Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519): The Renaissance Man Refined
Presented on: Thursday, December 8, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
Italian Renaissance
Presentation 10 of 13
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519): The Renaissance Man Refined
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, December 8, 1983
Transcript:
The date is December the 8th, 1983. This is a tenth lecture in the series of lectures by Roger Weir on the Italian Renaissance. Tonight's lecture is entitled Leonardo da Vinci, who lived 1452 to 1517: The Renaissance Man Refined.
We have in this course, in this series attempted to describe a meaningful duration in history, in human history. And like the other programs that we have presented over the last four years we're trying to take a coherent movement. It's as if, using the metaphor of the dance of Shiva, it is if as if mankind in the divine dance of life changes the posturing every so often. And as the posture changes to a universal harmony all of the elements of the human form display themselves recognizably the same elements but in a different relationship. And with the Italian Renaissance movement to human history, we have been describing a motion which extends itself largely intact from Dante to Galileo. Dante, whose vision of The Paradiso begins this movement. And Galileo, whose publication The Starry Messenger of the scientific celestial realms, ends the movement. So that the movement from Dante to Galileo is one of aspiration. It's as if, as if the dance of life suddenly took a ballet leap and in the thrust of aspiration there is a grand pirouette. So that one can imagine kinetically in the formative imagination someone like an array of taking a leap with the pirouette and the aspiration ends on one toe and one finger. This movement, graceful as it is from certain considerations, that is from afar and at a distance in time looks gorgeous and entertaining. But the actual living through of this leap and this gyration, the pirouette, and the aspiration together, has at its culminating apex a twisting gyration which jars the posture. And if one is not prepared it can throw the spine out of joint. And in many ways the European history that follows the Italian Renaissance, that is the North European extension of it suffered the kind of dislocation. I think Shakespeare somewhere says it is as if time is out of joint and nothing human holds. And in fact, the discontinuities were in position until the great age of Spain and England at their apex, in their renaissance with Cervantes and Shakespeare, put the posture of men back into some working order. Through having arrived at a sense of cosmic irony which finally restored the inner requirements of humility. A certain kind of psychological equilibrium which had been lost at the shift to the high Renaissance.
For many of you the two lectures that focused upon the crunch, the crisis of consciousness, the whiplash in the pirouette of the lead. Those lectures that concern themselves with Botticelli and Michelangelo. Since they were not given in the regular Thursday night series but were given one on a Saturday series and one at another location on the Thursday night. Because it was Thanksgiving it wasn't held here. Will just have to fill in my cassette as best you can.
In those four hours of lecturing, I tried to present the cultural context focused as usual. I've tried all the way through reconstructing the history of man to adhere to the classical Hermetic tradition of the chronologica mystica. That is whatever nuances and extensions exist in time-space for us to be influenced by them they must register in a human being. And thus, if we trace history person to person to person, we reconstruct a chronologica mystica. The movement of time-space through its human manifestations. And without understanding Botticelli's crisis, which forbade him to paint for the last ten years of his life. Without understanding the anguish of Michelangelo, that ended up with him portraying himself as a pelt in the hands of Saint Bartholomew in the great fresco of The Last Judgement on the far wall of the Sistine Chapel. Without this background it's very difficult to understand what had happened. The discontinuity between the cultivated jovial intelligence of Ficino and the conniving Machiavelli seems almost impossible. But there is a third figure and in fact a fourth figure who also register this crisis of consciousness. The third figure we take tonight, Leonardo da Vinci. And the fourth figure who like some blessed angel of order came and in his just short 37 or 38 years was able to restore an element of equilibrium to art. That fourth being Raphael - I'll treat with on December 29th in a special lecture given just over here at 2029 Hyperion. There will be no lecture here because of vacation but I will cover Raphael last of all.
Even after having discussed the philosophic implications of the twist in consciousness. The implications as they spell themselves out in Giordano Bruno, and in Galileo, Francesco Giorgi, and other hermetic thinkers. I will close by coming back to someone who felt the time and filled it in equilibrium because of an almost uncanny sense of spiritual balance. And that being Raphael.
Leonardo, whom we have tonight, is an example of a man who's sensing all of the implications of his time, tried to do the impossible. He tried to step outside of history. Outside of his own capacity. And Leonardo by attempting this becomes a cosmic hero. He becomes a cultural archetype of the first real tungsten figure in Western history. Someone who would like to know whatever the cost, all there is to know about life so that he may view it and assess it in its complexity and pass judgment upon its possible unity. So, he's heroic for the attempt. but the failure to achieve this makes him a tragic figure finally. Leonardo even though we have reduced him like so much in our human background to a parlor image. So that we think of Leonardo as someone whose original books sell for millions of dollars and therefore, he must have been a very comfortable man. The truth is that Leonardo as Vasari relates at the very beginning of his life. Leonardo personifies the following kind of human. "Being the richest gifts are occasionally seen to be showered as if by celestial influence on certain human beings. May they sometimes supernaturally and marvelously congregate in one sole person. All of the powers that human nature is susceptible of improving through discipline, through enjoying via talent and circumstance, sometimes collect in one individual. One extraordinary figure." We had an antiquity in the figure of someone like Alexander and with Leonardo the same.
