Art History Today

Leonardo, Painting and the Natural World.

1) Leonardo da Vinci, A Seated Man, and Studies and Notes on the Movement of Water, (A “Symbolic Self-Portrait”, according to Carlo Pedretti), c. 1510, Royal Library, Windsor Castle, pen and ink on paper, 21.7 x 15.4 cm.

 

Continuing this series of posts based on lectures I’m giving on Leonardo.

“If you despise painting, which is the sole means of reproducing all the works of nature, you despise an invention which with subtle and philosophical speculation considers all the qualities of forms: seas, plants, animals, grasses, flowers all of which are encircled in light and shadow.”[1] Leonardo da Vinci.

“The painter can call into being the essence of animals of all kinds, of plants, fruits, landscapes, rolling plains, crumbling mountains, fearful and terrible places which strike terror into the spectator; and again pleasant places, sweet and delightful with meadows of many-coloured flowers bent by the gentle motion of the wind which turns back to look at them as it floats on; and then rivers falling from high mountains with the force of great floods, ruins which drive down with them uprooted plants mixed with rocks, roots, earth, and foam and wash away to its ruin all that comes in their path; and then the stormy sea, striving and wrestling with the winds which fight against it, raising itself up in superb waves which fall in ruins as the wind strikes at their roots.”[2] Leonardo da Vinci

These two quotes should be enough to confirm that Leonardo held the natural world in high esteem, but in what way can we view him as a natural scientist or philosopher? Firstly, for a painter to take such a conspicuously scientific approach towards nature was unusual in the renaissance. However, it should never be forgotten that Leonardo was primarily a painter; it would therefore be wrong to regard him as a dry scientist recording the natural world with cold detachment. Kenneth Clark puts it best: “the direction of his scientific researches was established by his aesthetic attitudes. He loved certain forms, he wanted to draw them, and while drawing them he began to ask questions, why were they that shape and what were the laws of their growth?”[3] Out of Leonardo’s delight in drawing and painting natural things emerged his scientific urge and insatiable curiosity which powered it.

In analysing this “scientific urge”, it might help to consider it in the context of a renaissance concept known as fantasia., which in the words of Sharon Fermor who wrote a whole book about it in the art of Piero di Cosimo, was “an image-forming capacity” which was fed by things seen, although there was a certain dream-like aspect to the process too. As Fermor pointed out, Vasari saw Piero as a counterpoint to Leonardo; both were interested in the bizarre in nature, particularly strange forms and shapes (2,3), what could be called the morphological universe. 4] However, unlike Leonardo, Piero was trapped within his own fantasia, and never used it towards a rational end. What passed for “scientific” curiosity in Piero was soon expunged by eccentricity and abstractedness. His landscape and marvellous sea monster in his Perseus Frees Andromeda (2,3)seem products of a feverish imagination.

2) Piero di Cosimo, Perseus Frees Andromeda, 1513, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, oil on wood, 70 x 123 cm	3) Detail.

 

Vasari describes such artists as astratta or fantastic, lost in the love of creativity for its own sake, not as a tool for discovering the natural world. Piero could therefore never have sustained a serious programme of research like Leonardo, who despite his eccentricities was able to marry fantasia and scientia together and produce something unique- the science of art. When Leonardo’s avid curiosity began is difficult to say, but the roots of the artist’s interest in geology, botany and hydraulic engineering might be traced back to the artist’s childhood’s fascination with the natural world. It may not be fanciful to say that nature imbued Leonardo with some kind of pre-romantic fear and dread of it, as in the famous  incident of the cave visited by Leonardo which instilled both “fear and desire” in the young artist’s mind. Caves and strange rock formations are manifested by the artist’s hand in a number of his paintings, especially the celebrated Virgin of the Rocks (4) which has launched a thousand interpretations.

 

4) Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks, National Gallery, London, 1495-1508, oil on panel, 189.5 x 120 cm.

 

This also goes back to fantasia, because Da Vinci advises painters in the Trattatto to look at water droplets on the walls of caves in which they will find ideas for their art- the morphological method again. Pondering this “fear and desire” that Leonardo speaks of reminds me of another frightening encounter with nature, this time outside art history. Wordsworth’s nocturnal excursions in The Prelude:Growth of a Poet’s Mind terrifies the child, but leaves an impression about nature that is never eradicated. However, unlike a romantic like Wordsworth, Leonardo was able to fuse his poetic imaginings with a rational objectivity, until the two were virtually inseparable. He did both science and art and was completely unselfconscious about it. His drawings can be seen as “scientific reports” ,or graphic representations of his fantasia in action.

