Leonardo Da Vinci - Chapter II

Chapter II

Top Left: comparative drawings of the male and female genitalia. Others : anatomical studies of the developing foetus.

Top Left: comparative drawings of the male and female genitalia.
Others : anatomical studies of the developing foetus.

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When he writes that he is an uomo senza lettere, he is sug­gesting that he did not have a formal education, that he did not learn either Latin or Greek, or even the literary Italian of the times: in a word, that he is self-taught. And so, this genius with a universal mind, whose intelligence wished to capture and tap every source, never had the humanist forma­tion, which during the Renaissance, distinguished the well bred from the common man.

He was an insatiable reader who exhaustively delved into the libraries of all of his friends. The books he bought or borrowed were destined for the purpose of discovering the universe. He thought that any book not read, and any experience not fully understood, left a hole in the fabric of the fundamental being.

It seems as though tradition never weighed him down nor slowed his pace, nor inhibited him in his flight towards the ex­ploration of curiosities and realisations. He did not share the respect for "the Ancients" that sometimes paralysed the human­ists religiously attached to antiquity.

He was only thirty years old when he introduced himself to Ludovico the Moor, the regent of the kingdom of Milan, in a famous letter where he offered him his secrets. He expressed himself as though he had in his power a method through which he could resolve all the problems that outside circumstances or his own will could pose to him.

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He claimed that, "The senses belong to earth; reason stands apart from them in contemplation." Would this be in part, the first instigator of his intellectual quest, the genesis of his note­books? He was a tireless writer, filling notebook after notebook with his left-handed writing, each letter having its own nimble personality, the inverted writing akin to a secret code. The fre­quent diagrams reconstitute the movement of his running thought, fighting his own contradictions. I ask: this phrase con­stantly recurs. He was whipped forward by a sense of curiosity that nothing could quench, and which simultaneously embraced all forms of knowledge, intuitive and experimental, dialectic and factual. He seemed to contradict himself: he started with current public opinion and attempted to ascertain whether it was valid. He repeated an experiment ten times over, needing irrefutable proof before daring a personal affirmation. Although most of the time he kept records, he did not organize them, making it difficult to determine what his ultimate conclusions were.

Self-taught, with meagre means at his disposal, he explored the universe. Through the use of analogies and correspondences, he developed a general theory of the world — solid, powerful, coherent. He cities Aristotle: "Man deserves merit or blame only in consideration of what is in his power to do or not to do." It is however from 1490 as far as can be seen, that Leonardo tries to assimilate and rigorously inventory (after what he called "my mathematical principles"): the totality of human knowledge; restructuring it, correcting it when needed, and stretching it if possible. He was always thinking about the universe, and he had fixed his sights on this obstinate rigour that considers itself the most demanding of all. This rigour established, a positive liberty becomes possible, while apparent liberty is only to be able to obey each impulse of chance; the more we enjoy, the more we are tied up around the same point, just as the cork bobbing on the sea which nothing holds, which is attracted by everything, and which all the forces of the universes fight over and destroy. The entire operation of this master Leonardo is uniquely deduced from his great work; as if a particular being had no relation to

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it. His thought appears more universal, so detailed and isolated that it does not seem to belong to an individual. There is no su­perstition of the intellect, no vain fears. Nor did he fear analyses; he drove them, or was driven by them; to some remote conclu­sion he returned without effort to the real. He imitated, he inno­vated; he did not reject the ancient because it was ancient or the new because it was new; but he consulted within himself some­thing eternally real. Any knowledge we gather from his writings was not meant to be read by us. In all that the artist and the scholar has written, one must clearly distinguish what was meant for publication: those treatises he chose to distribute among his contemporaries and to posterity; treatises of all kinds — on the art of painting, on anatomy, on the horse, on the speed of air, on land formation, on prehistoric shells, on the flight of birds, on the construction of canals, on the drainage of swamps and so on, ad infinitum: enough to fill a multitude of existences. Not only did he write about all that could be known, but also about every­thing that could be done, since any knowledge that is not move­ment, or action, or cause for realizing is theory and not practice, and must be considered as accessory, less important than the rest. In his writings, Leonardo distributed didactical knowledge, he taught what he himself had learned; whether through books, through his conversations with men of all classes or professions that he had met, and — above all — through his own experience. Anything in his notebooks that was not meant to be published or to prepare for a future publication, was meant for him alone. From this tendency comes the apparent disjointedness of his notes, numbering more than 5000 unorganised pages. In spite of the mutilations that these notes were subjected to, the com­pilations, as they come to us remain a monument of inestimable importance. There exists nothing comparable among any of the documents at our disposal on the motivations of artistic creation and on the multiple preoccupations of a genius.

