A New Reading of Leonardo Da Vinci

THERE is a fascination in the incomplete. In art this is a commonplace; in life and history it is none the less true. Great men have more than once consciously increased their renown by enveloping themselves in a mystery. Petrarch confesses to have obliterated himself from the world in the hermitage of Vaucluse not for the sake of solitary meditation, but that the world might wonder what he was up to. And the result was that in his own day Petrarch was, if possible, less talked of as the singer of Laura or as the humanist than as the man-of-mystery, the mage. None, however, have exerted upon the imaginations of contemporaries and of posterity this witchery of the half understood more than the painter of Mona Lisa. At first sight, one is tempted to exclaim of Leonardo da Vinci that he seems to be a veritable definition of the incomplete. His contemporaries never tired of bemoaning his wasted talents ; and even so clear sighted a modern as Michelet speaks of him as “the Italian brother of Faust.”Both saw only his incompleteness. Illegitimate in birth ; slighted by his native Florence ; favored only, it would seem, by such infamous tyrants as Ludovico il Moro and Cesare Borgia, or his natural enemy France ; his one masterpiece, the Cena, destined to become a total wreck from time and the swifter vandalism of monks, soldiers, and renovators ; his other masterpiece, the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, destined never to grow beyond his model ; his encyclopaedic labors in nearly all the sciences destined to rot for years, an undecipherable litter, in the garret of an unintelligent beneficiary, and then in no small part to perish utterly ; and finally to die in exile, leaving behind him little but the shadow of a great name, — surely here is a life all the more pitiably a fragment just because it might have been, nay should have been, so grandly complete. Such has been the threnody over da Vinci up to our own day. Yet there has been always something ambiguous, something troublant, about this incompleteness of the enigmatic master. Just as the historical critic has comfortably housed him in the pigeonhole of the incomplete, there comes the same doubt, the same shake of the head, as must follow the attempt to interpret and catalogue that very same Mona Lisa of his with her bewildering smile. Hence it is that we have more works upon this genius spoiled in the finishing, this living torso, than upon even the perfect Raphael or the sublime Michael Angelo.

Happily, there need be no longer this haphazard speculation, this baseless talk “ about it and about.”Genius and the productions of genius are not, as M. Seailles is fond of saying, to be estimated by weights and measures; the value of genius is qualitative, not quantitative. And the decipherment and publication of da Vinci’s manuscripts, strangely written from right to left, like Hebrew, have put us into the possession of facts which entitle us to declare the artist-savant to be not merely no incomplete man, but perhaps the most grandly complete man the world has yet seen. To make clear to the average reader this somewhat disquieting readjustment of historical values is the task M. Séailles takes upon himself in the volume in hand.¹

The function of the artist as explained by da Vinci is essentially demiurgic : to make a new heavens and a new earth and new inhabitants thereof. Realism and Idealism are mere idola tribus : art is neither mere imitation nor mere fantasy ; true art imitates nature’s methods that it may surpass her results. Science, properly understood, is no end in itself, but the means to new creation by intelligent comprehension of the old ; it is in all literalness the apple of the tree of wisdom, by eating which men become as gods. There is, therefore, in da Vinci’s understanding not only no conflict between art and science, but indeed no art worthy the name without science.

“ Comprendre pour créer,” — such M. Séailles discovers to have been the maxim of da Vinci’s multitudinous activity. Comprehension, science, not accompanied by creation is the most depressing of sterilities ; for the mere knower the universe becomes a huge chaos of conflicting atoms without purpose and without charm, for purpose and charm are discoverable in nature only by the creative imagination, never by the mere intellect. Creation, art, not guided by exact knowledge of the natural phenomena on which and through which the artist is compelled to work, is on the other hand crude and unsatisfying to the mature mind. It is with the conception of this childishly empirical art that M. Renan makes the depressing prophecy, “ Il y aura un temps où le grand artiste sera une chose vieillie, presque inutile ; le savant, au contraire, vaudra toujours de plus en plus.” Leonardo knew better than that; and it is better for us, in this age of science for the sake of science, to listen to his wiser words, that since the aim of the artist is “ to show what the subject has in his soul,” not merely the painted face, but the hands as well, indeed the whole body, must speak. Now, as the human soul is the microcosm, how shall we know it unless we know the universe of which it is a mirror ? How express in the rigidity or languor of a painted limb, the pallor or flush of painted flesh, the delicate gradations of emotional light and shadow which play across this infinitely reflective mirror ? To those who, like Renan, reply that art is simply inadequate to the task, it is sufficient to point to the Mona Lisa, created not far from five hundred years ago, in the very dawn of the sciences which in the opinion of its creator alone made it possible.