 

5) Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Water, c. 1510, Royal Library, Windsor Castle, ink on paper, 29 x 20.2 cm.	6) Leonardo da Vinci, Study of a Tuscan Landscape, Valley of the Arno, 1473, Florence, Uffizi, pen and ink,

 

Of the four elements, it was water that most excited the artist. In Milan and Florence, Leonardo studied hydraulics- (a topic in applied science and engineering dealing with the mechanical properties of liquids). As a military and civil engineer, Leonardo was interested in canals and one occasion tried to divert the river Arno, unsuccessfully. Water is present as an early interest in the drawing of the valley of the Arno (6), where we see rivers, pools and waterfalls. According to Leonardo, water “conceals an infinity of movements”, which offers a clue to his interest in it: from it he could devise a system of dynamics that was applicable in both artistic and scientific contexts. A number of drawings (5) betray the artist’s fascination with water; these illustrate such statements as the following. “Thus, united to itself, the water turns in a continual revolution. Rushing hither and thither, up and down, it never rests, neither in its course nor in its character; it owns nothing but seizes everything, borrowing as many different characters as the landscape it crosses.” Could we surmise that the old man contemplating the behaviour of water  (1) is a portrait of the artist as natural philosopher?

[5]

 

7) Leonardo da Vinci, The Annunciation, c. 1472, Florence, Uffizi, oil on panel, 217 x 98 cm.	8) Leonardo da Vinci, Head of Leda, 1506, Windsor Castle, Royal Library, pen and chalk on paper, 17.7 x 14.7 cm.

 

As for water’s applicability to the art of painting, it can be seen in the rhythms and patterns of the hair of Leonardo’s figures, e.g. the angel in his Uffizi Annunciation (7)or his beautiful head of Leda (8). Unlike Verrocchio’s hair, which Vasari tells us derives from his love of knots, Leonardo conjures movement out of the forms in nature, thus demonstrating his view that humanity is part of it. But water means much more to Leonardo than this: it can be deployed in medical investigations (the fluids of the body likened to the seas and rivers); geology (its presence in underground caverns and the earth); psychology (the deluge drawings which hint at a morbid fascination with disaster and death.).

 

9) Leonardo da Vinci, Deluge over a City, c. 1517,, Royal Library, Windsor Castle, chalk on paper, 163 x 210 cm.	10) Michelangelo, The Deluge, 1508-9, Sistine Chapel, Vatican, fresco, 280 x 570 cm

 

Interestingly, these tempestuous set of drawings (9) may have a more factual basis; they may have been inspired by two catastrophes that occurred in 1513 and 1514 in the region of Bellinzona, which has inspired some to arrange them in sequence like meteorological illustrations to a weather report. Alternatively, as Daniel Arasse suggests, they might be viewed as a scientific response to Michelangelo’s religious Deluge (10) on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, maybe a continuation of the embittered rivalry between the two artistic giants which was always smouldering below the surface.[6]

11) Leonardo da Vinci, Allegory of the Wolf and the Eagle, c. 1510, Royal Library, Windsor Castle, red chalk on grey-brown paper, 17 x 28 cm.	12) Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Cats,, Dragon and other Animals, 1513, Royal Library, Windsor Castle, chalk and ink on paper, 27.1 x 20.4 cm.

 

Unlike the medievalists, Leonardo did not subscribe to the view that natural history was a pretext for moral allegory, although he knew about that tradition through his studies and working practices. He designed allegories for Il Moro at the Milanese court, although sometimes his allegories assumed a more personal cast. An intriguing example of 1510 (11) showing a wolf uncertainly steering a boat with the aid of a compass watched by an eagle perched on a globe reflects how Leonardo incorporated natural history into his art. It has been conjectured that the wolf might symbolise the artist who steers with the aid of rays emanating from the eagle’s crown, which might represent a safe port at court, presumably Milan where Leonardo was working for the French- the eagle wears a French crown and there are three fleurs de lys on the compass.[7].

Leonardo delighted in the many creatures, domestic and wild, real and mythological, that came to his attention. A wonderful sheet of cats (12) might pass for just that until you notice that the artist has drawn a dragon in the middle of the sheet, a strange juxtaposition with some bizarre rationale known only to Leonardo himself. Closer to Piero with his fantasia this time? Spot the dragon yourself !

