Leonardo da Vinci's eye
Leonardo da Vinci's eye
How the artist and others understood the human soul
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024).
I RETURN with a sense of relief to my share of mediocrity, to the metronomic rhythm of my daily life, after contemplating Michelangelo’s Pietà (1498–99). Or Da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine (c. 1489–91). Or listening to Schubert’s String Quintet. Or experiencing works of art that have transformed my relations with the world.
They’re a painful reminder of the chasm between transcendent beauty and the earth on which I live - a state of psychic discord eased by my proximity to the beautiful visual art of Susan Bottrell.
This strangely painful sensation inspired by works of art we love has the paradoxical effect of intensifying our longing for them. They diffuse the quotidian squalor. They ease the torments of existence. They conjure compassion and tenderness. They summon the possibility of objective truth.
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Wherever we turn in the ‘High Renaissance’ of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries we encounter art that astonishes and exhausts us. The feelings the Pietà and Lady with an Ermine evoke in me are impossible to erase. A longing for their return smoulders within me.
Behold Mary cradling her dead son. She gazes on the flesh – in Michelangelo’s hands, the marble becomes the flesh of Christ’s broken body – splayed out on her lap. Her outstretched hand lingers over it. Is there anything more compassionate than that hand? ‘This may be the Son of God,’ her gesture seems to say, ‘but I am his mother.’ Two thousand years of a mother’s grief are held in that hand.
Look at the expression of defiance and dignity on the face of Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine. She is Cecilia Gallerani, a mistress of Ludovico Sforza, the duke of Milan, nicknamed ‘the seducer’. Cecilia gazes mysteriously to her left, probably at Sforza, who has been forced by his wife to abandon her.
Cecilia holds an outsized ermine. Is the animal a symbol of her purity? Ermines, by legend, preferred to die than soil their white coats. Is the ermine Sforza’s soul, to which she clings, after his body had deserted her? Is the ermine the soul of her illegitimate son, fathered by Sforza? Whatever the answers, the painting depicts a beautiful girl, a teenage mother, viciously thrust from the Milanese court.
Countless works of the Renaissance portray the soul as fallen, saved, tormented, triumphant – Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement, which covers the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, is a spectacular allegorical expression of this.
Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (1478–82) seems a hurly-burly of figures from classical mythology, prancing around a lush garden in celebration of the love of springtime and the springtime of love. Sterner minds insist that this marvellous painting is a ‘Neoplatonic allegory of the ascension of the Christian soul to heaven’. Whatever the case, it delights the heart and mind.
Titian’s Penitent Magdalene (1531) depicts the former prostitute Mary Magdalene as a repentant Christian soul. The passionate swoon of her upturned head, the sensuality in her liquid eyes, the beautiful copper locks that tumble about her naked breasts: whatever their erotic value in her past life, Titian assures us they won’t hinder the salvation of her soul in the next.
‘[S]he is naked due to her resolve to strip herself bare of her past,’ notes the Uffizi Gallery. Titian probably used a Venetian courtesan as his model: many had repented and converted to Christianity in sixteenth-century Italy, and his painting seems dedicated to them as much as to Mary Magdalene.
El Greco’s Christ on the Cross Adored by Two Donors (c. 1590) presents the ideal Christian soul during the Passion of the Christ: the ‘lower part’ of Christ’s soul suffers on the cross, while the ‘upper part’ experiences a beatific vision.
Michelangelo’s Slaves conveys the struggle of the inner self against a world of torments. Two of the four sculptures (of forty commissioned for a pope’s tomb) are, we’re told, non-finito, or unfinished. If so, we’re grateful to Michelangelo for leaving them incomplete. We see human forms struggling to free themselves from a substance, literally marble, which looks – thanks to the chiselled indents of the master’s tools – like a glutinous bog, sucking the figures back to their enslaved state.
Michelangelo worked, he said, to ‘liberate the forms imprisoned in marble’. He conceived their state as ‘an embodiment of the human soul trapped into matter and attempting to free itself from this bodily prison’. His slaves convulse before our eyes, straining to burst free, to escape the anguish of their mortal lives. Their hands and feet are literally stuck in the mud; the heads of two are faceless, their identities erased. One, the Atlas slave, seems to wrestle with a great slab on his head.
The Haywain Triptych (c. 1516) by Hieronymus Bosch describes the transit of a deviant soul passing from Eden to a life consumed by sin and death in a comically horrible Hell. It’s a cheerless theme, yet there’s more than a hint of black humour (as in all Bosch’s works) in the ardour with which he grinds our noses in the pathos and degradation of humankind.
Bosch’s Christian duty was to terrify us, but his artistic genius renders every emotion within us. Is he hinting at the absurdity of Hell, a dank palace of comic horrors? Were the bishops nodding with solemn approval at the image of a toad sitting on a woman’s vagina, a none-too-subtle symbol of earthly lust? Or were they privately wondering whether Bosch had lost his mind? His paintings are a hideously comic reflection of our worst nightmares.
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‘Consider now, O reader! what trust can we place in the ancients, who tried to define what the Soul and Life are – which are beyond proof – whereas those things which can at any time be clearly known and proved by experience remained for many centuries unknown or falsely understood.’
Thus Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) began his notebooks, questioning why ancient philosophers spent so much time trying to understand the incomprehensible (god, the soul, the afterlife), while ignoring the study of that which was before their eyes: their bodies, their feelings, nature itself.
The artist who ranked himself a military engineer first and a painter last devoted more time to understanding engines, flying machines, sewerage disposal systems and human anatomy than to his art. Yet no artist understood the inner workings of the mind and body better than Leonardo. He believed that ‘all our knowledge’ had its origins not in faith or superstition but in the ‘experience’ of ‘our perceptions’, chief among which was the power of sight.
Leonardo spent much time dissecting the human body, risking the charge of heresy. Largely self-taught, he was heavily influenced by Mondino de Luzzi (c. 1270–1326), the Italian surgeon and anatomist; Galen, the ancient Greek medical writer; and Avicenna, the Arabic philosopher and physician.
Leonardo’s earliest drawings, dating from 1489, were of the human skull, which contained, he believed, the soul or seat of consciousness. He had to see for himself, to lift the lid on the brain and look inside. In 1508, after witnessing a 100-year-old man pass away, Leonardo dissected the body in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. He hoped to find the cause of ‘so sweet a death’, and concluded that the man had died from a lack of blood in the arteries, ‘which I found very dry, thin and withered’.
Further dissections of corpses inspired Leonardo’s faith in science and reason over religion and superstition. He had no use for priests. The explanation of the mysteries of humankind had less to do with God and the afterlife (ideas that ‘clamoured’ for attention) and everything to do with scientific inquiry. Leonardo thus inaugurated the tradition of Copernicus and Galileo, and the great empiricists John Locke, Isaac Newton and David Hume.
‘The eyes’, Leonardo believed, were ‘the windows of the soul’. All true sciences were ‘the result of experiences which has passed through our senses’, but the eyes were the supreme sense organs because they filled the understanding with ‘the most complete and magnificent view of the infinite works of nature’.
‘O excellent thing,’ Leonardo wrote of the eye, ‘. . . the window of the human body through which it feels its way and enjoys the beauty of the world . . . for through the eyes all the various things of nature are represented to the soul.’ This chimed with Leonardo’s belief that seeing and studying the natural world would reveal the source of all knowledge. Through the eyes, the world ‘came into our brain’, where it was interpreted and stored in the sensus communis (common sense) of the frontal lobes.
The soul was an actual organ, he believed, the ‘seat of judgement’ situated in the sensus communis where ‘all the senses meet’ – a sort of grand junction of the nerve endings of the eyes, ears, skin, nose and tongue, which brought together experiences of the outer world. There the soul interpreted the information it received as images, sensations and judgements.
The five senses were the ‘ministers’ of the soul, Leonardo believed. Their purpose was to understand how nature worked. ‘Truth was not to be found in investigating the soul, but [in] understanding the world’ through the senses, chiefly the eyes. The artist must reach beyond merely seeing and hearing, Leonardo averred; he must use all his senses to pene- trate the body and reveal its inner spirit. For him, this was the artist’s highest purpose.
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By dissecting the human face and body – by turning the body ‘inside out’ – Da Vinci laid bare the essence of the human being, the very soul of Mona Lisa, the Lady with an Ermine and the apostles at the Last Supper.
And therein lies the mystery of these works: their faces reveal the quality of their souls or minds. We struggle to fathom that mystery, but we fail, because their faces reveal more than we’re able to comprehend.
Leonardo’s ensouled subjects seem to see us, recognise us, study us and wish to know us, just as we wish to know them. Look at the baffled faces of the crowds who mill around Mona Lisa in the Louvre. In her eyes and smile, she seems to know more about us than we know about her. For a full hour, in Kraków, I sat before Lady with an Ermine, thinking she was revealing herself to me, while in truth I was revealing myself to her.
After years of dissecting the human corpse and rendering its mysteries on the canvas, Leonardo concluded that the body, however marvellously constructed, possessed something infinitely superior: the spirit or soul that dwelt within and longed, like Michelangelo’s slaves, for liberation. The soul, he wrote, ‘whatever this may be, it is a thing divine’.
Next Thursday, 7th November 2024: Dinner with Judas
Selected sources and further reading:
Armour, P. (Spring and Fall 1998) ‘“A Ciascun Artista L’ultimo Suo”: Dante and Michelangelo’, Lectura Dantis, 22/23, Special Issue: Visible Parlare Dante and the Art of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 141–80.
Da Vinci, L. with Wells, T. (ed.) and Richter, I.A. (transl.) (2008) Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Graham, H.S. (2008) ‘Renaissance Flesh and Woman’s Devotion: Titian’s Penitent Magdalene’, Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 39(1), pp. 137–54.
Mambretti, J. (1973) ‘Neoplatonism in Botticelli’s “Primavera”’, The Bucknell Review, 21(1).
Pestilli, L. (2015) ‘Michelangelo’s Children’s Bacchanal: An Allegory of the Intemperate Soul?’ Renaissance Studies, 29(3), pp. 338–74.
Polzer, J. (January 2011) ‘Reflections on Leonardo’s Last Supper’, Artibus et Historiae, 63(63), pp. 9–37.
Struthers, S.A. (20 April 1996) ‘The Seven Deadly Sins of Hieronymus Bosch’, Dayton OH: Wright State University.
Townsley, A.L. (1972). ‘Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” and Its Aesthetic Implications’, Franciscan Studies, 32, pp. 218–24.
Viladesau, R. (2008) The Triumph of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.