Leonardo's Brain

by Leonard Shlain

  * Neuroscientist Lillian Schwartz observed that the bony structure of Mona Lisa’s face corresponds uncannily to Leonardo’s features. When the famous red chalk drawing of an old sage that most art historians agree is Leonardo’s self-portrait is superimposed on the image of the Mona Lisa, the fit is striking. If Schwartz’s hypothesis is correct, Duchamp’s gesture is all the more prescient and outrageous (Carmen C. Bambach, ed. Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003).

  Duchamp aimed his visual and auditory double entendre at everyone who loves fine art. He wanted to puncture the notion that art was only for the cognoscenti. Average viewers, he believed, did not need a layer of interpreters interceding to tell them what they should see. In another of his memorable quotes, Duchamp said:

  Art is a habit-forming drug. That’s all it is for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People speak of it with great, religious reverence, but I don’t see why it is to be so much revered. I’m afraid I’m an agnostic when it comes to art. I don’t believe in it with all the mystical trimmings. As a drug it’s probably very useful for many people, very sedative, but as a religion it’s not even as good as God.

  In an age replete with revolutionaries, Duchamp was sui generis. His work was influential in setting the stage for the Dada and Surrealist movements that followed within a few years.

  But was there an artist in the Renaissance who performed an act comparable to Duchamp’s Mona Lisa graffiti? Again conjuring time travel, what if we could beam Leonardo into the twenty-first century and give him a tour of our museums and let him follow the trends in art from after his death leading right up to the modernism revolution. Then, bringing him to stand before L.H.O.O.Q., what would be his reaction? Would he not have recognized Duchamp’s impish gesture as that of a kindred soul? Given Leonardo’s disdain for the pretensions of the academics, parvenus, the Church, and nobility, would he not have applauded Duchamp’s act of vandalism? Tailored for his time, Leonardo, too, carried out a less obvious but nevertheless vigorous seditious warfare against artistic conventions.

  A crucial difference is that artists in Leonardo’s time were completely dependent for commissions on rich patrons, ruling authorities, and the Church. The concept of “art for art’s sake” did not exist. Also, artists lived in a far more dangerous and censorious time, when dissent was often brutally quashed. Those in power who felt threatened by different points of view not uncommonly assassinated enemies, exiled opponents, burned “heretics” at the stake, or, in the case of the Pope, wielded the heavy cudgel of excommunication for any perceived menace to their authority. Leonardo’s gestures could not dare be as flamboyant as Duchamp’s. Nevertheless, in many respects, Leonardo’s well-cloaked defiance exceeds that of his impertinent twentieth-century counterpart.

  Leonardo, like Duchamp, attempted to move away from mere retinal art, although he never called it that. He advised artists that merely reproducing the external appearance of their subjects was not sufficient, no matter how technically excellent were their efforts. Leonardo insisted that besides a realistic landscape into which they placed their subjects, they must also find a way to convey the subject’s inner mental landscape. Failure to accomplish this mandate relegated their art to Duchamp’s dismissive epithet, “pretty pictures.” Leonardo expected that a painting should encourage a viewer to ponder something deeper than just the surface “prettiness” of artfully arranged objects realistically rendered. Duchamp and Leonardo echoed each other, and likely would have heartily enjoyed each other’s company.

  Chapter 8

  Leonardo the Trickster

  We have seen that central among the traits that define a creative person are two somewhat opposed tendencies: a great deal of curiosity and openness on one hand and almost obsessive perseverance on the other. Both of these have to be present for a person to have fresh ideas and prevail.

  —Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  The desire to know is natural to good men.

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  [Leonardo] had a very heretical state of mind. He could not be content with any kind of religion at all, considering himself in all things much more a philosopher than a Christian.

