Leonardo's Brain

by Leonard Shlain

  Chapter 6

  Renaissance Art/Modern Art

  If the body of every feeding thing continually dies and is continually reborn, how can that art be “most noble” which can engrave or paint only a single moment?

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  He was like a man who awoke too early in the darkness while everyone else was still asleep.

  —Dmitry Merezhkovsky

  There is in great art a clairvoyance for which we have not yet found a name, and still less an explanation.

  —John Russell, art critic

  The first artist in the modern world to resurrect Leonardo’s innovations was Édouard Manet. Following a span of nearly half a millennium, during which artists obediently conformed to rigid guidelines concerning perspective, composition, and subject matter, Manet was in the vanguard of a new generation of artists who acquired their skills outside of the influential French Beaux-Arts Academy. In 1859, the twenty-seven-year-old artist stood before his works and destroyed nearly everything he had painted up to that point. He announced to his startled friends, “From now on I will be of our times and work with what I see.” But the new works that he created met with a withering reception. With a few notable exceptions, critics delivered harsh verdicts, criticizing his paintings as clumsy and unpolished.

  Acceptance for artists at this time in France depended upon winning a cherished spot to show their art in the prestigious annual Salon, and it was the grand old graybeards of the Academy who made up the jury of this much-anticipated public event. But change was in the air, and many younger artists decried the selection process, suspecting that it was heavily biased against them. Rebelling against repeated rejections, in 1863 they defiantly organized a parallel art show nearby, naming it the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Rejected).

  Manet exhibited several major works, but his centerpiece was Le Déjeuner sur L’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass, 1863) [Fig. 5]. It was a shocking composition. He positioned his favorite model, Victorine Meurant, nonchalantly sitting sans clothes upon a picnic blanket while staring impudently at the viewer. Alongside her, two men in business suits discourse on some subject; but, adding to the unsettling aspect of the painting, they not only seem oblivious to the naked woman sitting next to them, but they are not even looking directly at each other. The critics savaged the painting. People came and laughed at its composition. Nevertheless, Le Déjeuner sur L’Herbe drew the largest crowds and garnered considerable ink in the newspapers.

  The criticisms leveled at Le Déjeuner were that it was not picturesque, nor did it seem to have any symbolic reference to virtue, mythology, history, or religion. Increasing the tension, Victorine’s clothes lay in a pile in front of her. The recent popularity of photography had made pornographic images ubiquitous. In France, the art-savvy public acknowledged that the nude belonged to a genre of high art, but a naked woman represented pornography. Among Manet’s other painterly sins was his disregard of perspective. The figure of the woman bathing in the background would have to be about nine feet tall if she was corrected for perspective. Further, Manet played fast and loose with the direction of the light source and the position of shadows.

  Critics attributed these flaws to Manet’s lack of a formal École des Beaux-Arts’ education, or simply wrote them off to a sad dearth of talent. Manet, however, was a master draftsman and was well acquainted with the intricacies of perspective; he disobeyed those rules purposely to increase the painting’s interest. Manet’s alteration of perspective compares to Leonardo’s. Both artists clearly understood that this optical technique could be manipulated to produce a dramatic effect in the painting. In this way, both men are markers at each end of perspective’s hold on the imagination of Western painters.

  While art history books have repeatedly documented the brouhaha over Le Déjeuner, less well known is that Manet had positioned an equally outrageous work on the adjoining wall: Mademoiselle V . . . in the Costume of an Espada (1862). As the viewer walked from one wall to the next, the juxtaposition of the same model, naked in one painting and cross-dressed in the most macho outfit imaginable in the other, increased their visual shock. But, Manet further discombobulated his viewers by cutting the ground out from under his matadoress. (As we shall see later, Manet’s use of sexual ambiguity was also a key feature of Leonardo’s paintings.) Given the background information, she is obviously positioned in a bullring, but Manet obscures where exactly she is standing. She appears suspended in midair!

  In many of his other paintings, Manet again placed his solitary figures with minimal or contradictory perspectivist clues (The Fifer, Woman with a Parrot, and Dead Toreador). Similar to Manet’s female matador, the viewer is unsure where exactly these figures in the foreground are in relationship to their background. Leonardo’s last painting, St. John the Baptist (discussed in the following chapter), is completely devoid of any background that could assist viewers in knowing where the saint is standing. In between Leonardo and Manet, there were no artists who painted figures without background clues.*

  * Many of Rembrandt’s portraits seem similarly devoid of background clues, but close inspection reveals something in the background that helps to locate the subject of the painting.

  In the first half of the nineteenth century, great strides were made in chemistry that led to the manufacture of oil paints that could be stored in aluminum tubes. Colors became brighter and more stable, and a greater number of hues were available commercially. These advances relieved artists from the tedious task of having to mix and compound their own paints from scratch. In the early 1870s, the portability of paints and the invention of the folding easel led French artist Claude Monet to abandon his studio and venture out into the countryside to begin to paint his subjects and landscapes en plein air. This change in locus constituted a revolution. Rather than plan, study, and labor over preparatory drawings and paint compositions in the confines of often poorly lit studios, Monet moved outdoors to paint the objects and scenes he saw with greater immediacy in their natural settings.

