If
you had to name the icons or paragons who embody the idea of European culture
for you, how many names would you come up with before remembering Leonardo da
Vinci? Most people would certainly include him in their top ten, possibly five,
and some would quite likely think of him first. Recently I read somewhere that
an Italian researcher found out Leonardo was not in fact European to the bone.
Having examined the master’s fingerprint, he determined that the whorling friction
ridges followed much the same pattern as those typically seen on the
fingerprints of Arab individuals. I have no idea of the size of the fingerprint
sample professor Luigi Capasso of the University of Chieti–Pescara used in
mounting his less than convincing statistical analysis – the specific spiral
pattern in question characterises no more than 60 per cent of the total
population of the Middle East – but the relevant database available today is
undoubtedly vast. These days, refugees flocking from the East to the borders of
our continent are fingerprinted and labelled as “migrants” by Leonardo’s
Europe. I suppose there is no point in entertaining a direct analogy between
the registering stations set up on Hungary’s southern border and the research into
the provenance of the famous Florentine painter, and from now on I will resist
the temptation to dabble in that dubious enterprise. Having said that, I wish
to essay a few propositions in the belief that the artist’s life and work
justify an inquiry along rather similar lines.
As
is commonly known, Leonardo was a love-child. Unusually, however, we know more
about the identity of his father than about that of his mother: he was one Ser
Piero da Vinci, a gentleman who decided to accept in his own name the son born
out of wedlock to his housemaid called Caterina. In those days, many women from
the East found a new home in Tuscany, most of them baptised as Maria or
Caterina on arrival. It is not inconceivable that Leonardo’s mother came to Ser
Piero’s portal as a refugee migrant herself, possibly as a victim of the slave
trade with Constantinople. We know very little if anything about her identity.
It is instructive in this regard that the painter’s baptismal certificate does
not deign to expressly identify the mother, when it mentions the priest and no
fewer than ten witnesses by name.
We
may not possess hard facts, but there are records at our disposal which
nevertheless permit certain conclusions to be drawn. Leonardo’s childhood
recollection of a raptor’s tail brushing him in his crib is widely known from
Sigmund Freud’s essay. Freud identifies the vulture – Leonardo actually called
it a kite – with the figure of the mother indulgently kissing her child. (In an
adjacent page of Codex Atlanticus,
Leonardo writes about a monkey that fondles a nestling to death.) Having grown
up in Christian Italy, the artist found such excessive adoration revulsive at a
time when the parent’s relationship with the child normally followed Christ’s
teaching as recorded in Matthew: “… he that loveth son or daughter more than me
is not worthy of me”. Furthermore, displays of parental affection also had to
be suppressed because the child, as the fruit of corporeal abandon, was often
seen as the incarnation of sin. There was another culture, however, in which
the display of emotion was hardly inhibited by such hang-ups and conventions.
Suffice it to recall the relationship between Muhammad and Halima, which was
far more intimate and informal than that between Jesus and Mary.
Leonardo’s
biography contains an intriguing blank spot on the map, perhaps related to a
trip the artist allegedly made in Arabian lands. True enough, virtually no
records or data survive about his dealings from 1483 to 1486, although it is
reasonable to surmise that he did not stay in Milan, where a massive plague had
broken out. What we do have extant is a number of letters dated from around
this period, addressed to one Diodario di Soria, the Syrian defterdar or lieutenant of the Sultan of
Babylon, providing an account of his lengthy travels in the Middle East. Even
though the majority of historians regard these peregrinations as purely
fictional and refuse to see Leonardo’s letters as anything other than part of
his “literary efforts”, this line of inquiry may still be worth pursuing in
some ways. Should we need more justification to do that than the interest in
tracing down the master’s true extraction, we might as well remember that
Syria, no less a “war zone” at the time than it is today, must have been a lucrative
prospective purchaser of the kind of war machinery and stratagems which
Leonardo preoccupied himself with and continually peddled in the courts of
Italian condottieri.