 

13) Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of a Bear Walking, c. 1484, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, pen and ink on paper, 10.3 x 13.4 cm.	14)Leonardo da Vinci, The Hind Foot of a Bear, Royal Library, Windsor Castle, c. 1490-3, metalpoint with pen and brown ink, heightened with white, on blue prepared paper, 161 x 137 mm.

 

Closer to the spirit of natural history rather than poetic allegory is a study of a bear (13). This sheet not only has the complete creature but a study of its foot, complete with intimidating sharp claws. Drawings with studies of the “structure of a bear’s foot” exist (14, but the American drawing  suggests that the artist would have drawn the animal’s foot while it was alive, according to Kenneth Clark.[8] After it had died Leonardo dissected it in order to compare it with the human foot, an example of comparative anatomy, which was obviously of enormous interest to Leonardo since he draws animal and human anatomy on the same sheets. As Clark puts it, this analogy between man and animal “springs from {Leonardo’s] conception of man as part of nature, subject to the same laws of growth, controlled by the same chemistry.”[9]

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[1] Trattato, no. 8.

[2] Trattato, no. 116.

[3] Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art, 1949, 58.

[4] See Sharon Fermor’s discussion of Piero and Leonardo in Piero di Cosimo: Fiction, Invention and fantasia, 1993, 22-3.

[5] Codex Atlanticus, 171r-a.

[6] Arasse, Leonardo da Vinci, 111.

[7] Arasse, Leonardo da Vinci, 151.

[8] Clark, Leonardo da Vinci, 78.

[9] Clark, Leonardo da Vinci, 78.

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.

Seen and Not Seen: Raphael Book Review

Christian K. Kleinbub, Vision and the Visionary in Raphael, Pennsylvania University Press, 2011.

If there’s one question that frames Christian Kleinbub’s enquiry into the visual in Raphael, it’s this: how is it possible to reconcile the visionary in renaissance art with the rise of naturalism, amidst a context of historical picture-making and narrative art. An altar piece can be “read” as a narrative, but as Kleinbub argues in parts of this book, it’s also about how the artist presents, and represents a supernatural and religious vision- the not seen- to the viewer, as well as picturing the seen, the visible world in which such religious events supposedly occur. Kleinbub’s investigation demonstrates how Raphael was able to keep the two approaches in mind without his art falling into visual and thematic chaos.

Kleinbub’s book is especially welcome since the issues he discusses in this book are to be found at the margins of Raphael studies, which is more noted for its traditional methodologies like stylistic analysis and iconography rather than studies weighted more towards theories of visuality or the role of colour and perspective in making pictures signify. I’m not implying that Kleinbub is predominantly theoretical in this enquiry; on the contrary, he is meticulous in his examination of the details and motifs of the paintings that he selects for investigation, and succeeds in opening up new and persuasive avenues in the process. Yet his study owes a lot to that interface between traditional renaissance art history and work on French visual theory. As a contributor to a forthcoming volume on the latter, I find it very encouraging that Kleinbub is able to situate his enquiry within that lesser-known area of renaissance art history and theory that features such names as Arasse, Damisch and others.

One French art historian that Kleinbub has used in conjunction with his own thoughts on Raphael’s visionary paintings is Hubert Damisch, who has explored the idea of cloud in its iconographic, semiotic and figurative senses in his Théorie du Nuage. Pour une histoire de la peinture, of 1972. Kleinbub has many interesting things to say on supernatural manifestations like mandorlas and putti in relation to naturalised phenomena.  Kleinbub demonstrates convincingly how Raphael learnt from the cleric-painter Fra Bartolommeo via his Lucca altarpiece (left) on how to go beyond the flatness of Perugino’s mandorlas in order to create what Kleinbub calls “the glowing cloud glory”, a cluster of putti, cloud phenomena and theological symbolism.  This is a valuable addition to the scant literature on how meteorological realism, such as we find in the Madonna di Foligno (right), which has a comet in the background, and the invisible cloud children surrounding the Virgin, become part of a mechanism for making the invisible visible to the renaissance spectator.

That preliminary discussion is impressive enough, but it’s Kleinbub’s analysis of the School of Athens which may be the most innovative, and indeed controversial part of the book. In this section Kleinbub theorizes something called “the philosopher’s eye” because he wants to locate visuality firmly in the centre of the discourse of philosophy, to render wisdom an aspect of seeing rather than merely philosophical discourse or book learning. Kleinbub brings something new to the table with his point about why Raphael’s self-portrait is found within the School of Athens: it could suggest an alliance of painting and philosophy forged through perspective. Perspective in this context is not solely concerned with rendering figures and objects within the visual field, but also about transcending it. In line with his project to show how Raphael managed a dynamic between ascension and the terrestrial, Kleinbub argues for dialectic between skyscape and cityscape in the School of Athens. In viewing the infinite space through the veduta created by the perspective, the eye finds God. In this way veduta can be visionary as well as encircling the physical things in the world.