  Monet strove to capture on canvas the evanescent moment of his first impression, and critics dubbed his technique Impressionism. There were no artists in the preceding several centuries that had ever experimented with a similar technique. But should not Leonardo’s 1473 sketch of the Tuscan countryside en plein air qualify as the first Impressionist work in Western art history? A full four hundred years earlier, Leonardo had anticipated this great movement of art of the late nineteenth century.

  Another giant among fin de siècle artists was Paul Cézanne. He began a series of still lifes in the late 1880s that differed from those painted previously by Western artists. Viewers and critics stood before them baffled as to how to correctly “read” them. The problem: They tried to view Cézanne’s work within the hidebound framework that had been the accepted norm for hundreds of years. Cézanne painted each object in his compositions as if it was viewed from a different angle. Essentially, Cézanne’s still lifes afforded the viewer the opportunity to see multiple views simultaneously. Cézanne’s eccentric reading of perspective set the stage for a much more radical revolution.

  In 1904, the twenty-two-year-old Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso, moved to Paris and teamed up with another young artist, Georges Braque. Together they rocked the art world to its foundation by introducing a new way to see art that radically broke with everything that had come before. Picasso outrageously declared, “We must kill modern art.”

  The critic Louis Vauxcelles acidly criticized Picasso’s and Braque’s new style by claiming that their paintings resembled a jumble of “little cubes.” The name Cubism stuck. Despite its initial hostile reception by many art critics and art lovers, Cubism took the art world by storm. Critics alternately fumed or waxed hyperbolically that, even taking into account Cézanne’s earlier intimations, nothing like it could be found in the work of any previous artist.

  Pablo Picasso was once asked in a train compartment by a fellow passenger why he did not paint people “
the way they really are.” Picasso asked what the man meant by the expression. The man pulled out a snapshot and said, “That’s my wife.”

  Picasso responded, “Isn’t she rather small and flat.”

  Perhaps confident that they would not find a lone Renaissance artist who had anticipated the Cubist movement, art critics did not search far enough into the past. Leonardo, like Cézanne, Picasso, and Braque, felt constrained by the monocular view demanded by perspective. He sought a way to show multiple points of view of the same object, simultaneously. He needed a better way to envision the relationships of parts to the whole, and to each other. It was Leonardo’s anatomical dissections that provided the impetus for such an optical trick. Leonardo was the first artist to make comprehensive illustrations of the interior of the human body. Although technical in nature, they are masterpieces of art by any standard, and many art historians have not hesitated to call them just that.

  He solved the problem of how to demonstrate the many different sides of an anatomical feature simultaneously and the relationship of parts to contiguous structures by inventing the exploded view. Leonardo drew the same object on the same page but rendered it from different angles of vision, thus allowing a viewer to envision simultaneously multiple aspects of the same object. There is an uncanny similarity between Leonardo’s anatomical drawings and Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubist paintings. At the heart of all of these works is the principle of conveying information about an object’s suchness (to borrow a term from Zen).

  Leonardo’s art tilted more to his dissections’ scientific needs than the art of the Cubists, who were more interested in artistic deformations of familiar objects. Leonardo, in his anatomical drawings, Cézanne in his still lifes, and Picasso and Braque in their Cubist paintings, all wrestled with a new way to portray visual information outside the cage of cyclopean perspective. All of their solutions were stunning and revolutionary; they also all revolved around the same principle. In the vast expanse of years that intervened between Leonardo and the turn of the twentieth century, no other artists had tackled this problem.*

  * Between 1826 and 1833, the Japanese artist Hokusai predated Cézanne by painting thirty-six views of Mount Fuji in his famous Ukiyo-e series.

  Another similarity between the innovations of Cézanne and Leonardo concerns Cézanne’s desire to capture the essence of one mountain in Provence: Mont Sainte-Victoire. He understood that he could not convey the mountain’s suchness by painting it only from a single point of view. During the 1890s until the time he died in 1906, Cézanne painted a series of views of the mountain from different locations. The total effect of these combined paintings was to convey a holistic view of the mountain. No Western artist had ever conceived of this method of showing the differing aspects of the same object as seen from different angles—except one.

  Five hundred years earlier, Leonardo had invented a method to do just that. In his anatomical drawings he depicted sequential renderings close together of the shoulder but visualized from different angles [Fig. 6].

  From the Bavarian countryside, Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky initiated an innovation that would dominate twentieth-century art. Like many great discoveries in both art and science, his breakthrough was serendipitous, but it occurred in a mind prepared to look at the world in a fresh way. Alone in his studio one day in 1910, Kandinsky became increasingly dissatisfied with his efforts to force the painting he was working on to conform to the vision that existed in his mind. Frustrated, he decided to take a break and go for a walk. Just before leaving, for no particular reason, he absentmindedly turned the painting on its side.

