s late nineteenth-century art historian and dealer prejudices meant the volumes “weighted more towards the arts than sciences and technologies,” leaving room for McCurdy (1930s) and Richter’s daughter Irma (1950s) to “redress the balance” (Kemp).
By mid-century, the taboo against valuing “private ‘notebooks’ or ‘papers’ of great individuals’’ as providing insight into “a great mind at work” (Richter v)--or in Pater’s words, “mode of thought”--had been definitively lifted. “Which Leonardo do we present?” became open game and even more profitable business: “[t]he artist, the scientist, the engineer, the natural philosopher, the author of literary snippets…?” (Richter vi). Similarly, in an age of technological reproduction and specialization, the notebooks now offered both scholars and a mass of general readers the opportunity to name, claim, and classify (and commercialize) their Leonardo.
C. Truesdall’s 1968 Essays in the History of Mechanics takes issue with what evolved as claims too easily trucked as “science” or “experimental method” in the mechanical sketches and notations of Leonardo’s notebooks, by taking jabs at the “busy modern” who “calls for culture in predigested pills, packaged in abridged paperbacks, explained by folksy prefaces in pellet-paragraphs of sugared baby-talk, lullabies to smugness” (3). In a prescient subsequent line, Truesdall offers, “Suggestion to a general audience that historical facts must precede if not replace historical enthusiasms may exact only oblivion, the palm of dullness” (3). This mentality, designed to curb further inquiry into, complication of, or challenge to the ‘fable’--“Leonardo as the lonely creator”--or the ‘legend’--“The one scientist whom the common man can name, though he may well never have heard of Newton or Leibnitz”--certainly gives pause (Truesdall 3).
The problem is that while we lack the content of Leonardo’s missing notebooks, we lack seemingly more from his contemporaries who were working in the then uncategorized scientific and mechanical fields for satisfactory comparisons. It suffices that one earlier collection exists, according to Truesdell, Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s 1475 Trattato di Architectura, so that “[a]s the number and variety of machines he drew suggests, Leonardo is now seen as illustrating the common or extraordinary technology of his day and projecting improvements upon it” (5). The genius of Truesdall’s meticulously evidenced and organized commentary, breaking down every aspect of Leonardo’s mechanics, rests in its unabashed exposition of bias and motivated scholarship (get students to take a class!) in Leonardo studies and criticism: “A good artist’s drawing of an existing machine carries the same forthright veracity as his drawings of an existing man, giving us no reason to presume that he invented either” (5). Truesdell indicts lazy reasoning and disciplinary territorialism, perhaps the very “business of Leonardo,” as having made it impossible “to say anything about Leonardo that will not outrage one or another segment of the audience. For peaceful co-existence with the standard view, shared with the general semiliterate mass by ninety-nine percent of university professors, he must be labelled a ‘genius’ straight off and described by no adjective of less than superlative degree” (Truesdall 40). In order to find its conclusion, the current essay now locates energy in the thought that, indeed, “contrary to Vincian folklore, Leonardo did not discover everything,” but “he did discover something...of solid if limited achievement” (Truesdall 40). Leonardo, the personification of the Renaissance Man, became the prototype of modern man.
In 1974, The Unesco Courier published an entire issue devoted to two “rediscovered manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci” considered to have been lost and containing hundreds of drawings. Some dedicated library catalogue sleuthing made the 1967 Madrid discovery possible at about the same time Truesdall was collecting, editing, and publishing his Essays. Modern Leonardo scholars found themselves once again encountering a mind “like a moving searchlight, constantly probing into the darkness, illuminating one subject, then rapidly passing to another” (Courier inside cover). “Crammed with brief notes and sketches, done with unfailing precision,” the Madrid Codex offered “deeper insight than ever before into Leonardo’s work in mechanics, military engineering, geometry, perspective, optics, casting, and many other subjects” (Courier 3), excellent selling-points for a generation in the throes of computational and technological advancement, inventing all manner of petroleum-based plastic, for instance, that was making living better but perhaps not necessarily more beautiful or sustainable. Yet, Codex Madrid continues to lay bare Leonardo’s process, his professed approach to art and the purpose of his “penetration into the most secret parts of nature” (Pater):
Limbs, which are not in exercise must be drawn without showing the play of muscles. And if you do otherwise, you have initiated a shock of nuts rather than a human figure. (Pedretti 45)
While this statement may have been conceived by Leonardo as an inside jab at rivals such as Michelangelo, they establish that “the human body was not an excuse for the artist to show off his skill in depicting bulging muscles unnecessarily” (Pedretti 46) but essential knowledge required to move away from “the appearance of things” which Leonardo pursued relentlessly in drafting “to stress form: form which is defined by sharp contours and by lines of shading which curve around it with deliberate slowness” (Pedretti 46). “Seeing” is difficult yet profitable business.