It is in this spirit and with these premises that M. Seailles approaches the life and works of Leonardo da Vinci. Of the life itself he offers little new, unless indeed it be the broadly catholic spirit in which he interprets and justifies the scanty facts. Of the art works, also, of his subject he is reticent, evidently not wishing to put himself into competition with the special art critic. It is when he comes to the scientific methods and discoveries of da Vinci as revealed by his manuscripts that, if I may be allowed the expression, the French scholar lets himself go. “ La mise au jour des manuscrits de Léonard de Vinci recule les origines de la science moderne tie plus dun siècle ” (p. 369). “ Je vais plus loin: à prendre les choses strictement, Bacon et Descartes sont plus loin d’un savant moderne que Léonard de Vinci et Galilée ” (p. 388). Truly Mr. Oscar Wilde seems here justified in his flippancy that “ history exists only to be rewritten.” But the list of supposed discoverers relegated to the second place by da Vinci is really something serious for the readers of standard textbooks. A century before Galileo, two before Bacon, Leonardo applies the method of experimental induction and mathematical verification and inference as fully and exactly as if he were an alumnus of John Stuart Mill. He compiles, nay originates, the materials for a complete encyclopaedia of the sciences when the ancestors of the French Encyclopédistes to the tenth generation were still unborn. He anticipates Spencer in the postulate of the Unknowable (p. 213) ; Leibnitz in the doctrine of a preëstablished harmony between sense and reason (p. 216). He recreates the mathematical sciences by returning to the sound principles of Archimedes neglected throughout the whole Middle Ages. In special discoveries in those sciences, to him belongs the honor hitherto given to Guido Ubaldi and Galileo, Stevin, Commandin and Maurolycus, Gassendi, Amontons, Pascal, Castelli, Lavoisier, Bouguer, and Rumford, — yes, almost to Newton himself. Astronomy he frees from the shackles of a superstitious astrology ; geology he may be said to create. In botany, he antedates Sir Thomas Browne’s supposed discovery of the arrangement of leaves in “ quincunxes ” by exactly one hundred and fifty years, and Grew and Malpighi in the recognition of a tree’s age by the rings on its trunk. In anatomy, he creates embryology, comparative anatomy, and is the first to make anatomical charts of an exactitude sufficient to excite the admiration of the great English surgeon William Hunter. He strives all his life to effect a practicable flying, and in the course of his studies anticipates by more than two centuries the De Motu Animalium of Borelli. In optics he anticipates Cardan, and puts the theory of perspective clearly and fully. In the applied sciences, finally, da Vinci’s ingenuity is inexhaustible ; but the slightest indication of his endless inventions for the purposes of peace and war would take us beyond the limits here assigned.

Now add to these claims of Leonardo the more ornamental ones of having been reputed to be, besides the greatest painter and thinker and investigator of his day, also no inconsiderable architect, sculptor, engineer, musician, poet, conversationalist, athlete, and you will have ground for thinking him to be whatever else, but at least not incomplete. Of such a man hero-worship becomes less a choice than a necessity : not to prostrate ourselves before him is to emulate either the ignorant savage or the vulgar philistine, to whom marvels appear commonplace in proportion as these transcend their faculties. It is hard, therefore, to cavil at M. Seailles’ eloquent and enthusiastic eulogy of his grand subject. Nevertheless, it is well to remember that, after all, the specific good sense of da Vinci was the sense of fact, and one feels now and then that M. Sdailles is a little wanting in this sense of fact: in his fine desire to make his hero impeccable he almost makes him impossible. This vision of da Vinci as another Atlas bearing upon his unaided shoulders the whole fabric of the modern world is grandiose, sublime, yet we cannot but feel fixed upon us, as we regard it, that disquieting skeptical smile which seems so fitting an emblem of the master’s own soul.

An aperçu is not the same thing as a discovery. M. Séailles confuses the two. Leonardo writes: “ The earth is not in the middle of the circle of the sun nor at the centre of the universe, but it is in the midst of its elements which accompany it and are united with it.” “On songe,” comments M. Séailles immediately, “ on songe à l’hypothèse de la gravitation ” (p. 253). Very likely “ on songe ; ” but it would be a vain dream indeed therefore to declare da Vinci, and not Newton, to have formulated, we do not say the law, but even the “ hypothesis ” of gravitation. We should wish first to hear da Vinci elaborate and develop his aperçu, to know just what he means by the earth’s elements, how they accompany the earth, in what sense they are united with it, and so on. And this criticism applies, I conceive, to not a few of M. Séailles’ deductions from da Vinci’s aperçus.

Undoubtedly, modern historical criticism is sound in its endeavor of development by cataclysms in human nature as well as in nature. It is hardly too much to say that every Messiah has his John the Baptist making clear the path of the Lord; great discoveries are like great events in that they do not come unheralded, unprepared. “ Natura non fecit saltum.” Constantly, therefore, we may expect to find our supposed historical origins thrown further back, our supposed pioneers of thought dispossessed of their primacy, and neglected names restored to a more than pristine brilliancy ; only it seems desirable that we should make haste slowly, and above all not be thrown off the line of fact by the facile sensationalism of most hero-worshiping criticism. A little more moderation, a little less obvious desire to take established history by storm, would have made M. Séailles’ work, which by the way is delightful reading, a trifle more scientifically valuable than even now it is.