Leonardo’s Paradox

Word and Image in the Making of Renaissance Culture

Joost Keizer

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789141023
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art général

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was one of the preeminent figures of the Italian Renaissance. He was also one of the most paradoxical. He spent an incredible amount of time writing notebooks, perhaps even more time than he ever held a brush, yet at the same time Leonardo was Renaissance culture's most fanatical critic of the word. When Leonardo criticized writing he criticized it as an expert on words; when he was painting, writing remained in the back of his brilliant mind.In this book, Joost Keizer argues that the comparison between word and image fueled Leonardo's thought. The paradoxes at the heart of Leonardo's ideas and practice also defined some of Renaissance culture's central assumptions about culture and nature: that there is a look to script, that painting offered a path out of culture and back to nature, that the meaning of images emerged in comparison with words, and that the difference between image-making and writing also amounted to a difference in the experience of time.

ONE

The Look of Script

‘LEONARDO, son of ser Piero, not legitimate, was born from him and Caterina . . . [he is] five.’ These dry, formulaic words Leonardo’s paternal grandfather noted down in his tax return of 1457.¹ That Leonardo was born an illegitimate child reads like an unnecessarily harsh statement coming from the pen of a loving grandfather, who, five years earlier, on 15 April 1452, had written with great enthusiasm and pride about the birth of his grandson in Vinci ‘in the third hour of the night’.² But there was a prosaic reason for the grandfather’s candidness. He could deduct the costs for the child’s upbringing from his taxes. Leonardo da Vinci’s name appears under the tax entry for bocche (mouths) that Antonio had to fill. Antonio had been offering his grandson, son and his new wife a home in Vinci, a small town about half a day’s horse ride west of the metropolitan city of Florence. Leonardo’s parents weren’t married when he was born, and they ended up with different partners soon after Leonardo’s birth. His father married a woman called Albiera in the year of the child’s birth, and his mother, a local peasant girl called Caterina and aged sixteen when she gave birth to Leonardo, married in 1457. Perhaps Leonardo stayed with his mother until around that year, but he was soon adopted into the household of his paternal grandfather, a relatively well-off notary. By the time Leonardo was in his early teens, the family had moved away from Vinci to Florence, where Leonardo’s father would become one of the city’s most successful notaries. Leonardo probably did not frequent his biological mother. There is no trace of her in his writings.³

A Memory of Writing

Much has been made of Leonardo’s erratic start in life. Sigmund Freud believed that the young boy’s separation from his mother had a big effect on the artist’s life and art. Freud recognized a lingering, unconscious longing for the presence of motherly love in the two pictures and many drawings Leonardo made of the Virgin, St Anne and the Christ Child.⁴ For Freud, these pictures of the infant Christ being cared for by his mother and grandmother offered a kind of imagined matriarchy against the realities of the patriarchy in which Leonardo grew up. What sparked Freud’s interest in Leonardo’s youth was a short note by Leonardo himself, trusted to paper when he was fifty years old, in which the artist recalled a strange occurrence when he was an infant. Perhaps Leonardo’s note did not register an actual memory but just a dream. Leonardo was designing a flying machine around that time and that led him to a close study of the flight of kites. His interest in the bird was prophesized by a childhood event, Leonardo believed:

This writing distinctly about the kite seems to be my destiny, because among the first recollections of my infancy it seemed to me that as I lay in my cradle a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail and struck me many times with its tail inside my lips.⁵

The note appears right next to drawings of birds in flight.

But Freud found deeper meaning in Leonardo’s recollection. Freud had read his share of animal symbolism and had learned that the bird visiting the infant Leonardo had been a symbol of motherly love in Egyptian culture. The patients Freud was treating at the time in Vienna had taught him that similar dreams and memories were sparked by suppressed sexual feelings. Freud diagnosed that they were more common in passive homosexuals than in other people. In Leonardo’s unconscious, the lack of his mother’s breast was replaced by the bird’s tail, a phallic symbol that was an outlet for Leonardo’s closeted homosexuality. In Freud’s story, Leonardo’s illegitimacy led to a whole chain of feelings that, according to the Viennese therapist, could not be separated from the subjects of Leonardo’s art.

Freud’s story has long since been discredited. Art historians pointed out, for instance, that his reading of the childhood memory relied on a wrong translation of the Italian word for kite, nibio.⁶ Freud thought that Leonardo’s lips had been caressed by a vulture, on which he based his idea that the bird had something to do with a felt lack of a mother’s love. Freud’s conclusion that Leonardo’s homosexuality was closeted, suppressed or passive is even more difficult to believe. Leonardo lived with two men most of his life and had made no secret of his relationship with them.⁷

Freud was right that Leonardo’s illegitimacy affected his life, however. The years spent in his father’s household, away from his mother, had a profound impact on his art and writing.⁸ But in this chapter, I am going to put the emphasis on a different kind of longing than Freud had recognized in Leonardo. Being illegitimate meant that Leonardo couldn’t train in his father’s profession of the public notary. The notary’s guild of Florence required its members to be legitimate at birth.⁹ With Leonardo, a long family tradition that had begun with his great grandfather in the early fourteenth century came to an abrupt end.¹⁰ Leonardo was among many illegitimate contemporaries who made a career in spite of being bastard sons, a handful of popes and a few famous artists among them. There had been no way to hide his illegitimacy, however. Some people blamed his unruly, somewhat unfocused and difficult-to-predict working habits on it. In 1509, when Leonardo was 57 years old, his illegitimacy was still mentioned in one breath with the fact that he supposedly worked little.¹¹