Codex Madrid’s notes on painting also treat “the problems of light, shadow, and contour” aligning painting with optics, wherein Leonardo records his discovery that reflected and refracted light define the human face and body (Pedretti 46). The unseen is brought to light, and no darkness is depicted here as having been ‘penetrated’, a curious word choice, suggesting violence and which carried in the Victorian era a moral judgment. If there is one thing the 6,000 sheets accomplish, it is to forward a legacy that is acceptable and valuable precisely because the notebooks are unresolved and chaotic. They ignite dialogue, model modes of inquiry that center the visual through acts of drawing, the last of the several “lower” forms, modes, or métiers in this story due to be lifted out of subordinate obscurity.
As an industrial design major concentrating in drawing, which was not an option as a “major” and has never been, but only recently established as a “concentration” or minor for students at the Rhode Island School of Design, I am particularly interested in this aspect of Leonardo’s legacy and its impact on my practice, thinking, and future. “Drawing,” as it is viewed today, has come a long way, and perhaps its most distinguishing aspect is its eschewing of disciplinary boundaries, while it remains paradoxically foundational, subordinated to all the established majors, a prerequisite.
Leonardo produced “a number of drawings several times greater than those of the most-active 16th-century draftsmen” (Landrus), a practice he is said to have picked up as a child, put to use in Verrocchio’s workshop as “underdrawings” for painting (Dunkerton 15) and refined thereafter. In the notebooks, scholars revel in Leonardo’s own privileging of the mode--manuscript image, unfinished, traced, sketched--of seeing over writing and reading as expressed in this passage:
O writer, with what words will you describe with a like perfection the whole arrangement of that of which the drawing is here? For lack of knowledge, you will describe it confusedly so as to convey but little perception of the true shapes of things; and deceiving yourself you believe that you can satisfy the listener completely when you speak of the figure of anything that has body and is surrounded by surfaces.
I recommend that you do not cumber yourself with words unless you are speaking to the blind, or if you wish to demonstrate to the ears with words rather than to the eyes of men speak of things of substance or of nature and do not busy yourself in making enter by the ears things which have to do with the eyes for in this you will be far surpassed by the work of the painter.
With what words can you describe this heart without filling a whole book? (Richter 152; Lefevre 67-68).
In her 2011 Doctor of Philosophy dissertation “The Sketches of Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, and Leonardo: Eye, Mind, and Hand in Renaissance Florence,” Jessica Louise Stewart sets out to accomplish for the ‘discipline’ of drawing or sketching what Vasari accomplished for “painters, sculptors, and architects.” Her “fresh perspective” interprets “carefully selected drawings of Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, and Leonardo containing varying degrees of spontaneous and exploratory mark-making” as “sites of invention, rather than purely practical tools to service other media” (3). Thus, for Stewart, “an examination of Florentine draftsmanship from the 1460s to 1490s readjusts the standard history of drawing and is a crucial step in creating a revisionist history of Renaissance drawing that acknowledges a continuous evolution in the conception and reception of drawing, rather than the single moment of revolution attributed to Leonardo and Michelangelo around the year 1500” (3).
Reclaiming a legacy for Leonardo palpable to the contemporary student of any field would benefit from efforts to connect modern philosophy and cognitive science (Stewart, Lefèvre), forging not a division but a set of unities: of mind with body, of knowing with doing, of mark maker with viewer, of man with nature. For the eye, “drawings call for closer, more intellectual looking that reconstructs paths of vision and asks the viewer to envision the process as it occurred in the artist’s mind” (Stewart 5-6). For the contemporary aspiring artist or designer, perhaps the most encouraging understanding of this immense and valuable legacy recognizes “the explicit indexical trace of the artist’s hand” and dismisses “standards of finish seeking to erase evidence of making” (Stewart 6). Drawing invites “[recalling] the physical act of creation, to trace again each mark as it is made, to acknowledge that, at the most basic level, ‘art is made by the hands’” (Stewart 6). Valuing Leonardo’s notebooks as the “true masterpiece” frees them not only from his paintings, as subordinate to them, but also from romantic notions of their having “fathered” modernity (science, mechanics, innovation) and possibly the ills that have emerged from that. In the sketches, there is no “guarantee of easy legibility or clarity” and no “neat and tidy understanding of drawing” (Stewart 6, 49), which does less to propagate the ‘Leonardo business’ and more to get on with the much needed and desired ‘humanity business’.
Bibliography
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