  Returning later, Kandinsky, deep in thought about some other subject, paused in the doorway and, looking up, caught a glimpse of his work in progress. For a moment, he stood there, puzzled, unable to recognize it. Then he remembered that he had turned the work 90 degrees. Upon reflection, Kandinsky realized he was more engaged by not being able to make sense of what he was looking at. He alternatively experimented with examining his work right side up and turning it on its side. Kandinsky finally concluded that the painting was more interesting when he could not affix a name to a familiar image. So began abstract painting.

  Leonardo, too, was interested in the nature of abstract designs. In his Treatise on Painting (not published until 1651), he spoke of a method “of quickening the spirit of invention.” He advised artists:

  You should look at certain walls stained with damp, or at stones of uneven colour. If you have to invent some backgrounds you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, great plains, hills and valleys in great variety; and expressions of faces and clothes and an infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose stroke you may find every named word which you can imagine.

  A new kind of abstract painter emerged after World War II in the United States. Jackson Pollock, the leading proponent of the school of “action painters,” had set for himself the daunting task of representing on canvas the essence of the process of painting.

  The verb “to paint” describes an artist holding a paint-soaked brush, making repetitive strokes on a surface. How could someone represent what is essentially a motion on what would eventually become a static canvas? Pollock’s solution was pure genius: He discarded his brushes and placed his canvas on the floor. He exaggerated the delicate movement of the typical artists’ wrists and fingers by flinging, dripping, and throwing the paint. The resulting pattern of colors amid tangled skeins of paint, although appearing chaotic, paradoxically possessed a strange unity and beauty.

  Critics have hailed the abstract painters as true revolutionaries who blazed a trail in an area where no Western artist had gone before. But has their assessment left someone out? Near the end of Leonardo’s life, he began to experiment with art lacking a recognizable image. In a melancholy mood of his failing fortunes, health, and the many reverses he had suffered, his mind turned to imagining how the world would end. He began an apocalyptic series of pen-and-ink drawings that were his rendition of the great flood that would wash away the evils to which mankind, in Leonardo’s view, was so inextricably entwined.

  In these fantastic drawings, Leonardo blurred the distinctions between objects and patterns. The walls of falling water that Leonardo envisioned engulfing the world in this series, when aligned alongside Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950), reveal an astonishing similarity. Further, Leonardo’s recommendation to other artists to throw a paint-soaked sponge at a wall presages Pollock’s paint-flinging method by centuries.

  Leonardo also preceded by half a millennium a novel art movement that arose from a genteel argument concerning the manner in which a horse runs. In 1872, Leland Stanford, railroad magnate, founder of Stanford University, and racehorse aficionado, engaged in a lively dispute with several other owners of thoroughbreds. The question: Does a galloping horse have one of its four legs in contact with the ground at all times, or is there a moment when the horse is completely airborne? Bets were placed, and to settle the wager, the equestrians called upon Eadweard Muybridge, a noted photographer. He positioned a series of cameras along the side of a racetrack and then rigged them with strategically placed trip wires. Muybridge produced a series of still photographs revealing that the positions of the galloping horse’s legs were unexpectedly different from how generations of artists had imagined them.

  Artists typically rendered a galloping horse with its two forelegs extended forward and both rear legs extended backward, with none of them touching the ground.* Muybridge’s experiment proved without a doubt that a horse in motion has all four of its feet off the ground, if only for an instant. Stanford’s original challenge led eventually to the invention of the motion picture. Muybridge’s work attracted the attention of Thomas Edison and William Dickson, and, in 1888, the two inventors produced the first motion picture camera. In
the same time span a French physician and photographer, Étienne-Jules Marey, and his countrymen, the Lumière brothers (Auguste and Louis), also contributed to the development of film independently of Muybridge. Using the technique of time-lapse photography, all of these pioneers studied the motion of bodies in time and space.

  * Leonardo incorrectly drew a horse with two legs forward and two legs back.

  Master of the future, Leonardo anticipated all of their ideas and innovations. The artist was in his fifties when he began making preparatory sketches for his work, Leda and the Swan. He experimented with a series of poses wherein, when placed side by side, Leda rises from a kneeling position to a full upright one. If these drawings were to be placed one in front of the other in sequence, they would create a flipbook that would reveal Leda moving in time.*

  * Leonardo’s original painting was ordered burned by a prudish French noblewoman who felt the work was too lascivious, but we know how it appeared, both from Leonardo’s extensive preparatory drawings contained in his notebooks and the copies followers made of it.

  Leonardo employed a similar technique in his anatomical drawings. As noted earlier, seeking a means to illustrate multiple views of an anatomical part, such as the shoulder and upper extremity, he drew it in multiple views presented on the same page, as if the viewer were moving around the object. If these drawings were arranged to run together at flicker fusion, the result would be similar to what one sees in a motion picture.*