Vasari writes, "Beauty, grace and talent being united in such a manner that to whatever the man thus favored may turn himself, his every action is so divine as to leave all other men far behind him." And of course, it is just this capacity that urged Leonardo to consider strategically for himself in his life, that if any man could understand the completeness of life, it would be he. And so not understanding that sometimes we are out distanced by the sheer in capacity of our corporeality to take in the unity of time-space, Leonardo began to pursue a path that was characteristic of him. One that we would describe if we were looking from afar as fidgety.
He almost never completed anything. his largest memorial, his greatest claim to greatness almost like Whitman's Leaves of Grass. He turned himself into a book. but the book is unorganized. It occupies about 500 sheets of unarranged notes. Many times, during Leonardo's life he jots in the corner I must organize these. I have a plan for these. It never happened. So that the record of the man is truthful. For on any given page of the notes one finds the most incredible array of human talent and capacity. Someone who drew helicopters and parachutes four or five hundred years before anyone ever thought of having them. Someone who designed a tank for one of the Sforzas.
Someone for whom he couldn't glance with what has been called his almost superhuman visual capacity and follow the exact movements of the flight of birds in the air. And sketch out in a sequence the exact movements of the fast-moving wings of a bird in flight. Someone for whom he occasionally notes if we place our hand in the stream, reminiscent of Heraclitus, we touched the water the last of which has just flowed by and the first of which is just flowing to us. So that the hand of man in its manifesting of its touch, in its exercising of the capacity of the mind and the eye and the hand to coordinate a grasp of understanding. We seized the tail of time. And then with the penetrating resonance of what we have caught hold of, wonder at what reality might be. And what we might be recursively in face of reality to be able to grasp its tail. And wonder is there some impediment of training. Is there some capacity not given to us by the gods that forbids us to extend this grasp to comprehension. Why is it Leonardo asks again and again in his life that man may see exactly, understand poignantly and not be able to extend it to the whole, not be able to comprehend. And is finally in his great painting of the Mona Lisa that he expresses the incredible paradox. We may grasp any moment of reality as firmly as certainty would allow but we cannot know comprehensively what it means to be able to do that. So, the Mona Lisa looks at us with all the charm of the inscrutable exactness, which apparently as our ultimate parentage.
So, Leonardo came into this world blessed with all the divine talents that human beings are capable of having. He was a tall, beautiful man. He was so strong it was said that he could open horseshoes with his bare hands. Or door knockers, could bend them as if they were lead, says Vasari. He had an extraordinary voice. It was gorgeous and beautiful. He learned enough of the loop to be able to accompany himself in certain songs. And Vasari records that of all the improvisers of his time Leonardo was the greatest. He could make up a song and spur the moment with his unbelievable fantastic loop that he made for Duke Ludovico of Milan. It was cast in silver, and it was shaped in the form of the skull of a horse to get this peculiar deep resonance he wished. But on top of the horse's head, he put a ram's horn. and on the very end of the nose, he put a bird with its eyes looking out. And this whole entourage you would have to turn upside down to have the strengths of the route available.
Of the hundreds and perhaps thousands of songs and sonnets that Leonardo composed only one definitely survived. And I'll give you the words to them because it brings us back poignantly to the problem the man has with himself. In translation it reads thus, "If wouldst thou cast not, then content thy too will as thou mayest act. It is but folly to will what cannot be. Soon learns the wise to rest his will from bootless wishes free. Over bliss and woe depend alike on knowledge. Of what we should do and that known to do it. but he alone shall compass this who never doth warp his will when right before him stands. All he can do man may not safely will. Oft seemeth sweet what soon to bitter turns. How have I wept of some fond wish possessed. Thou therefore reader of these lines wouldst thou count with the good and to the good be dear will only to be potent for the right."
All of this capacity was dropped into time-space in the little village of Vinci less than a day's walk from Florence. Up in the hills. There are only two little towers in the village of Vinci. Maybe 25 three houses. One of these is squarish sort of garishness is now just a DaVinci museum. The other is the steeple of the church were proverbially he was baptized. He was not legitimate, that is to say his father had not married his mother. His mother being totally unknown. A mystery to history. We have no idea who she was. His father was a notary. Fairly successful so that he could move to Florence later on in a few years and became associated with some of the powerful families of Florence. His father before him, his father's father, three generations back had been notaries in this district. But of the mother nothing is known. except that she raised Leonardo for the first four or five years of his life. And the qualities that the young boy had nourished in him come therefore from a nameless peasant woman unknown to history.
For Leonardo is the first Westerner to be able to look at a landscape as a sense of reality pervading the composition which his mind sees there. And Leonardo early on was capable of empathetically understanding the composition of nature that he began to have almost the Chinese idea that man in his perceiving of nature participates in the natural flow. So that nature begins here at the side of his temples and extends on out. So that one has a sense of almost kinesthetic balance with the composition of nature. he criticized once openly Botticelli for having painted sorrowful landscapes. That one should not just throw landscapes onto the canvases filler. But landscapes create the environmental space. the true perspective where in the human manifestation actually occurs. And only by the attentiveness to landscape could one then position the human portrait with fidelity to reality.
So, this attentiveness of Leonardo also manifesting itself in love for animals. He was proverbial in his kindness to animals. He would, like the late great Carrabba (?), free birds by buying them from sellers and then opening the cages and letting them go. He was proverbially keeping all kinds of animals especially horses around him wherever he went whenever he could. Even though he was never wealthy as an individual he always had many things usually pets around. This love of animals of course extended itself quite often to exotic stages. When he was older, in his 50s for instance, he found a pet lizard and trained this lizard and kept it in a cage. And, fascinated by this creature, built a little harness for it, and then constructed little wings for it. And covered the wings with old lizard skins, put a set of horns on this thing, and then warned visitors not to tempt it too much. He filled little vials full of mercury and put them in the wings so when it would scamper around on the floor the wings would flap enormously. And of course, it probably had a little mechanical hiss somewhere.
But his love of life. His love of exotic things. Remember the loop that he made. He loved the exotic, and he loved the natural. He loved stretching himself between the two bookends of possibility. Between fantasy at its most extraordinary and natural living at its most primal. And so, Leonardo keeping both these faculties in balance in his life kept reaching out, kept extending the possibilities for human expression. Until finally he just simply transcended as Vasari and all contemporaries attest to. Finally transcended the capacities of almost any single person to understand him. He became in the words of one critic like one of these curious Chinese boxes. His personality was one thing inside of another, inside of another, inside of another. So that one was never sure what was the real Leonardo or what was the whole Leonardo.
It is easy to see in context of what I have been presenting for you that he made a mirror image of himself to the conception of reality that he understood. And this mirroring of his own personality as if to say I will try to understand reality if I have to make myself a mirror completely for the whole of it. This mirroring capacity extended itself to that poignant area, which we today and advanced philosophic analysis can point to as the area where the mythographers come in. That is the area of mythology where the structural vehicle is language. Because Leonardo's language, his language, was written so that it could be only read with the mirror. He wrote from right to left. Chinese style.
In Leonardo's development by the time that he was brought back from his mother to his father, his father seeing that he was not going to be able to corral this individual. Visited fortunately a friend of his in Florence. A man named Andrea del Verrocchio. Verrocchio was a very famous artist at that time in Florence. And he looked at some of the sketches that this boy had done. And Verrocchio, according to Vasari, so amazed at the capacity and quality immediately took Leonardo into his house, into his studio. Leonardo would stay there for years and years and years. In fact, after he was off on his own even in Florence he still continued to live in Verrocchio's house and studio.
Verrocchio at this time was given a commission. And this Baptism of Christ commission was to do a beautiful painting and Leonardo had come along so well that he was taken away from grinding colors simply and actually given the task to paint one of the figures. One of the two angels in the painting. He was also given the task to do the filler landscape above the figure. And when the painting was finished and put on display the discontinuity between the supposed master and the supposed student was extraordinary. Verrocchio proverbially never again touched oil. Devoted himself to casting and sculpture. He gave up painting because the incredible genius Leonardo at 19 was stupendous.
His first excursion into oil was extraordinary. And I say oil advisedly because Italian painting from Giotto to Verrocchio had emphasized the use of eggshell tempera. An eggshell tempera is an exacting medium. The colors do not mix. One must make the paint the color you're going to apply and that's it. Leonardo did his portion of the Baptism of Christ in the new Northern European medium which he adapted which was an oil-based paint, which does mix. And Leonardo's first assay at landscape painting creates that vaporous, indefinite, and ambiguous natural volumetric sheen. And within that set one of the most lustrous angelic figures. The blue folds of the drapery just cascading in light patterns upon one another. And the face unbelievably tender, delightful. The hair just vibrating on the canvas. And everyone who came to view Verrocchio's painting would say, who did this? The young Leonardo. So that in the next year we find him no longer a student but accepting commissions on his own. So, at age 20 he had been born in 1452 by 1472 Leonardo was off and running.
But in 1470s in Florence, it was the Medici who were dominating. And the philosophic view that was everywhere was a Latin based, Latin language-based appreciation of Plato and eventually of Plotinus. What they call Neoplatonic studies. Leonardo was never very good at Latin and had very little sympathy with the Platonic view. He thought the theory of ideas was completely wrong. He didn't think along Neoplatonic lines at all. he did not get along with Ficino. He did not get along with the Medici. Because Leonardo's personality, his way of looking at the world for a comprehensive design was in fact traceable to another different figure in antiquity. Because before Plotinus and before Plato there had been Pythagoras. And Leonardo's personality is resonant and close with Pythagoras. So much so that Leonardo's incredible mathematical talent, which lay behind his genius for inventions and machinery, gears and gadgets, music in all the perspectives and almost everything that Leonardo does has a Pythagorean order to it. Consequently, he was out of kilter with the dominant 1470 environment in Florence.
And in 1481 when Rome was being decorated and the best artists were being brought from Florence, Botticelli, and everybody else, Leonardo was left out. He wasn't invited. It was not a part of the gang. Leonardo then wrote a letter to the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, asking for employment. He almost immediately left for Florence. He would do so at the end of his life again when he realized that he had been slighted again by the city of Florence. Because at the age of, nearing the age of 50 late fifties, he would be compared to the young up-and-coming Michelangelo in unfavorable terms and would not be able to stand the comparison.
Leonardo was what we would call a centrovert', neither introvert nor extrovert. The centrovert making a pattern around himself and saving himself from egotism by constantly breaking the shell of the old ego and expanding it. but at certain notes along this phase formation of the centrovert are periods of intense egotism and periods of intense transformation. The continuity which he required as a human being, as a mastermind was provided by his geometric talent, by his mathematical genius, by his Pythagorean disposition. So that Leonardo is actually a case in point of someone who lives several lifetimes in one lifetime. And constantly is breaking out of one shell into another, into another. Reincarnating himself into a future form of himself and on and on. So that Leonardo is like a telescoped capacity drawn out phase by phase by phase. The difficulty, the trouble with centroversion in this phase form of psychological manifestation is that it is an infinite line of development. There is no goal. There is no purpose attainable. Or even imaginable, which is worse. Each new discovery, each new perspective, each new landscape simply opens the possibility that must be one more beyond that.
And so, Leonardo was condemned by his freedom, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, to explore indefinitely the infinity which he himself was creating. And this is the tragedy of Leonardo. It is the tragedy of the high Renaissance consciousness bequeath to Northern Europe in one lump sum problem. One of the first reactions to the inheritance of the Italian Renaissance consciousness with this peculiar twist was of course Martin Luther's declaration that no one will tell man what to do except the divine. And we will have a personal way to address ourselves to it.
For Leonardo the journey to Milan was one of great elation. He felt that coming to Milan in 1482, he was thirty years of age. He knew his extraordinary capacities, his accomplishments. And he was coming to a brand-new city. Milano at that time was about a hundred thousand people. It would within two years suffer a devastating outbreak of plague where in fully half the population in Milan would die. 50,000 people died in Milan in 1484. Incidentally Leonardo assessed the situation and wrote a long-detailed proposal to Duke Ludovico, saying that the reason the plague had broken among the population was the overcrowding of the people, the piling up of garbage in the streets, the making of houses and streets too narrow. And he designed the first great modern city plan since Alexandria and Constantinople had been laid out. In it almost like a modern, it's it looks almost like a busier radiant city in its design. The streets were wide. They were not to be narrower than the heights of the buildings on either side. So that there would be a sense of proportion. There would be two sets of roads. There would be a lower set for commercial traffic and an upper set of roads for men as pedestrians. So that men as pedestrians would have a free movement unimpeded by commercial traffic and other non-human modes of transportation. And they would have the first level of composing the life of the city. He laid out a city for a quarter of a million people. And laid out spiral ramps that would join the two levels together. Needless to say, it was not built. Almost every plan Leonardo went unbuilt.
The Duke Ludovico had hired Leonardo for two reasons. One of them tactical and the other strategic. His tactical reason was he needed someone to be a court magician. Now not a magician in the sense of pulling bunnies out of the hat but someone who could make up all of the entertainments that he required. For instance, at one time when the King of France was invited by Duke Ludovico to visit Milano Leonardo made a mechanical lion which would walk a few steps and then rear up and its chest would open, and it would be filled with lilies. He made all these kinds of things. He made scenery backdrops, wrote plays, made the props. He entertained the duke. He...he made the Sforza Palace the most scintillating entertainment capital of the world at that time. The second reason, strategic, was that the duke wanted to be immortalized. And he had visited Venice where there was a huge equestrian statue of the Colleoni. And he knew of the greatest bronze work and antiquity in Rome, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius had a huge bronze horse. It had been saved from devastation by the Christian populations because they thought it was Constantine on the horse. And not Marcus Aurelius who had survived intact from antiquity. But these two great creations plus the one that Donatello had made of Gotta Milla (sp?) had enticed the mind of Duke Ludovico to have an equestrian statue of himself made that would be larger than any of the three. Perhaps as large as all three put together. And Leonardo had said the magic words, one sentence near the end of his letter of application for employment. I can cast bronze and I love horses. And that was the magic phrase. He worked for 16 years and as far as he got, he made a 26-foot-high clay model of the horse. And computed that it would take a hundred thousand pounds of brass to make the horse. And then the rider would have to be made later of course. This huge model astonished the population of Milano until the French invasion. And the French soldiers used it for target practice and destroyed the entirety of it.
Almost all of the activity during these years in Milano. He spent 20 years there from 1472 to roughly 1492. He was employed in making these court entertainments and dreaming up new stages for his great equestrian sculpture.
And dreaming up new stages for his great equestrian sculpture. But Leonardo, remember, was this telescope unfolding. The centrovert unphasing. And being left alone to himself quite often. He preferred being solitary and occasionally he would have other people come in and join him in his place. But he liked to go off by himself. He would characteristically sit for hours and hours at a time, not so much thinking, but focusing on his imagination the perfected image of what he was trying to conceive of. Leonardo again and again in his 5,000 pages of notes, and again in his notebooks, which are reprinted. They were put together again in 1883 about a hundred years ago. And they're reprinted here in Dover paperbacks. I think we carry them in the PRS bookstore. He notes again and again that he cannot keep the details in his mind. This is very peculiar because he had as was noted an almost superhuman sense of perception. He had a tremendous mathematical geometric capacity to imagine. He had a tremendous memory. But what Leonardo was meaning to say, it's not that he couldn't keep it in his mind as we would wish to have it. But that he could not keep it in his mind as he would wish to have it. that is to have it become manifesting real in his mind.
If there is a secret desire in the life of Leonardo it is to develop the human mind to the capacity to be able to create reality by thought. And so, his whole waterfall and avalanche cascading of ideas in his notebooks and his thousands of pages are an attempt to remind himself to come back to this in his mind when he can. And the lack of arranging it. the lack of completing anything was that doing things out here was increasingly phantasmal to him. Whereas doing things in here was what was increasingly real. That there must somewhere in man's capacities be a key, an archetypal organization, a pattern by which man could translate thought into reality. Without having to work with the ambiguity of intermedius.
And so oddly enough Leonardo what he was given all this time by Duke Ludovico applied himself to developing his mind. And I think one of the best illustrations of Leonardo at this time, in his capacity, is the painting that he did for Duke Ludovico decorating the top of his entertainment banquet room in his Tower. It is a painting which by its sheer size transcends anything that we could even think of in terms of painting. I mean it is not ten feet high, it's not 20 feet high. It covers almost 3000 square feet. The entire domed ceiling. And it is a composition in subtle complexity which almost baffles the imagination. It's been restored. They started on it in 1901 by 1965 they had enough of it so that one could take this photo. It is a series of interlocking limbs of the tree a certain kind of an Italian juniper, which by the name is called an Italian I understand Vinci da Vincia. So that on the ceiling of the entertainment capital of the world, under the nose of Duke Ludovico Sforza, he was putting his own monogram on 3,000 square feet but very large. And not only the gigantic size of it but the interlocking limbs of the trees perform the kinds of gyrations that are a very, very complicated Pythagorean mandala might occupy. But not content with that because Leonardo was constantly trying to step outside of the capacities of even himself, he worked into the composition a series of knots with rope painted in among the interlacing branches and leaves of the trees. And these knots form what we would call today an eternal knot patterns in all the convolutions there's no way to tell where one begins one ends. The entire composition of the ceiling is interwoven by one long continuous rope eternal knot and all of its convolutions all of its emblems. This of course is monument(?) that is greatest Leonardo.
And when he left Milan when he was coming back to Florence he went by way of Mantua and Venice. And I'll talk about that in just a moment. but he produced in 1499 what I like to think of as his monogram. It is an eternal knot mandala design reproduced in this book. You can see it close-up later on. And it simply boggles the imagination in the mind. That the center written in the Latin that he could manage was Leonardo da Vinci Academia. That is, this is the school of Leonardo. That it doesn't exist in a building. It doesn't exist in textbooks. It exists in this most incredible knot of perceptual form brought into an ultimate unity. And presented before you to lead you baffling out of yourself onto the infinity where he was headed. But this was the school of Leonardo. And in this vein, he brought himself back to Florence. And when he arrived in Florence in 1500, Leonardo was looked upon as one of the lions of art of his time. And when we come back from the break I'll talk about The Last Supper. And talk about the remaining 19 years of Leonardo's life.
Well next Tuesday night is Karl Marx.
Person in the classroom: Karl Marx?
Karl Marx. The subtitle for the series for the 19th century is the pilgrimage through the world as a permanently dissolving insurance. And the course is much, much more germane as you might expect to our present-day conditions. Karl Marx. We have Wagner of course. And Darwin, Dostoevsky and of course we ended with Tolstoy, who brings us back from material man to spiritual man. So, we have that.
And starting in January on Saturday mornings we're continuing on with the Rainbow Circle Institute over here at 2029 Hyperion. And you may have one of these. I'll be constantly every quarter offering an introductory level course so that somebody can come in at any time and start at any time. The introductory course will alternate between one called symbolic consciousness and one simply called nature. But nature in terms of contemporary science, contemporary physics, contemporary astronomy, contemporary biochemistry and so forth. But I'll also be now carrying on and going through an eight-quarter cycle, a two-year cycle of development. And the
second stage of development from the introductory is that of rituals - the ritual level. And the third phase for instance starting in April will be on mythologies. And the fourth one will be on symbols. And we go on through increasing levels of complexity of human consciousness. So that in the two-year cycle one has a chance to experience the levels by which the human person actually seems to mature. But in a coherent two-year cycle rather than just living it through in a lifetime. This gives a person a chance to get some experience in some conception of what an overall pattern of maturation might be.
And this of course I've been working on this for about twenty years. So, this is. And I have offered it in many places and matured it. I offered some early versions of this in San Francisco in the 60s, and in Canada in the 70s, and I've gone through it with thousands of students, so I know pretty well the ins and outs of the pattern. And like a good trail guide I'm not trying to see the flowers for you but just to take you to a threshold where you can see them for yourself. So that's what is in here.