The next section of Kleinbub’s book deals with the themes of blindness and enlightenment in Raphael’s tapestry cartoons, particularly the Blinding of Elymas and Paul Preaching in Athens. In doing so, Kleinbub builds on John Shearman’s exhaustive exegesis of the sequence; but unlike that scholar, the author contextualises his enquiry within visuality, which hasn’t really been applied to the subjects of these designs. Kleinbub corrects this with some interesting readings of the two designs. In his analysis of the Elymas, Kleinbub links the blinded sorcerer and certain iconographical components with a failure of vision and the idea of idolatry. One of these compositional elements is a niche figure that appears on a pier in copies of Elymas created from Raphael’s original designs. Shearman affirmed that it symbolised Salus, Salvation, but he neglected to think about its placement within the lighting system of the design, not to mention its relationship to seeing. As this statuesque figure is bathed in light, and Paul stands next to it (in the copies adapted from the original), Kleinbub sees this representing Paul as the “Light of the Gentiles”, the light that Elymas cannot see. To cement this iconographical interpretation, Kleinbub cites the following passage from Acts (also used by Shearman, but obviously not within the visuality context). “I have set thee to be a light for the Gentiles: that thou mayest be for salvation (salus) unto the utmost part of the earth.”  

After a chapter focusing on representation and such concepts as fantasia in relation to visuality in such pictures as Raphael’s St Cecilia and Vision of Ezekiel, Kleinbub inevitably arrives at the summit of Raphael’s achievements, and the pinnacle of visionary painting, the Transfiguration. This work can also be seen as enshrining the guiding question of Kleinbub’s thesis. How do we reconcile visionary art with the rise of renaissance naturalism and historiated picture-making and narrative ways of seeing. What helps a methodology such as this is the formally “split” nature of Raphael’s altarpiece, with its historiated lower register and its upper nigh-iconic effect of Christ levitating and facing the viewer amidst blinding light. When art historians attempt to unite the two halves of this composition together, they generally do so by turning to theology, demonstrating how the lower part and upper register are connected by such concepts as faith, despite the fact that they depict different biblical episodes. The sudden appearance of Christ as the disciples try to cure the sick boy is seen as an admonishment that they do not have the faith to cure the boy. However visuality and vision is central to the mechanics of this altarpiece, as Kleinbub shows. He makes good use of Konrad Oberhuber’s observation that the dark-haired apostle who points upwards towards the levitating Christ has his eyes closed, and thus is witnessing the Transfiguration inwardly. As Kleinbub notes, Oberhuber was first to introduce the notion of a “visual contest” in the lower register, since not all those down below have the necessary spirituality to see the vision. Some of the apostles see externally; the possessed boy is clearly seeing something different altogether; and a figure in profile in the shadows next to the sick boy’s father has his head bent back and his eyes closed, which according to the author indicates “visionary ecstasy.”

Kleinbub’s analysis of these figures is suggestive, but what I can’t understand is why he hasn’t commented on another face in shadow whose head is very close to the boy’s mother; he kneels in the dark, not with eyes shut, but gaze directed to the apostles on the viewer’s left. The first scholar to notice this ghostly figure was not an art historian, but a philosopher, Gary Schapiro, who in a book called Archaeologies of Vision, stated this obscured figure was the Cyclops to Christ’s Apollo, an idea inspired by reading Nietzsche. Away from the philosophical speculation, I wonder if it’s too fanciful to see this face in the gloom as Raphael himself? He has a beard and recalls Raphael’s self-image in the Louvre Self-Portrait with a Friend. If as Kleinbub maintains, Raphael “inserted his own subjectivity at the heart of this image”, it seems feasible that Raphael might have introduced his corporeal self engaged in the process of seeing.

Anybody interested in Raphael, or the broader topic of vision and painting in the renaissance, will find Christian Kleinbub’s book thought-provoking and worthwhile. It’s admirable that this author is able to bring visual theory, especially modern French thought, exegesis and pictorial analysis together in such stimulating ways. Most of all, Kleinbub deserves praise for showing how vision and visuality are indispensable for understanding Raphael’s artistic development and achievement.