From these thousands of sketches and notes we get the ex­traordinary feeling of a staggering display of sparks exploding from some fantastic creation. Leonardo is revealed as obsessed

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by an endless number of problems, not only of perspective, physiology, geometry, architecture, sculpture, landscape, optics, shadow and light, ornaments, knots, rosettes, interlaces, mete­orology, zoology, botany, as well as, among others mechanics, ballistics, and hydraulics, which materialize in projects of public works, artillery and other engines of war resulting in the famous diagrams of flying machines and submarines.

He writes: "One cannot possess either a lesser or greater do­main than the domain of oneself." This Apollo ravishes us to the utmost of ourselves. What is more seductive than a god who rejects mystery, who does not build his power on the disquiet of our senses, who does not address his prestige to the darkest, to the most vulnerable, the most sinister part of ourselves; who forces us to agree and not to bend; and for whom the miracle is to make himself clear; the depth, a perspective well-defined? Is there a better mark of an authentic and legitimate power than not to practice under a veil? Never was there for Dionysius a more deliberated enemy, nor one so pure, nor armed with so much light, than this hero less preoccupied with bending and breaking monsters than with considering their motives; disdainful of piercing them with arrows so much as harassing them with ques­tions; their superior more than their conqueror, he wished to understand them rather than to triumph over them — almost to the point of reproducing them; and as soon as he got hold of their principles he could very well abandon them, derisively reducing them to the humble condition of particular cases and explicable paradoxes.

He was also a visionary who was not afraid to venture be­yond the limits of experience and reason. Who can listen to him dreaming of a prehistoric era wherein huge fish lived in oceans covering the earth, and perceive the extent to which the naturalist and the poet reciprocated information? In the Codex Atlantica can be found an assortment of different, extraordinary texts where Leonardo appears under the guise, new and strange, of a visionary poet, an adventure novelist, capable of describing the destruction of the earth by a universal deluge with such tragic

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vivacity that it is as though he had really been there in the midst of the experience.

Here is the memory he records of having explored a cave, probably in the Apennines. In this extraordinary account, so characteristic of Leonardo, one finds intertwined the art of evoking an image and his passion for earthly enigmas.

"Driven by an ardent desire, anxious to see the varied and strange abundance of forms that artful nature creates, having gone a cer­tain distance between the overhanging rocks, I arrived at the en­trance of a huge cavern and stopping for a moment, struck with stupor since I did not know of its existence; back arching, the left hand embracing my knee while with the right shading my furrowed eyebrows, I leaned from side to side, to see if I could perceive anything inside, against the intensity of the darkness. After staying in this position for sometime, two emotions sud­denly swelled in me — fear and desire — fear of this menacing dark cavern, desire to see what sort of marvel it was hiding."

Leonardo made himself more admirable from research to re­search, training his thoughts, developing his acts. He used one or the other hand for his most precise designs; he stripped them down and reassembled them, he tightened the connections of his will with his powers, pushing his reasoning in the art further and preserving his elegance.

He had other forms of precious knowledge in addition to the knowledge obtained from books: intuitive knowledge and, knowledge of nature that only a man closely related to the ele­ments, informed by them in the physical nature of his own body could possess. A good horseman, he gladly visited the stables of the Duke of Sforza or those of the pope, thoroughly noting down in his notebooks the particularities of the animals he fa­voured, he demonstrated by these notes what an intimate un­derstanding of the animal he possessed. His sketches of horses are of stupefying anatomical exactitude and specially attest to an extraordinary understanding of the soul of the horse, of its

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distrustful and fierce restraint, of its savage fears, of its terrible whims. And so it is for the bird. His biographers tell us that he bought captured birds from peddlers to set them free. His sketches of birds in flight are numerous and he wrote a treatise on the topic. Whatever he was interested in took the shape of a treatise in which he would write down everything he knew about a particular subject. Seeing in the bird the very principles of flight, of ascending, the meaning of the appropriation of space in all its dimensions, in the spread of its wings and in the height of its tra­jectory, Leonardo wished to identify with, to become a real bird, building for himself the body of a bird: constructing a flying machine which will replace the natural mechanism of flight [see sketch p. 84] . That is why the first flying machine invented and built by Leonardo was the recreation, as perfectly as possible, of a bird. But because he realized the inconvenience of this artificial bird, Leonardo later invented the helicopter, which has nothing to do with the bird morphologically. While constructing the flying machine, Leonardo twice recorded the ambitious project in his notebook in almost identical terms: "From the mountain that carries the name of the great bird will take flight the famous bird which will fill the world with its great glory" This mountain is Mount Cycero: the Swan. There was no trace of his failures in his notebooks; failures had no interest for him; he erased them from his thoughts, he started differently with the thing which had failed, or he began something else.