The textbooks for the rituals course incidentally are Susanne Langer's, Philosophy in The New Key. Great woman philosopher. The new View Over Atlantis by John Mitchell, it just came out this year. The Tao of Painting by Mai-Mai Sze. The Bacchae by Euripides. Lavin notation (?) by Anne Hutchinson, how to note dance movement down in a notational form. So that we can look at movement in terms of a language comprehension and communicate with each other and so these terms.
So, we have all this going on Saturday morning. But I'm trying to also pursue and bring the chronological mystica up to the 20th century. Where we'll have to linger for some time because it is so complex by our time that we can't just take a sequence of 12 or 13 persons. We have to almost do that every five years in the 20th century. We're really in a tangle, and if you like tangles it's beautiful, but if you don't it's rather disconcerting. So that brings us back, the word disconcerting and entangle brings us back to Leonardo. While he was...
Speaker in the room **inaudible question**
That's at the Gnostic Society. Yeah. 59.
Speaker in the room. **Inaudible question**
Yes.
May we go on with Leonardo? I want to come to The Last Supper, which was painted while he was residing there in Milano. The Dominican Order, which has the little church where The Last Supper is painted, was actually bombed in 1943. There's a photograph of it in here completely demolished except for the wall that contained The Last Supper. Mercifully it was spared even though the rest of the structure was ruined. It has been deteriorating and is almost impossible of being seen the way that it was originally painted. But we have the testimony here from Vasari about The Last Supper. And he goes on to indicate that when Leonardo was working on the painting, he would seat himself in front of the wall for long periods of time. Days on end. In fact, at one period, he had sat for weeks. What he was trying to conceive was not just the form as a geometric design but the implications. That is to say that he was struggling to integrate in himself the significance of what he was doing. And it kept alluding him. So much so and he had sat for so long without doing anything that the prior became very concerned. In fact, uppity. He's not working. So, he went to Duke Ludovico who sent for Leonardo as authoritarian figures will do. And had a little conversation with him.
They usually have this with two or more other people with them so that you're in front of the board of inquiry. They set up this forum. Arthur Koestler has a wonderful description of this in Darkness at Noon. They usually get you up early in the morning and under no breakfast the questions are very poignant.
So, he said how come you're not working. And so, Leonardo said, "Well I am in fact working I'm doing the hard part. The hard part is not to draw the thing. The hard part is not even to put up the paint and I can do that. The hard part is to understand what I'm doing so that I can do it right. Now you don't want me to do it wrong do you?" And Ludovico just loosening up a little bit probably, enjoyed this conversation and said, "Well what is the problem?" So, Leonardo not being able to explain to him what his cosmic problem was made up a little parable. He said, "Well..." He probably didn't call him your highness, but he probably meant to. He said, "The problem is that I don't have the two faces that I need to complete the painting." He said, "Now I've done the apostles except for Judas. I don't know whose face to put on Judas. And I don't know whose face to put on Christ. Have you any suggestions?" Yeah, well in the conversation that turned out that the friar would probably go on to Judas very nicely.
Ludovico loved Leonardo. He was good for laughs. And he was probably the most intelligent individual that anybody at that time had ever run into. So, Leonardo settled for a Judas but never fully settled for the Christ. And so, he left Christ's face somewhat in ambiguity. In fact, he notes in his own writings that the painting is unfinished. The face of Christ is not there. That he tried his best to imagine the face of divinity become human and he said he could not. That he analytically discarded through contemplation any image that he was able to engender. So, the problem of receding infinity before galloping capacity manifests itself in the personality of Christ for Leonardo. He couldn't imagine the man's personality. But he tried, a long time.
So, without being able to put the face of God on man he put the figures into a compositional framework where the mystery of the situation would have to disclose itself to the viewer as best the viewer could experience. And so, The Last Supper is one of the great mystery experiences of mankind. Very difficult to address oneself to a comprehensively.
There's a great version of it here in Los Angeles up at Forest Lawn. One great huge glass panel lit from behind. Reproduction of The Last Supper is up there. You can go up at any time take it in and sit there and experience it.
The key to the problem is its geometry. There of course is a great problem in presenting 13 figures interestingly on a straight-line basis. Try it yourself. It's very difficult to do this. It's hard to order 13 figures in a straight line in a composition. Leonardo solved it by working with primordiality again. Being a good Pythagorean, he went for four triangles. And the impairment of one of the four triangles would leave an opening for the thirteenth figure to mysteriously fit in. So that when the thirteenth figure fit into one of the impaired triangles, one of the corners of the impaired triangle would be left out in the open. And that was Judas. So that by understanding the way in which Christ related to the Apostles in Leonardo's cosmic Pythagorean penetrating vision, one understood how Judas was left out of reality. Well, the arrangement is in halves. Christ is in the center of The Last Supper. And on his left, to the right of the viewer, are three apostles grouped together. The one nearest Christ has a finger up aspirantly pointing up. And that's the leap into comprehension. But it's also indicating unity and paradoxically that one has betrayed the unity and is therefore no longer a part of the unity. This third figure has the hand coming back so that the gesture is to the heart. And next to that gesture is a fist. Sort of the mudra for the ultimate crunch. Is it I ask one of them? Not knowing because it was inconceivable that one. How could a human personality betray God? How could that be? That it may be something that you can juggle in a doctrinaire fashion mentally but experientially how can a human being understand that? Are we capable of that? If we are, what kind of significance do we have in this universe? Who are we that we could do that? These are the kinds of resonances set up in The Last Supper. This is why it is the most talked about single painting in history. The other three apostles also form a triangle. And there are again in the gestures, very Italian style, the hands convey the feeling tone, and the eyes convey the intellectual poignancy. So, the hands and the eyes together map out the geometry.