Being a bastard child did not stop Leonardo from submerging himself in the world of pen and paper that was the notary’s household. A penchant to write, combined with a notary-like veneration for the handwritten word, informed Leonardo’s whole life as an artist. Nobody knows when exactly Leonardo started keeping notebooks. There are some sheets bound into later notebooks that Leonardo filled in Florence, where he trained and worked until about 1483. Most of his manuscripts date from the period after that, which he spent in Milan (1483–99), Venice and Mantua (1499), Tuscany and Florence (1500–1508), Milan (1508–13), Rome (1513–16) and Amboise, France (1516–19, the year he died). Other artists had written occasionally and sometimes added texts to their drawings, but none of them had kept notebooks as regularly as Leonardo. The notebooks helped him to organize his thoughts, to record and meditate on things he had read, heard or seen. And he spent hours revising his own thoughts. Twenty-two of these notebooks have survived, some of them with the original number and sequence of sheets, others a mishmash of parts of other manuscripts, and then some entirely consisting of loose sheets bound after Leonardo’s death. At least ten more once existed. The books vary in size and therefore in function. Some are large and contain detailed drawings and long texts. Others are the size of pocket notebooks, measuring no more than 9 by 6 centimetres (3.5 by 2.5 in.); Leonardo might have been carrying these with him on his many ventures into town or nature. Leonardo wrote on a wide array of topics. And although some of the books are confined to one or two subjects – like the flight of birds and painting – many cover Leonardo’s full range of interests. Leonardo would often have several notebooks on the go at the same time. He used some of the notebooks for long periods, sometimes for fifteen years. And he hauled all those volumes with him: from Milan to Florence and back again, and then to Rome, and from Rome to France.

In an age when printed books slowly started to become the preferred way to spread knowledge, Leonardo held fast to handwriting and made no effort to have his notes published. Printing presses emerged in Italy soon after the invention of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany around 1440. In 1467 the first books rolled off the press in Rome. Florence followed four years later. And by the time Leonardo started writing notebooks, around 1480, considerable quantities of printed books could be found in all major European cities. Giorgio Vasari reported a story of an artist trying to get a text by Leonardo published in the years after Leonardo’s death, first in Florence and then in Rome, but apparently with no success.¹² Leonardo’s notes on painting were only published in 1651, more than a century after his death.¹³

At first instance there is nothing remarkable about the fact that Leonardo’s writings never made it to the printing press in the early sixteenth century. Art-theoretical writings of those times rarely appeared in print. Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura, sometimes considered something of a fifteenth-century bestseller, was only printed after the middle of the sixteenth century, in Basel. The first printed art-theoretical treatise to roll off a European printing press was Pomponius Gauricus’ De sculptura (On Sculpture), which was issued on Christmas Day 1504 by the Florentine press of Filippo Giunta. Art was mentioned in earlier printed books, including Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (On the Art of Building), published in Florence in 1485, making it the first published architectural treatise in the world, and in new print runs of ancient Greek and Roman texts by Pliny, Vitruvius and others. But no one before Gauricus had convinced a publisher to invest in a print run dedicated to art alone.

And yet, Leonardo’s disinterest in printing is remarkable. He started collecting printed books early on, probably already in the 1480s, making him among the first artists in Europe to invest so much money in printed materials. Leonardo recorded some of his books on different occasions – once when he was putting a few of them in crates – and many of them have been identified as rare, late fifteenth-century editions.¹⁴ That means that Leonardo collected printed books long before the real boom in printed materials that came long after his death, around the middle of the sixteenth century. Leonardo’s engagement with the medium of print was double, however. A fanatical collector of the printed word, he was also one of its earliest critics. He criticized the printing industry’s repetitiveness in the note quoted in this book’s Introduction. In the industry of the printed book, there was no such thing as a first or an original; there was no added value of the unique, singular product, not like the originality of painting. Leonardo never engaged in a systematic effort to have his drawings printed, as Andea Mantegna and Raphael would do. And there was a similar resistance in the way he wrote and ordered his notebooks to the new technology of printing. Besides the reasons mentioned above, Leonardo’s reluctance to have his notes published was also a logical outcome of the kind of writer he was: the kind that needed the handwritten word’s lack of closure. For Leonardo, writing was a process through which truth could be uncovered but never entirely decided. What he wrote was in a constant state of flux and revision. Meaning was never fixed, the words he penned were always subject to change. Leonardo often revised his opinions without getting rid of or crossing out earlier paragraphs on the same topic. And if he did cross out words, he would make sure that they remained readable, in case he would revise his opinion in the future and would want to use what he had written. In Leonardo’s notebooks, a new paragraph could be repeated and then slightly amend the words of an earlier paragraph a few pages back. In a small pocket notebook, Leonardo reminded himself that he ‘will not be cancelling these notes’, but would instead ‘change from an old one to a new one’.¹⁵

Printed books were instead expected to deliver a stable kind of knowledge. Endlessly reproducible and therefore available in far greater numbers than manuscripts, printed pages accelerated the spread of knowledge. Printed broadsheets, often issued by Church, prince or government, made knowledge of current events travel at an unprecedented speed. What was once exclusive and unique began to look common and unremarkable. Take the news of monstrous births, a newsworthy event in Renaissance Europe. In 1495, after he had just issued a couple of broadsheets on the birth of monsters, the German writer and publisher Sebastian Brant refused to print more sheets on some newly reported births, simply because the acceleration in the spread of knowledge made the once wondrous look normal.¹⁶ More precious books being printed in the years around 1500 offered facts about geography, history, anatomy, astrology, animals, plants, the New World and the gods that looked fixed, objective and unchangeable once they appeared in print on paper.¹⁷ The early stag...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Look of Script
• 2 Nature’s Imprint
• 3 Invention
• 4 Time
• Conclusion
• REFERENCES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX