Leonardo da Vinci, who is he?

Leonardo da Vinci was the quintessential figure of the Renaissance era. He embodied the Renaissance humanist ideal of being open to all knowledge. As a painter, musician, poet, scientist and engineer, it seemed like nothing was beyond his genius.

Around 1460 in Florence, he formed a school of Platonic philosophy that was frequented by artists like Michelangelo and Botticelli, who was a close friend of Leonardo's. The rediscovery of this philosophy emphasized the connection between the mystery of life and the mystery of humanity, and the possibility of unraveling this dual mystery through appropriate means like art and knowledge.

Who is Leonardo da Vinci

Beauty is God's mirror

The Florentine Renaissance artist was entrusted with a mission: to express the divine through Beauty, which is the face of God. The artist uses aesthetics to move appearances towards the essential, from form to idea. The artist is therefore firstly one who apprehends, not just a technician of forms. Art then becomes the reflection of the divine, and the artist its prophet.

To express the divine, one must listen to everything, starting with nature, which is the perceptible form of the enigma of the world and life. This is why, depending on his abilities, the artist can also transform into a researcher examining the mysteries of nature. This is what Leonardo actually did, putting his prodigious talent for observation at the service of both his painting and inventions.

Art is a mental process

The key concept of artistic research during the Renaissance was proportion. This exists "when the parts of a whole have harmonious relationships with each other and with the whole" according to the definition of Alberti inspired by Vitruvius, a Roman initiate. Proportion reveals the unity that arises from the balance between parts. And unity is the imprint of divinity, because it is the mystery that underlies the multiplicity of representations. To perceive unity in everything is to perceive God. This faculty is above all mental. Art is "mental cosa," says Leonardo da Vinci.

According to Vitruvius, the noblest proportions are those of the human body inscribed both in a circle and square, which Leonardo used in a famous drawing. Therefore, art requires an ability to abstract which alone allows ideas to be captured. This is why mathematics is the basis of Leonardo's work, following the Pythagorean tradition that established the science of numbers as metaphysics. Leonardo apprenticed under the greatest mathematician of his time, Luca Pacioli, whom he met in Milan around 1490. For Pacioli, Leonardo created drawings of the Platonic solids in his book The Divine Proportion. This is how Leonardo could state "Let no one read my principles who is not a mathematician."

An Ambiguous Individual

If the structure of space comes from mathematics, the animation of the world comes from the conflict between shadow and light. From this conflict, life is born, the daughter of the ambiguous and the inexpressible. Leonardo translated this into his painting using a special technique: sfumato. Sfumato, or chiaroscuro, attempts to express the unspeakable and give birth to life in the painting, lending it an elusive dimension which made the Mona Lisa a universal success. The pinnacle of this approach was undoubtedly reached with St. John the Baptist.

Leonardo not only cultivated ambiguity in his painting, but was an ambiguous man himself. He was ambidextrous, drawing with both hands and writing left and right handed. He was also said to be homosexual. He was a vegetarian yet dissected animals. He declared war to be bestial madness, but created ingenious deadly weapons and war machines.

Reason and Experience

Whether in Milan, in the service of Cesare Borgia, or in Florence, Leonardo displayed remarkable scientific and inventive activity. Many of his mechanical inventions (acoustic, hydraulic, flying machines etc) saw application centuries later. He was also one of the first anatomists and botanists.

For Leonardo, science, like art, is an imitation of nature - not to slavishly copy it, but to make the mental cosa verifiable through experience. Perceiving the mechanism of the macrocosm (earth) or reproducing the anatomy of the microcosm (human body) are similar approaches - they aim to penetrate nature's intelligent, divine spirit-filled laws. To imitate nature is to elucidate its laws and glimpse the enigma of God. It is to become a demiurge, an equal creator to God.

However, Leonardo was not interested in spiritual phenomena, leaving that to philosophers and monks. Rather, he was passionate about natural phenomena allowing empirical analysis. He called himself a "disciple of experience." For him, experience combined with mathematics was the mother of knowledge. Because practice without science is like a sailor without a compass. "Science is the captain, practice the soldier," wrote Leonardo.

Painting as Asceticism

For Leonardo, painting was the ultimate goal. "The divine character of painting transforms the spirit of the painter into an image of God's spirit," he wrote in his Treatise on Painting. Painting was the search for the absolute, the synthesis of all arts - it was the mirror of the cosmos. For Leonardo, the greatest fault of painters was to do what resembled themselves. Their narcissism led them to project themselves onto their work. The true painter must set aside uninteresting subjective screens. In his Treatise, Leonardo gave advice from mental asceticism to healthy living to achieve this. He invited the creation of a new objectivity through speculation and experience.

In the intellectual flowering of the Renaissance, where the individual opened to the world, Leonardo as an innovative humanist cultivated an interdisciplinary approach linking opposites - shadow and light, reason and experience, observation and imagination, art and science. He illustrates the return of Hermes, god of imagination and master of correspondences between heaven and earth, and man and the universe. © Gerard Van Weyenbergh