So, we have two very nice triangles one of them pointing out and one of them pointing in. And balancing that on the other side we should have the same thing. We have a triangle that's pointing out just like on the end because the three apostles on Christ far right on our left arrange much in the same way. But the inner triangle is impaired. It's this triangle that's impaired. It's this triangle that contains the figure of Judas. For the figure that is, should the fourth in line, is leaning behind Judas. And therefore, comes next in line. And by taking his fourth place and circumventing Judas by coming behind him, creates a triangle to carry this motion also out. So that Christ and these apostles end up with the cross. And Judas is left out of the geometry of reality.
And in the painting as one looks more and more at reproductions of it, you see the recoil of Judas as if he has been hit by a shockwave of recognition of what he has done. And in consequence what has happened to him. And the head of Christ is tilted ever so slightly to its side because man has matured himself to the capacity to be able to betray divinity. And this was to Leonardo a very, very serious maturation point. Because if we have matured to that point where in the universe is man safe.
Well, he came back to Florence having created The Last Supper, which of course is just talked about all the time. Increasingly he was seeing as one of those masterful figures who transcended his own time when he came back. And 1500 to Florence, he was there just a couple of years and he fell in with Caesar Borgia. He decided to accept a call from Caesar Borgia. And at the same time Machiavelli was sent by the Signoria, the Council of Florence, to negotiate with Borgia. And Machiavelli and Leonardo meet and become very close friends. And both of them decided to stay with Caesar Borgia because he was interesting. But more than just interesting he was captivating. Because Caesar Borgia, more than any man alive at that time, was capable of being a Judas.
When Leonardo had been young, Vasari says, again and again he used to go out on the streets with a sketch pad, a little notepad. Leonardo said you always must travel with a notepad. The mind forgets so you have to sketch down constantly. And you have to use a fine point so that...and tinted paper so that if you make a mistake, you can't erase it you have to go to the next page. Because reality is like that you have to be able to get it just right. So tinted paper so you can't erase. He used silver point finally towards the end. So, any kind of motion or movement would somewhat like break the composition.
He wanted instant exactness because therein lay the only key, the only possibility for fidelity. It was Judas's incapacity for fidelity that allowed him this transgression. So that a lot of significance was wrapped up in this for Leonardo. And he used to take this little tinted paper sketch pad and he would follow, Vasari says, interesting faces all day long. Watching them. How they argued with people. How they ate their food. How they took little snoozes. How they were bored. How they were interested. Reviewing in the million gestures recorded all the evidences and significances that would build up to lead one to understanding a person.
For Leonardo, as for Machiavelli, Caesar Borgia was the most interesting person of their time. He was the son of the Pope. And he was carving out an empire for himself. And when he was laying siege to Tuscany, to Florence and had all of his ideas Leonardo was drawing designs for cannon for him. To go against his own city perhaps. So engrossed was he in pursuing the ineffable. Well, this is the hair-trigger on modern man. He can become so engrossed in his pursuit of reality that he will betray the just order. And this is the problem of Judas. This is the key to the breaking of the harmony of the Apostles in The Last Supper.
And this hounds Leonardo increasingly as he becomes older. Observing that even this capacity has seeped into him. He the most talented of all human beings. He was not only head and shoulders, he was torso above anybody else at his time in capacity. He was one of those persons if you gave an IQ test, he'd probably be above 200. But he was increasingly aware of the vast ends of infinity within himself and that was his problem. That there isn't any amount of analytical capacity that can put that together. There isn't any amount of universal vision that can encompass that. There is a kind of a mystery of acceptance of experience as it is without the analytic, without the comprehension. That's the only possible shape for man in his phenomenal form to understand. And this was an increasing burden to Leonardo.
So, after the episode, the seizure Borgia, who has given a commission to paint a portrait of a woman. And these thoughts were in his mind. He wasn't much concerned with the woman, but he was concerned with the thoughts that were inside of his capacity. And so, Vasari writes, "For Francesco del Giaconda, Leonardo undertook to paint the portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife. After loitering over it for four years he finally left it unfinished." Again, like the face of Christ. But she became the face of the ultimate mystery. She became the ultimate cosmic Madonna, the mother of Christ.
