Prophecies

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• Publisher: Alma Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780714549101
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

Found in the Codex Atlanticus of Leonardo da Vinci's writings and drawings, 'The Prophecies' are a collection of enigmatic divinatory pronouncements, some punning and playful, others dire and ominous. While the author's intentions behind these utterances are unclear, they clearly attest to the artist's fevered and troubled imagination and offer a glimpse into a world very similar to that depicted in his lost painting The Battle of Anghiari.This volume also contains a further selection of Leonardo da Vinci's fragmentary writings, in the form of fables and aphorisms. Taken together, these pieces provide an invaluable insight into the thought processes of one of the Renaissance's most productive minds.

Introduction

This book contains only a selection of Leonardo’s writings – and those writings are themselves fragmentary, and the fragments are often tantalizingly brief. In this respect at least, then, this book is fairly representative of the work of the great scientist, artist and engineer: he was always famous for initiating more projects than he could possibly complete. However, frustrating as this may be, it is also part of his charm. The reader must be prepared for mystery. If we think, for instance, of his paintings, it would be difficult to maintain that his Mona Lisa is a better, a more complex and satisfying work than, say, his Annunciation, now in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. And yet the Mona Lisa is much more widely known – indeed probably the best known – of all Leonardo’s works, because we have to wonder what the lady is smiling at, or even if she is actually smiling, or… She, like Leonardo, leaves us guessing.

Similarly, we are often uncertain as to the exact significance of Leonardo’s writings. We cannot always be sure of the tone of his voice. He does make jokes – and not only in the section headed ‘Pleasantries’ – but, owing largely to the fragmentary nature of these writings, the twinkle in the eye which writers can sometimes convey every bit as well as painters is not always obvious.

Two things, however, are obvious: his thoughts are always exploratory, and usually moral. He is a wonderful example of the truth of the Platonic maxim that “the unexamined life is no fit life for a human being”. We are creatures who have an innate need to understand things, and Leonardo would have agreed with Dante’s Ulysses who, even in hell, recalls making the same point to his old companions in order to urge them to undertake their last, disastrous voyage:

Consider where you come from: from your birth
Not meant to live like beasts, but to pursue
Virtue and understanding here on earth.

(Inferno 26, 118–20)

By “moral” I do not mean – how could I? – that his thoughts are always such as one can approve of. I mean that when he sees a problem (and Leonardo is fundamentally a man who sees problems everywhere), it usually has some relevance to the way human beings ought to act. The teasing quality in Leonardo’s writings – which is sometimes deliberate and sometimes an accidental result of the process of time – should not distract us, as it did not distract him, from his fundamental concern with “virtue and understanding”.

All these features are clear in the first section, ‘Prophecies’. The language here is often oracular, as though the writer has something important to impart, and the sayings could often be read as genuine attempts to prophesy. But he does not only give us prophecies in the mysterious and often riddling language which prophets love to use – he also tells us what the prophecies mean. This is not part of the traditional role of the prophet. Indeed, this is precisely what serious prophets avoid doing. The sixteenth-century French prophet, Nostradamus, owes his continuing fame to the fact that his prophecies are couched in language, always vague and frequently metaphorical, which demands interpretation and can always be interpreted in such a way that the prophecies appear to come true. Nowadays the writers of horoscopes in newspapers work on the same principle, although usually without the lurid tropes of Nostradamus. We may be told, say, that we can “expect trouble midweek”. Of course we can: trouble of some sort there always is and always will be. Leonardo’s inclusion of the solutions (the word is reasonable, because so many of the prophecies sound like riddles) turns his prophecies into a mockery of human attempts, or pretensions, to prophesy. Including the solutions with the prophecies even suggests at times that Leonardo is offering recipes: everyone, he seems to be implying, can be his own prophet if he just learns the tricks. In this satirical, and therefore moral intention Leonardo is in the same tradition as Jonathan Swift, more than two centuries later. Swift dealt his blow to prophesying by making a prophecy himself. He announced that one of his contemporaries, Partridge, a man who had pretensions to foretelling the future, would die on a certain date. Then, on that date, Swift announced that his prophecy had been fulfilled. So Partridge was left in the unenviable position of having to persuade people he was still alive – something he found much more difficult than foretelling the future.

This does not exhaust the meaning of Leonardo’s ‘Prophecies’. Sometimes they open up other fields for thought and discovery, and leave us turning over in our minds things which we may previously have taken for granted:

“Men will be treated with great pomp and ceremony without their knowledge. [Of funerals, their services and processions and lights and bells and company.]”

Sometimes they can be remarkable in their wisdom:

“Men will pursue what they fear the most. [That is, they will live in poverty in order to avoid poverty.]”

That this is wise, as well as witty, reminds us that the categories into which these writings are put are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and some prophecies could well be included in, for instance, ‘Thoughts and Aphorisms’, among such sayings as this:

“He who wishes to get rich in a day is hanged in a year.”

While the exposing of charlatans and all their chicanery is clearly a moral act, it is difficult to claim such a prestigious intention for many of Leonardo’s ‘Pleasantries’. The longer anecdotes have some of the sharpness of Boccaccio, but the shorter jokes seem no more than diversions from more serious occupations and a reminder that, just as “Good poets have a weakness for bad puns”, so they often enjoy silly jokes. I am reminded of Ben Jonson, whose preoccupations in his writings were every bit as serious and moral as Leonardo’s. The record of Jonson’s conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden in 1619 contains, among much shrewd literary and other criticism, such gems as the following:

“What is it that, the more you [take] out of it, groweth still the longer? A ditch.”

And yet, it is too easy to sneer. Such riddles and jokes require – not only to solve them but even merely to enjoy them – the same kind of lateral thinking which can lead to more weighty results. It was necessary to look at things in a sidelong, unexpected way in order to write Volpone, in Jonson’s case, and in order to think ahead to, say, submarines and helicopters, in Leonardo’s.

With the ‘Bestiary’ we see a strange mingling of interests. Sometimes Leonardo is simply fascinated by what is exotic. However, many of the creatures are included in order to be allegorized. This is particularly obvious when the quality they stand for is put before the description of the creature itself:

“Magnanimity. The falcon only preys upon big birds, and it would sooner die than feed on little birds or stinking meat.”

Sometimes Leonardo’s interest is what we can recognize as scientific: we gather that he would rather like to anatomize the creatures physically if he could. And there is one obvious reason for these three different approaches. Some of the creatures (like cicadas) must have been quite familiar to Leonardo, others (like elephants) less familiar, or even known only from reliable hearsay, and still others (like the two-headed amphisbaena or the crocodile-killing ichneumon) quite impossible for him to have seen.

If the ‘Bestiary’ tends to show Leonardo at his most “medieval”, concerned more with tradition than observed fact, and more anxious to allegorize than ana...

Table of contents

• Introduction