Leonardo and the Wild State of Thought.

I’m currently teaching a course on Leonardo da Vinci called “Leonardo, The Artist’s Studio and the Renaissance World.” It therefore seems a good idea to recycle some of the teaching material as the occasional blog post- my aim is always to reach a wider audience.  My first in this series considers Leonardo’s education and scientific investigations in relation to the renaissance context, part of my first lecture on him: “Introducing Leonardo.”

Leonardo’s name has become a byword for bright, shining genius, but those expecting to find an erudite scholar fully conversant in the classics, or even the humanities, might be in for a shock. Leonardo struggled with Latin and Greek, and his minimalist library significantly contained Latin grammars. Like many renaissance artists, Leonardo received a rudimentary renaissance education. He would definitely have attended an abacus school, which as the name suggests was meant to inculcate numerical skills, essential for surviving in the ruthless Florentine commercial world. [Sorry, the nearest image of an abacus I could find is in this German print, which shows Lady Philosophy presiding over mathematical endeavour.] After leaving the abaco- which he attended between 12 and 15-,Leonardo should have gone into a scuole di lettere, attended by pre-university students, but instead the young Leonardo went straight into Andrea del Verrocchio’s studio, a workshop that attracted the cream of quattrocento painters: Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Botticini, Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, not forgetting Leonardo himself.

By entering Verrocchio’s studio , Leonardo missed the classical education given to many intellectuals and scholars of the period. Leonardo earned the tag, “uomo senza lettere”, an unbookish or unlearned man. In order to combat this, Leonardo had a library of about 200 books, which reflected his education. It certainly was a small library, and wasn’t the kind of resource you would associate with renaissance scholars. Half the books dealt  with the sciences and technical subjects; the other half was probably divided into three groups of unequal importance: 25 works on profane literature; 14 on religious and moral literature; 16 on Latin, grammar and vocabulary. This library was also consistent with Leonardo’s attitude to intellectuals; he stressed the importance of experience, not memory of facts and theories learned from books. To quote Leonardo: “If painters have not described painting and have not turned it into a science, the fault lies not with painting […] Few painters are familiar with the humanities because their life does not enable them to understand them.”

This library isn’t that of someone interested in the humanities (little philosophy, history, literature and poetry), but obviously scientific and technical subjects are well represented. The only books that Leonardo owned by a contemporary humanist was Leon Battista Alberti’s volumes on architecture and mathematics. Those 16 books on Latin are significant too; Leonardo could not read classical languages like Greek or Latin- a sine qua non for self-respecting renaissance intellectuals- and instead used the Italian vernacular to structure his investigations. This meant that Leonardo could only discover philosophical and scientific ideas through intermediaries, such as Ristoro d’Arezzo who developed the analogy between the human body and the world, something that Leonardo was to exploit to the full.   Another example is Luca Pacioli, a mathematician and Franciscan prior, as well as an expert on accounting. You’re not likely to find an abacus in this portrait of the scientist-cleric, attributed to Jacopo di Barbari; the instruments reveal Pacioli’s abstract thought, far beyond the practical commercial sphere of Florentine accountancy and the renaissance bottom line.

One of the finest discussions of Leonardo’s intelligence and education is by the late Daniel Arasse, the French renaissance scholar, pictured here.[1] For him, Leonardo should not be considered a systematic scientist, but more of an artist-engineer characterized by what the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss called “wild thought.” This is a term that Levi-Strauss applied to indigenous cultures, where he detected a kind of intellectual bricolage, a difficult concept, but one which could be defined as an improvisatory attitude towards fact-finding and data gathering.   There’s a nice summary of the idea here. Yet Arasse is careful to point out that unlike Levi-Strauss’s primitive Islanders and Indians, Leonardo didn’t (a) believe in magic, “even though the crisis of Aristotelisanism in general brought the renaissance to an ontology of magic” (Arasse, 94); (b) Leonardo was an engineer, the “first technologist” (Arasse, 94). Arasse quotes Levi-Strauss’s words that the engineer “interrogates the universe, while the handyman addresses a residue of human works, that is to say a subset of culture”, (Arasse, 94-5). Despite being wayward and strange, Leonardo searches for conceptual breakthrough while the handyman maps out a limited area of exploration, chiefly for survival. We can see here the modern paradigm of the specialist verses the universalist emerging, a conflict which surely was inaugurated by Leonardo as he’s considered the epitome of the uomo universale, the man interested in everything but not able to finish and follow through; the man who was more interested in the beginning than the end to quote Leo’ X’s memorable assessment of Da Vinci.

  Despite his keen interest in science, Leonardo was not really part of the scientific community but existed on the fringes, a kind of Leonardo fringe science if you like. Some of those Faustian scientists who appear in the wonderful show Fringe have something of the Leonardo blueprint about them.However unlike Dr Walter Bishop, Leonardo is not an institutionally trained scientist. Instead it might be helpful to view Leonardo as a homemade intellectual, a peculiarity of the self-taught. Leonardo was not a trained scientist, but an artist-intellectual driven by curiosity to know more, to make sight and its associations with painting part of a new way of experiencing the visible world of the renaissance. In the words of Daniel Arasse, “the science of Leonardo is founded on the strength and sharpness of his capacity for observation, but at the same time these contribute to the fact that he remains attached to observation as a stage in the development of knowledge”, (Arasse, 93).