  —Giorgio Vasari

  Duchamp’s antiestablishment stance is but an echo of the many disputes that arose between Leonardo and clerics. The Church had a considerable investment in maintaining a pious decorum when commissioning religious art. Artists and the public were of the same mind. When racy paintings and sculptures of nudes reappeared in the Renaissance, they made it past the religious police under the flimsy excuse that they were permissible because they evoked the newly rediscovered art of the “Classical Age.” When depicting the Holy Family or the saints, however, the Church expected artists to strictly adhere to the sanctified conventions.

  In the early 1480s, Milanese friars of the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception commissioned Leonardo and his two partners, the de Predis brothers, to paint the Holy Family, with the emphasis on Mary. The brothers were to paint the two panels on the sides, but the center panel was to be the work of Leonardo. The friars demanded that he sign a contract specifying how the paintings were to be composed, what color clothing the principals were to wear, how many cherubim and prophets there were to be in accompaniment, and other irritating intrusions on the artist’s creativity. They also inserted a clause demanding that he finish the painting by a fixed date. Leonardo signed, but he obviously had no intention of being told how to compose a painting. Missing the deadline, he finally delivered to his impatient but eager patrons his first version of Virgin of the Rocks in 1483.

  Historical records confirm that they were so upset, they refused to pay him until he altered this masterpiece to comply more fully with the contract. To express their displeasure, they piled on additional contingencies not included in the original document. As the dispute dragged on, a disillusioned Leonardo turned to the many other responsibilities he had as the artist and engineer to the court of Milan’s Duke of Sforza. The de Predis brothers, however, persisted in demanding their share of the commission, and a long and contentious lawsuit followed that was not resolved until some twenty years later.

  There has been debate on the reasons for the dispute but we do know of Leonardo’s idiosyncratic rendering of the holy assemblage and his jettisoning of clichéd sacred shibboleths. In what would become his signature style of composing multiple subjects in a painting, Leonardo grouped the Virgin, the infant Jesus, the infant St. John, and the angel Uriel in a pyramidal construction—nothing very heretical. However, Leonardo omitted the requisite halos floating above the heads of his figures, blurring the distinction between the sacred and profane. Thus, Leonardo moved the four revered personages, each of whom is associated with heaven, closer to the secular.

  If one wants to read heresy in Leonardo’s Virgin, there is more. The Gospel of Matthew tells the story of Joseph and Mary’s flight into Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod, the king of Judea. Tricked by the Magi, who were present at Jesus’s birth, Herod was told that an infant was born within his kingdom that would one day usurp his power. Intent on ensuring that this could not happen, Herod ordered the killing of all the firstborn sons of the Jews. The angel Uriel forewarned Mary and Joseph, and, under his protection, they fled into the Egyptian desert. The thinly veiled attempt by Matthew to relate the birth of Jesus to the birth of Moses (whose mother also had to protect her son from an identical threat) and the connection of both narratives to the desert raises the possibility that Matthew’s story was completely fabricated. None of the other three Gospel writers mention this tale.

  Further, The New Testament does not contain any passage about a meeting between John the Baptist and Jesus when they were infants. Instead, an unverifiable and extremely implausible legend has the two babies meeting during Mary’s flight into the desert. Only a strained and fanciful interpretation of any biblical passage coul
d place the two in proximity at this young an age.

  Leonardo also painted the male archangel Uriel in a strange way. According to the Bible, Uriel was the Angel of Death. He is the archangel responsible for killing all the firstborn sons of the Egyptians in the Exodus story. Presiding over God’s potent thunderbolts, Uriel generally comes across as a terrifying figure. Leonardo rendered this supposedly frightening character androgynously. A fierce he appears more like a gentle she. Additionally, Uriel points his/her dainty finger portentously at the infant John the Baptist rather than at the baby Jesus.

  Compounding the strangeness of Leonardo’s composition was its setting. Mary appears to be in a cave, but impossibly suspended boulders that defy the principles of gravity form its ceiling. Leonardo’s otherworldly landscape does not resemble anything heavenly, and is more the way artists typically imagined Hell. What’s more, Leonardo’s seascape in the background does not jibe with what one conjures up when imagining an Egyptian desert landscape. All told, Leonardo’s rendering of the Holy Family in this version of Virgin of the Rocks would have had the same effect on his audience as did Duchamp’s much later placement of a mustache and goatee on the Mona Lisa.