This failure of Leonardo is the consequence of what he mis­takenly imagined: that the impossible is possible in the absolute! His intentions and his imagination took giant strides; unfortu­nately, technique did not follow at the same pace.

Leonardo wanted to surpass the possibilities of his time. One would think that he wished to be independent of time, as of space, to escape from the constraints of dimensions, without worrying about what is real and what the world in which he lived demanded. This flight of the visionary, constantly unsatisfied, who aspired to perfection, led him to a series of well-known fail­ures that trail his life.

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The Mona Lisa was never delivered to the one who had com­missioned it. It would seem that Leonardo always wished to win by postponing, that what he feared was to spoil with hurrying. So he maintained an Olympian impassivity in his defeats. The triple disasters of the equestrian statue, The Last Supper, and The Battle of Anghiari did not seem to discourage him. This serenity, this impassivity had at the time of the Italian wars a bizarre character. They contrast Leonardo to Michelangelo who was quick-tem­pered, vindictive and violent. And Leonardo's ascetic solitude is contrasted with the voracious mondanity of Raphael. Though he was so careful and ingenious, he did not see to the preservation, even less to the publication, of his manuscripts and sketches. Even though it would have been easy for him, he did not bother to copy The Last Supper and The Battle of Anghiari on wood or canvas when he realized that they were deteriorating. In fact, few great men cared so little for their glory. Not even of one figure in all of Leonardo's work can we be sure is a self portrait of the artist, until he made one when he was over sixty: it is as though he did it to take the exact measure of his own aging; he seemed to be looking at life fading away and at death advancing. We know that Leonardo was handsome; he simply did not want the memory of his beauty to survive. Leonardo did not care about his mortal remains, he did not think of having them returned to his place of birth after his death. The failure of The Battle of Anghiari, the great Florentine composition, reveals a curious aspect of his character, something which is both grandeur and a weakness. In this instance, his error consisted of the use of a technique not well adapted to the circumstances. Instead of the traditional fresco, he combined a mixture of elements thought to give more brightness and more brilliance to the painting. Unfortunately, this mixture failed: the colour would not dry, the walls remained impregnated with humidity; Leonardo pulled by other projects, quit Florence leaving The Battle of Anghiari in a deplorable state and it became impossible to save it.

Michelangelo had perhaps well understood this unlucky inno­vator the day he reproached him for not knowing how to finish.

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Here, these two opposite personalities bring out their radical dif­ferences. One can hardly imagine Leonardo entirely dedicated to a colossal work such as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, spending years on scaffolding, face to face with the colossus he was cre­ating, lying on his back, while the colour dripped from the brush down to his face and on to his clothing. This criticism seems justifiable when one considers the amount of work Leonardo left unfinished, because circumstances kept him from achieving them, as he depended on his protectors, on his patrons, on their whims, on their willingness. He did not have more freedom or more security than the other artists of that time. Alongside this external fatality there was another that was internal: that of the unequal harnessing of a too quick imagination, too ready to change subject and goal, and of this scruple he had to proceed in the realisation of what he undertook with extreme slowness, dedicating much time to preliminaries, to the preparatory work. But there was something else which Michelangelo refused to agree to, perhaps not even to understand, because this thought would have stopped his creative impulse and awakened uneasi­ness: that is, for Leonardo, nothing was ever finished. Gian Paolo Lomazzo in 1590 had this to say:

Whenever he began to paint, it seemed that Leonardo trembled, and he never finished any of the works he commenced because, so sublime was his idea of art, he saw faults even in the things that to others seemed miracles.

Giorgio Vasari said the following:

Clearly it was because of his profound knowledge of painting that Leonardo started so many things without finishing them; for he was convinced that his hands, for all their skill, could never perfectly express the subtle and wonderful ideas of his imagination.

