№ 627. Leonardo da Vinci

Vitruvian Man

 

Kenneth Clark, who remains the best commentator on Leonardo, wrote years ago that Leonardo’s great artistic gift was for making emblematic images from observed life, hieroglyphic symbols that have the haunting quality of the real, constantly renegotiating the line “between science and symbolism.” Leonardo’s most “documentary” drawings, like the famous cross-section of the child wrapped in its mother’s womb, are largely imaginary: he never dissected a pregnant woman, and, anyway, the uterus he drew showed the multiple placenta of a cow. When he turned his mind fully to an image, it nearly always was both mythic and momentary. The “Mona Lisa,” of course, is the most famous of these double images, ageless femme fatale and Florentine merchant’s wife. But the gift, uncannily, is visible in everything he does.

The famous figure of Vitruvian man, for instance, splayed out in his encircled square, is in origin a derivative illustration of an antique idea about regular proportions: a man’s proportions when the arms are horizontal make a square; with the arms diagonal they center a circle. Though it is possible to see this as a “humanist” ideal, it is not necessarily so; it says not that man’s proportions are divine but merely that they are regular. The point of the image is not that man is the measure of all things; it is that man can, like all things, be measured. But the tension between this abstract and diminishing idea and its realization as a strange, aged, specific figure, with a strong, unostentatious but perfect body and a grave, unforgettable face—half Don Imus, half St. Jerome; Nicholl suggests that it is a self-portrait—gives the image a certain heroism, as though the individual had stoically lent himself for a scientific trial.

 

The Last Supper

Should we struggle to rescue Leonardo from this Nostradamus fate—as Clark writes, even his contemporaries came to see him “less as an artist and more as an old magician whose mind was stocked with terrible secrets about the universe”—and save him for science and modernity? The question is big and hard. How much of the High Renaissance he defined was an usher to the scientific revolution, helping it to its seat, and how much was the last efflorescence of a world view still religious and analogical, on the other side of the great divide?