  Twenty years later, with the help of the de Predis brothers, Leonardo delivered a second version of the same painting. This time, halos were in evidence, and the archangel Uriel, who appeared more masculine, was no longer pointing at the wrong baby. Leonardo did render the Virgin as older than the fresh maiden he had painted in his first version. Due to insufficient records, art historians have been unable to unravel the peculiar set of circumstances surrounding the mystery of why it took Leonardo twenty some years to redo the painting.

  Leonardo also unconventional renders Mary and the baby Jesus in The Benois Madonna (c. 1478) [Fig. 13]. The New Testament does not provide readers with any clues as to whether Mary was right- or left-handed. Yet, in many of the paintings, artists depict Mary holding her baby with her right hand. Casual observation of real mothers reveals that the majority of women, being right-handed, cradle their babies on the left side of their body, the better to free up their dominant hand.

  Even left-handed mothers prefer holding their baby in their left hands as the soothing rhythm of their heartbeat quiets the baby. In a significant number of these early Madonna and child paintings, the manner in which male artists depicted Mary holding her baby borders on the incompetent. In more renderings than one would expect, a modern woman would be admonished for child endangerment if she held her baby similar to the way Mary does. In Leonardo’s Benois Madonna, Mary’s hands hold a robust baby Jesus in what appear to be a natural manner. Some have gone so far as to argue that Mary’s smile and the sheer healthy size of the baby Jesus also go against typical renderings of the time.

  Others have seen an artfully disguised jab in his widely-hailed The Last Supper. Vasari tells us how Raphael stood before it speechlessly, marveling at the expressiveness of the heads and the grace and movement of the figures. Kenneth Clark called it the most dramatic and most highly organized composition of its kind.

  But another ambiguous riddle in the painting has recently ignited a flash fire. Leonardo always emphasized the art of seeing, which meant to him abandoning preconceived notions about the subject matter. In his famous rendering of The Last Supper, Leonardo positioned immediately to Jesus’s right a figure who appears to be a woman instead of one of the twelve male apostles. And not just any woman, but the woman whom the New Testament smears as a prostitute, despite (or because of) beliefs that she was Jesus’s wife or lover.

  Viewers consistently read the figure to the right of Jesus to be the youthful apostle John. A few art historians had raised the question in hushed voices in the genteel world of academia, but author Dan Brown brought the controversy to a large public audience in his 2003 bestseller, The Da Vinci Code. The result was unexpected and volcanic. It seemed everyone had an opinion, and it elicited a vigorous defense from offended traditionalists who insisted that the figure is not Mary Magdalene but St. John the Younger.

  The accounts of the three synoptic Gospel writers (Mark, Luke, and Matthew) and John’s version, which is the most complete, provided considerable detail when they described the scene of the Last Supper. At the meal itself, the apostle John the Younger’s place was next to Jesus, on whose chest he leaned (John 13:23, 25). The Last Supper was a favorite theme that had been rendered by numerous previous artists. In many of these other paintings, the artist remained faithful to the New Testament, posing the figure of the apostle John as either asleep with his head resting on the table or, alternatively, leaning on Jesus, as described in the text. Most obvious is that the figure resembles less in form and face a young man, and more a young woman.

  Let us consider the alternative possibility—that the figure to the right of Jesus actually is Mary Magdalene. Is not her body language, her folded hands, and her facial expression that of a woman resigned to the coming arrest, trial, torture, and crucifixion of the man she loves?

  Outraged traditionalists dismiss the theory out of hand, claiming that the whole argument is the result of fevered emanations from feminist-leaning, anti-Christians’ overactive imaginations. But does this alternative interpretation have merit? The Last Supper is arguably the most complex composition in the entire history of art. Leonardo left not a single detail to chance. Taking all of the above arguments and counterarguments into consideration, a strong case can be made in the court of competitive plausibility that Leonardo, in a grand Duchampian gesture, fooled generations of viewers and art critics.