When he travelled with the cumbersome luggage of The Virgin

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of the Rocks, the Bacchus, the St John, the Mona Lisa, at a time when travelling was difficult and dangerous for works of art, he knew that these paintings were not finished. It was especially because his metaphysics were of the infinite that he did not see a limit to artistic creation, nor to scientific research. Perhaps the fi­nite appeared deceptive to him and he could not be satisfied with it: he needed the vast perspective of the infinite that he scanned with his physical eyes and the impetuous leap of thought. As a man of experience he knew the limits and the constraints of the finite. One year before his death, he recorded in his diaries words which have a weight, a density, a resonance, brightness, a forceful shock: "I will go on". Michelangelo was right to say that Leonardo was incapable of terminating, since all his actions as a scholar, an artist, and as a man open onto the infinite.

We see a picture of the world as if here and there reducing itself into intelligible elements. At times our senses suffice, at other times, even though the most ingenious methods are in­volved, some gaps are left. The attempts remain blank. It is here the kingdom of our hero. He had an extraordinary sense of symmetry that made a problem of everything for him. The productivity of his mind slipped into any small crack of under­standing. He was like a physical hypothesis. He would have to be invented, but he existed. The universal man can now be imag­ined. A Leonardo da Vinci may exist in our minds. In a very clear consciousness the memory and phenomenon find them­selves so linked, expected, answered; the past so well used; the new so quickly compensated; the state of total relation so clearly won over that nothing seems able to start, nothing to end, in the heart of this almost pure activity.

The methods of his mind were such that in everything he came back to the origins, the principle; the experience and the knowledge acquired by others did not satisfy him. As it is, any­thing can become better. He questioned workmen and settled himself in their workshops, examining their tools, the way they used them, and he took those tools in his own hands, made the gestures of the workmen, and at the same time thought of the

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improvements that could be brought to this hammer, to that file, so that their ways could become more comfortable or more ef­ficient. For example, before starting to dig a canal to change the course of the Arno River, he invented new pickaxes, new spades, a novel procedure to put up fences and caulk them. He had the genius of novelty because he had a creative sense and he knew that any human activity remained effective only if it moves. This passion he had for movement was the source of the idea that he had of progress in all fields, in science, techniques and art. "[...] art and scientific genius came together in Leonardo's spirit," said Thomas Mann.

Leonardo had the overwhelming impulses of the genius, he also patiently and carefully followed the methods of an explorer of knowledge that, following him, leave everything ironed out, checked, in place, before going any further. The orderly manner in which he organised his conquests is strict and meticulous; whether he galloped or plodded, it was with the same tenacious passion. Leonardo wrote that stupidity was a daughter of impa­tience. He worked at a terrific pace, but without haste. Always ready to wait, to postpone; it took him longer to paint the Mona Lisa than for Raphael to decorate the Vatican. What he con­ceived in a flash, he invariably postponed in the execution; he rarely missed reconsidering or modifying his own projects, he untiringly went over the series of means and causes; if he wanted to cut a piece of cloth, he began by inventing new scissors, a new alloy of metal for the scissors he wished to make. If he wanted to paint a smile he wanted to know the muscles that permit the smile. When Ludovico the Moor ordered the equestrian statue, Leonardo started to write a treatise on the horse and then one on the different ways to melt bronze.

His capacity to work was frightening. An ordinary man would labour enormously if only he had to copy so many sketches, verify so many calculations, put up so many apparatus, accu­mulate so many notes. And yet many of his notes, calculations, designs and even his paintings have disappeared. He retained all the appetites of adolescence with a robust hunger that sits at the

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banquet of everything knowable, with an incomparable faculty of understanding and assimilation, and the quiet and comforting conviction which irritated others so much — that the universal was his kingdom.

Leonardo's sharpness of vision was prodigious, superhuman; the analysis of his sketches where one sees the course of water, the beating of wings proves it: Leonardo could see details that the human eye would capture only several centuries later, with the invention of slow motion cinema.

At one time or another, we have all played at throwing stones in water. Who among us has been able to observe that two peb­bles thrown away from each other on a flat surface of water make two series of concentric circles which while widening meet and mix with one another without breaking — and be surprised and to come to a conclusion about the reasons for it? Leonardo observed that the water that seems to move, in reality is im­mobile; those are, he said, "some kind of little cuts or marks which, opening and closing, suddenly imprint a certain reaction on it which is more a vibration than a movement". If the series of circles do not break when crossing each other "it is because water is homogenous in all its particles and this sort of vibration is transmitted to its particles, without the water itself moving". And so having defined the principle of waves, Leonardo foresaw that sound and light spread in the air in the same way. Does it matter if afterward he was led astray? Nature was his labora­tory; he identified his most perfect instrument of investigation. Open your eyes he said. Suffice it to see well to understand. He studied the holes in stones, gravel that rolls in rivers, lime and mud. From shells, from remains of algae that he found in moun­tain sediment he concluded that long ago oceans covered the globe. He arrived at the most amazing conclusions with bits of candles, the eye of a needle, a funnel, a bucket, a metal box. He used a glass globe filled with water as a magnifying lens. It is while passing a sheet of paper pierced with a pinhole in front of the surface of a white wall that he defined the trajectory of light rays. An ember shaken in the dark looks as though it is tracing

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a line of fire, or a knife stuck in a table with force and vibrating, giving the illusion of two knives, told him that the eye poorly defines images succeeding themselves too quickly; he observed the phenomenon many times; the string of a lute when oscil­lating also seems to split in two; the eye does not immediately assimilate the visual impression — was this not new proof that the eye has a purely receptive role and that light moves toward it at a tremendous speed?

If all Leonardo's mental faculties were greatly developed or if his other activities appeared considerable in every field, the man becomes more and more difficult to grasp and has a tendency to escape from our effort. From one extremity of this mental outspread to another there are such distances that we have never gone! To us, the thread linking this mixture is missing. One must therefore linger, become familiar with, and overcome the obsta­cles which force themselves on our imagination, in this meeting of heterogeneous elements.

He established a relation between the movements of the eye, the mind and sunrays. Nothing is born, he thought, where nothing exists "neither sensitive fibre nor rational life". His con­ception of the human machine influenced his engineering works and vice-versa; he argued botany with the vocabulary of an em­bryologist while approaching anatomy as a geographer.

He tried hard to embrace certain truths and certitudes. To bring to the humanly visible the infinitely great and the infinitely small he fabricated microscopes, telescopes and mirrors to cap­ture reflections, stray light rays and evasive images. He tried to stretch his senses by all sorts of instruments of investigation, which would multiply his faculties to see and touch, which would bring the universe closer to his eyes and hands. He did not seem like everyone else, to have to attach himself to a nation, to a tradition, to a group practicing the same art, to be understood. He was made to be the despair of the modern man who from adolescence is plugged into a speciality in which it is believed he must become superior because he is shut in it. He was the master of faces, anatomies, and machines He knew of what a smile is

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The optics of a mirror as described by
Leonardo:

Whether he was studying human anatomy or optical theory, Leonardo's scientific method was a combination of experiment and deduction. His detailed explanation of the aberrations of a concave spherical mirror is translated below. Reference points are identified in his characteristic mirror writing.

In respect of concave mirrors of the same diameter, the one with least concavity will unite greater number of rays at the focal point of the said rays, and as a result will kindle fire the more readily and strongly.

Let the arc o p represent the mirror mentioned above; let a b be the locus between rays, raining  down from the sun onto the mirror; n marks the center of the circle of the sphere, from which the said mirror gets its concavity; m is the point where most of the reflected rays converge, and  where greater heat can be produced than in any other part of the pyramid of rays o p m. 

The line or ray of sun that falls from b to p is that reflected in the line p m, at equal angles, as can be measured by the arc t r on the cirumference round the point or center p. The same  happens to all the rays that come from the sun a b, always striking the mirror and being reflected back from it at equal angles, as shown in the angles v x.

 

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made; he could put it on the surface of a house, or in the lines of a garden. He ruffled and curled strings of water and tongues of fire. Nor would he hesitate to put himself at the service of another country. What were most important to him were not the fragile earthly frontiers, but the innumerable gifts that find their object and the occasion to be utilized. He was a citizen of the realm of Yoga. He had neither family nor country. Facing the fu­ture, he would discourage those who only lived in the present, as for example Ludovico. Thus this man who wished to understand all, to reproduce all, to penetrate and construct all, was used for his capacity to amuse or as a magician. He proposed designs of cities; instead, he was asked to design stage costumes.

Leonardo intensely disliked the pretence of priests who "pro­pose words, amass great wealth and give away paradise". "Many are those", he wrote, "who swindle and simulate miracles, tricking the insane multitude; and if no one denounces their lies they would impose them on everybody". The flagrant anticlericalism of Leonardo does not mean that he was an atheist. Leonardo believed in God — in a God not much Christian; he found him in the miraculous beauty of life, in the harmonious movement of the planets, in the wise alignment of muscles and nerves inside the body, in the inexpressible masterpiece that is the soul. He would almost be jealous of the Creator he calls primo motore: the inventor of all seems to him a better architect and mechanic that he will never be. "0 admirable necessity!" he cried, talking about the eye. "0 powerful action! What mind will ever be able to pen­etrate your nature? What language will know how to express this marvel? Probably none! It is here that human discourse turns towards the contemplation of the divine."

Leonardo studied anatomy from his first years as an appren­tice; his interest in "the art of building" did not bring him to the discovery of this science but instead, brought him into it; they both cement and use one another; and the branches of knowl­edge criss-cross and overlap each other, to prop each other up. Other sectors of his activity benefitted from what he acquired from these studies. Leonardo always put man at the centre of

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his researches. "Man is the world model," he said. It seems that Leonardo, contrary to Socrates, did not believe that all men are good deep down. To him some individuals did not seem to de­serve the body which has been endowed to them by the divine. Talking about the structure of bones, the muscles, and the or­gans he says: "I do not think that coarse men of bad manners and of little intelligence deserve either such a beautiful instrument or such a variety of mechanisms." Their bad nature makes it impos­sible for them to appreciate the human marvel; therefore, they do not feel obliged to respect it. So they kill, tear and devour each other — betray. Stupidity, mediocrity, greediness, baseness, these defects aroused a kind of rage in Leonardo.

Leonardo, this indefatigable seeker, this prodigious distrib­utor of treasure was elusive. Everywhere present, everywhere lively, active at the centre of each thing, identifying himself with the source of everything. He knew his power. He liked to be challenged, to be utilised. And also, he liked to serve. "May I be deprived of the faculty to act, before being tired of serving," he repeats over and over again. "I would rather lack movement than usefulness, rather death than weariness. I am never tired of being useful". If he found that nature is an admirable success, he was eager to get his hands on the work of man, this imperfection. "For the good of others, I will never do enough. Nature made me so".

One revelatory sentence can be read in the Codex Atlantica, written by Leonardo near the end of his life: "While I thought that I was learning to live, I have been learning to die". This is one of those phrases that can be turned inside out, questioning its multiple meanings He has left, about death, some lines which perhaps came back to haunt him at the moment he was leaving everything. "See: one hopes and wishes to go back to one's birth­place — just as the moths fly toward the light. And the one who always happily expects new months and new years — and even if the time to which he aspires finally arrives, he will always find that this time comes too late — that one does not know that his desire contains the seeds of his own death". "But this nostalgic

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desire is the quintessence, the spirit of the elements, through which the soul, locked in the body, tends to return to its source. Know that this aspiration is the quintessence of life, the servitor of Nature and that Man is a summary of the world". His judge­ment of death must be taken from a short text, which could have a place in the foreword of a treatise never completed on the human body. This man who had dissected corpses to follow the course of certain veins thought: the organisation of our body was such a marvellous thing that the soul, even though divine, only with great difficulty leaves the body in which it was living. "And I believe its tears and its suffering are not without reason," says Leonardo. Let us not look too deeply into the meaning of these words. It is enough to consider the shadow projected here by some idea in formation: death, understood here by some as a disaster for the soul! The death of the body, diminution of this divine matter! Death touching the soul until it weeps and in its more cherished work by the destruction of such architecture that it had built to live in! The body has too many properties, it solves too many problems, it possesses too many functions and resources not to respond to some transcendental urgency, powerful enough to build it, but not powerful enough to avoid complications. It is the work and the instrument of someone who needs it, who does not reject it off-hand, who cries for it as one would cry for power. Such was Leonardo's feeling.

Musing on pain — moral pain, not physical pain — he said: "The greater an individual, the greater his capacity for suffering grows." Suffering also had a place in his material and spiritual universe; he did not cherish it, but he did not try to avoid it either. He would sometimes even sigh, feeling discouraged, and ask himself: "Lionardo perche tanto penate?" "My poor Leonardo, why did you try so hard?" Why in fact did he try so hard? Why did he want to amass for himself alone all the knowledge, which if divided, would make the wealth of specialists? Why had he always refused to acknowledge that the finite governs the life of men and that the infinite is the domain of metaphysics and, that one should not mix it with practical matters, at the risk of

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upsetting all intellectual and spiritual categories?

"What is the soul?" This is one small question which theolo­gians and philosophers have had such difficulty to answer since man has begun to think. Leonardo slides it into the middle of a series of interrogations curiously chaotic; in appearance without any link between them. It is the discovery and the knowledge of the soul that he was pursuing, because he knew without a doubt that there resides the centre of everything, the seat of circular ir­radiation, the home of the rays of light, the place where they all converge and from where they diverge.

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