And for Leonardo who had always had a problem with women. It isn't important. It isn't relevant that he was accused twice in his life of homosexual acts. That was not the issue. Women for Leonardo were ineffable. The feminine for Leonardo was an intangibility, an incomprehensibility. All of this rose to the surface in great gulps of intellectual chaos. Intuited. And Leonardo grappled with it. With all of its titanic capacities. Like a voice trying to out yell itself. He couldn't do it. He couldn't finish the portrait. But as far as he got is as far as human talent can go. The Mona Lisa has for all time been the most mysterious painting of human nature. it's not in a simple ambiguity. It's in a very real conundrum which as it is understood in greater and greater significance radiates out to every aspect of our ability. Our abilities to perceive, to conceive. Our abilities to relate. Our abilities to focus. To integrate. To sense. All of these.
This portrait of course was one of the marvels of all time, as Vasari says. He says, "The eyes have the lustrous brightness and moisture which is seen in life and around them are those pale red and slightly livid circles also proper to nature. With the lashes which can only be copied as these are with the greatest difficulty. The eyebrows also are represented with the closest exactitude. Where fuller and when more thinly set with the separate hairs delineated as the issue from the skin. Every turn being followed." Because you see he was a mastermind. He was a genius. He thought if the clues exist in reality, in time-space and nature in man I will follow them with the ultimate exactitude. I will delineate every molecule if need be. To reproduce in my mirror the truth that is there in nature. And even with being able to do that. Being able to polish that mirror ever so fine. It was still elusive. And that's what baffled him. Was that when he looked into the mirror of his own mind, for himself it was empty. As one would expect knowing man's nature. But for Leonardo there should have been an image there. There should have been someone there. He didn't understand the mystery that we as personalities are not in our minds. Are not in our perceptions. Are not in our capacities. We don't exist there at all. And for Leonardo, not being privy to high truths like this, was astonished at the incapacity of his genius to wrench free from history, from nature, from men's capacities, some phenomenal image of ourselves which was true and real and there. It simply was not.
And Vasari says of the Mona Lisa, "It was the boldest. It made the boldest master tremble and astonished all who beheld it however well accustomed to the marvels of art. The Mona Lisa, exceedingly beautiful and while Leonardo was painting her portrait, he took the precaution of keeping someone constantly near her, to sing or play on instruments or just or otherwise amuse her to the end that she might continue cheerful. So that her face might not exhibit the melancholy expression often imparted by painters to the likeness they take."
Vasari is making up a rationalization. Leonardo was trying to structure through the music, the living toned structure, the ambiguity of the reality of this person. And he was trying to, as the scribe demands ultimate capacity in the cosmos, to record it. Trying to put it there and could not. Could not. It's like Faulkner said of Shakespeare, that after he wrote The Tempest, he simply broke his pencil because he realized that you could not create it. You couldn't write it. No matter who you were, no matter how great you were. And having followed the trail to the Nth degree with every capacity going for you, you still couldn't do it. And so, you still had to learn the first lesson being human in this kind of the world. And that is the truth of humility.
Leonardo unable to digest the increasing conundrums within himself began having the age-old psychological urge to flee. Not to flee from death, that's sort of a clumsy way to place this sociological ritualistic happening. It isn't the flight from death so much it's the flight from incomprehensibility, the flight from the abyss. When Leonardo died, he died in France. He'd gone to France, made one last plunge of greatness. Francis the First had paid four thousand gold florins for one of Leonardo's works. And he wanted Leonardo to create the ultimate masterpiece. And he was willing to give him whatever help he needed, whatever finances he needed. That he would back this great man and this great man would produce the masterpiece. And it ended up Leonardo gasping for air. And at the age of 67 he died in the arms of Francis the First, the King of France.
Well with Leonardo's passing a new note of gloom struck in the Italian consciousness. There had been a Superman. And he had failed to understand himself. He couldn't dot the eyes and put a period at the end. And this began to bother. This began to dominate the Italian psyche. And so, for the rest of the Renaissance after Leonardo's death in 1519 we find the great Italian minds turning more and more away from nature. Away from man. Away from history. Away from art. Away from architecture and sculpture. There must be a way to conceive of a context wherein man can comprehend himself. And if it isn't an art. If it isn't in nature. If it isn't in history. Then it must be somewhere else. So, we'll develop the mind. We'll develop our capacities to imagine worlds. To imagine philosophies more powerful than any before. Will bring together all the wisdom of the ancient world and the contemporary world. We will make some kind of a mental canvas upon which man can draw his real image.
And it was this compulsion that we examine starting next week because this led to the great rise of Hermetic synchronistic philosophers like Giordano Bruno. Bruno someone you haven't heard too much of, Francesco Giorgi. Will the direct links with the end of the course where we take the great utopian Italian her medicine Tommaso Campanella. Who finally wrote the great utopian classic The City of the Sun in his great contemporary whom he defended Galileo would finally say, it is in fact in nature it's just that we didn't understand nature. We didn't understand the scale and the size of the canvas. The points of light our moving bodies and they have moons around them. And there may be even more beyond that. So, we're gonna have to look at nature all over again. And then maybe, and this was the thing that Bacon... Francis Bacon took, then maybe when we have a real concept of nature we can come back to Leonardo's problem. And then triumphantly maybe we can sketch in the face of man. Well, this led to the hubris and the triumph of the Elizabethan age. and we'll see all the preparation of it starting next week with the Bruno. Who for his efforts was burned at the stake in 1600.
END OF RECORDING