The phrase “hero of the mind” is sometimes used to describe Leonardo as in the iconic and much reproduced Turin Self-Portrait, of which more in another post.  It is the face of a man cogent in thought and skilful in reasoning, as noted by Vasari. “This mind endowed by God with such innate grace possessed such strong reasoning power, further supported by intelligence and memory […] that he dominated and confounded the greatest minds with his line of argument […]. The splendour which shone from his wonderful features influenced the most obdurate minds. His power tamed the most violent furies.” In this context I’m tempted to see the renaissance furies as a metaphor for the wild thought of our artist-scientist. As Daniel Arasse put it, Leonardo developed thought “in the wild state” (Arasse, 95).

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[1] Daniel Arasse, Leonardo da Vinci, 1998.

Comments

[H Niyazi]

Fascinating post David! I wish I could attend that course!

It's interesting to read that Leonardo was more oriented towards experience and observation - something we can demonstrate by his appointment for his technologist talents rather than his artistic ability alone.

You may be also want to peruse a post with a related theme (and dramatic title!) over at Renaissance Mathematicus, exploring the powerful, often inaccurate mythology that has been built around Leonardo as 'scientist'

http://bit.ly/eySM64

Your descriptor of his investigative activities operating on the 'fringe' of contemporary 'scientists'(anatomists, mathematicians etc) of the day is much more appropriate.

Given his predisposition to observation and experimentation, I always find it fascinating to contemplate Raphael's (supposed) depiction of Leonardo as Plato gesturing toward the divine architect, and not Aristotle, gesturing at nature before him.

Kind Regards
H

[Thony C.]

A much better take on Leonardo as "scientist" than the usual fare but with a couple of small errors that I would like to point to now.

Normally he would have attended the Abbaco or abbacus school (English reckoning school) during his apprenticeship as artist. It is spelt with 2'b's to differentiate it from abacus with which it has nothing to do, abbacus come from the Italian for to calculate. These were small private schools, which taught apprentices the basics of particle mathematics not only reckoning with the Hindu-Arabic numbers and book keeping but also geometry, trigonometry and depending on the abilities and preferences of the teacher optics and linear perspective. These schools were attended by apprentices from merchant traders, masons, builders, architects, artists and goldsmiths. This would have been the normal schooling for an apprentice artist such as Leonardo. The teachers in such schools used textbooks that they usually wrote and published themselves called abbacus books or practica.

Luca Pacioli who was indeed Leonardo's maths teacher but he was not principally the theoretician he wrote and published the most extensive compendium of contemporary mathematics at the end of the 16th century but this was also a practica covering principally practical mathematics including the first printed account of double entry book keeping. He also wrote a book on linear perspective that was famously illustrated by Leonardo and equally infamously plagiarized the work on linear perspective of Piero della Francesca.

It is entirely correct to categorize Leonardo as an artist-engineer rather than a scientist, an very important group of innovators in the Renaissance but one that also goes back to the beginning of the High Middle Ages. Alberti who you describe as a humanist, which of course he was, was also an artist-engineer.

However to label him the first 'technologist' is an insult to all those who preceded him especial those such as Hero from Alexandria and Vitruvius from antiquity who acted as role models for their Renaissance successors.

I also think it is inaccurate and misleading to label him a fringe scientist because where he was active in scientific disciplines such as optics or anatomy his work was very conventional, very conservative and very mainstream.

What distinguishes Leonardo from his contemporaries is the breadth of his imagination and the extremely high quality of his illustrations

I hope that you aren't offended by my criticisms and I look forward to the next episode of your Leonardo lectures.

Thony C.

[David Packwood]

H, Thanks for your comments and the link to the Renaissance mathematicus site. That will be useful when checking facts and ideas about science in the renaissance.

I know that "scientist" or even "scientist-artist", assuming the two can be reconciled, are not really adequate to describe Leonardo. Like you, I thought the fringe category suited Leonardo best.

Thony C,

Not at all. If I've got it wrong you must tell me. I cringe with embarrssment over the Abbaco howler. I should have checked my facts more carefully, but I found it difficult to find information on the subject. Still, no excuse! Thanks for correcting me- I can amend notes for forthcoming lectures.

As for "technologist", that was Arasse's formulation, and I really had no opinion on it.I think Arasse was seduced by Levi-Strauss on the bricoleur idea.

The fringe connection is entirely mine. I accept that the areas he was working in, such as anatomy, medicine, hydraulics, were conventional, but I think I was hinting at Leonardo on the institutional fringe, something that was the result of his unorthodox research methods. You're right about the depth and breadth of Leonardo's imagination, and I guess I was looking for a metaphor or idea that would express the gap between him nas his contemporaries. It would be interesting to see what others think of the fringe analogy.

Thanks again for your contribution. Stop by again some time.

David

[H Niyazi]

Fabulous! I for one am very glad we have Thony C around to set us straight on these matters. "Artist-engineer" is exactly how I'm describing old Leo from now on.

Kind Regards
H

[Donato]

For the latest on Leonardo and Mona Lisa see: "Leonardo's Val di Chiana Map in the Mona Lisa", in Cartographica, 46:3, 2011. The article covers L's investigations and their application to his art.

[web design Landon]

It is spelt with 2'b's to differentiate it from abacus with which it has nothing to do, abbacus come from the Italian for to calculate. These were small private schools, which taught apprentices the basics of particle mathematics not only reckoning with the Hindu-Arabic numbers and book keeping but also geometry, trigonometry and depending on the abilities and preferences of the teacher optics and linear perspective. These schools were attended by apprentices from merchant traders, masons, builders, architects, artists and goldsmiths..