  Duchamp’s guerrilla act of pasting a mustache and goatee on the features of the most famous visage in Western art alludes to a man impersonating a woman, a not particularly subtle reference to Leonardo’s sexual orientation. L.H.O.O.Q. was not only disrespectful, but it was also vulgar both in its title and iconic sexual innuendo. Not only would Leonardo not have been insulted by Duchamp’s subversive act, he probably would have approved.

  Leonardo concluded his artistic career by painting his most enigmatic work, a portrait of St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of Florence [Fig. 14].

  According to the New Testament, John was an anchorite who spent most of his years living a self-imposed life of deprivation in the Judean desert. Avoiding the temptations of the external world, anchorites fasted, meditated, prayed, and renounced worldly pleasures. Sects promoting such a lifestyle were common around the time of Jesus. The Essenes, for example, were a breakaway group of militant Jews committed to living a spare, desert existence free of the pleasures of the senses while they waited impatiently for the arrival of the Messiah to right their perceived wrongs.

  The Synoptic Gospels describe John the Baptist as an undernourished, pious, abstemious holy man who cared little about his external appearance. Taking their cues from the text, artists preceding Leonardo imagined John the Baptist as a gaunt ascetic.

  So what are we to make of Leonardo’s final painting of this well-defined historical figure? Instead of painting an environment that aids in his identity, Leonardo eliminated all perspectivist clues and external hints of context. The viewer simply confronts the half-naked saint wearing a smile, his right forearm upright with forefinger extended in a gesture pointing heavenward.

  In contrast to Leonardo’s earlier figure of another ascetic, St. Jerome in the wilderness, John does not express the stereotypical, anguished face of a religious seeker. Instead, Leonardo presents a youthful, pretty boy with a head of carefully coiffed, cascading curls falling to his shoulders. A sly smile graces his smooth, beardless features. No masculine muscle definition sculpts this figure’s biceps, triceps, or deltoids. Leonardo’s version of the saint presents a well-fed, pneumatic young man.

  Leonardo was preternaturally aware of the power of symbolism and rarely did he place a plant, tree, flower, or animal in one of his compositions that did not refer to literature, religion, or mythology. These symbols always enhanced the central subject of the painting or deepened its meaning. As evide
nced in the detail Leonardo devoted to his The Last Supper, he obviously studied the New Testament very thoroughly. Therefore, his departure from its details describing the saintly anchorite’s surroundings is noteworthy. St. John the Baptist lived in a harsh desert environment that presently borders Israel and Jordan. There are few trees and little vegetation. Leopards are not indigenous to this desiccated environment today, and they were not present in the first century. So why would Leonardo drape John’s midriff in a leopard skin, especially when the Bible states that John wore a meager covering composed of camel skins and leather? So subtle are the leopard’s spots on John’s garment that only very close examination of the painting will reveal their presence.

  The figure in mythology intimately associated with leopards and leopard skins is Dionysus, god of sensuality, wine, ecstasy, and unbridled sexuality. Ample corroborating evidence in Greek plays associate leopards with Dionysus. Looking at the painting with fresh eyes suggests that the sensuous smile, oiled curls, boyish figure, and overall sumptuous nature of this painting, at the very least, beget another interpretation.

  Among the many exploits the Greeks attributed to Dionysus was one that involved the theme of resurrection. Prior to the masculine ethos of Christianity’s suppression of pagan beliefs, the central myth revolved around a mother resurrecting her son. In the Dionysus myth, the son resurrected his mother. With permission from Zeus, Dionysus traveled to the netherworld to petition the god Hades to release his dead mother, the mortal Semele. Surprisingly successful, Dionysus departed with her and ascended to Mount Olympus, whereupon Zeus graciously seated her next to him on his right. Among the lush imaginative adventures of the gods and goddesses of the Greek pantheon, no other rescue of this nature ever occurred.