I
possess neither the requisite sources nor resources to research the provenance of
the painter’s mother, or to collect data in an effort to prove the hypothesis
that Leonardo set out for the East in search of his roots. Nor could DNA
testing be trusted to yield reliable evidence, given that Leonardo’s grave was
vandalised in the wake of the French Revolution, and his bones scattered
around, so it is far from certain that those presently found behind the
tombstone bearing his name are actually his. Instead of relying on such meagre
tools and dubious evidence, I therefore choose to concentrate on the works
themselves as the grounds for arriving at my conclusions.
The
morally based argument of researchers rejecting Leonardo’s Middle Eastern
travelogue as apocryphal – saying how could he, a citizen of Christian Europe,
possibly enter the service of a sultan? – can be refuted easily. Case in point:
in 1502, Leonardo accepted a commission from Constantinople. Indeed, he may
have been the one who first approached Bayezid II, Sultan of the Ottoman
Empire, in a letter penned in Turkish, with the proposal of designing a bridge
over the Golden Horn. Albeit the ruler rejected the plan for the gigantic
structure, envisioned for the precise location of today’s Galata Bridge, we are
still left pondering whether Leonardo had visited the site before he set about
drawing. (They say the Sultan later sought to hire Michelangelo for the job,
but he declined the offer as a steadfast Papist – or perhaps because he learned
he was only the second to be contacted for it.)
In
his biography of Leonardo, Giorgio Vasari relates how the master “spent a great
deal of time in making a pattern of a series of knots, so arranged that the
connecting thread can be traced from one end to the other and the complete
design fills a round space. There exists a splendid engraving of one of these
fine intricate designs with these words in the centre: Leonardus Vinci Accademia.” The description seems to fit to a tee
the design known as the Impresa (Emblem)
of the Accademia, sometimes also
referred to as the master’s signature knot. While the original cannot be dated
precisely, we do know that a second copy of it had been made by 1507, which
gives us a fairly good idea of the lost original. Indeed, I had better say
copies and originals, in the plural, because the emblem survived in six woodcut
versions by Albrecht Dürer and three copper engravings by an unknown artist.
The inscription of the latter – LEONARDI.ACADEMIA VI.CI; ACADEMIA.LEONARDI.VIN
– leaves no doubt that the original series of emblems was designed, or at least
conceived, by Leonardo. As for the woodcuts, those are marked by the well-known
initials of the plagiarist Albrecht Dürer.
Each
tondo, resembling an intricately
looped and knotted cord, can be thought of as the master’s personal logo, as we
would call it today. The Italian infinitive vincire,
which underlies Leonardo’s surname, means “to thread, to knot”. Fittingly, in
lieu of a signature proper, Leonardo sometimes fitted his works, including Mona
Lisa’s bodice or the ceiling fresco of the Sforza Castle, with convoluted
loops, tendrils and coils, which art historians have come to see as a sort of
signature-by-imagery. If we go searching for an antecedent of these sophisticated
tangles that operate with hidden symmetries, we will come across oriental
patterns before long. Arabesque is a term coined by European art historians to
denote a type of surface decoration employing stylised, interleaving plant
parts such as tendrils, scrolls and foliage, which cropped up in Europe
courtesy of Arab influence. However, it is with somewhat better accuracy, or at
least more vividness, that one can unravel the inception of the Leonardian
tondo, on the basis of its association with the mandala and the kolam.
In
the Orient, particularly India, the ancient custom still survives whereby magic
labyrinths with purported powers of exorcism are drawn on the ground in front
of the houses, typically by women. These labyrinths, called kolams, consist of a single, uninterrupted
line in an undulating pattern frequently folding back upon itself, drawn by
letting rice powder or plain sand trickle through the artist’s fingers. Since making
the kolam was a daily routine, its
practitioners soon attained remarkable mastery. There is no use denying that I
am fond of fantasising about Caterina getting busy each morning drawing kolam
tendrils in the clean-swept courtyard of Ser Piero’s villa. The geometrical
distillation of the kolam, called
mandala, has many uses and interpretations from being an accessory for
meditation to a rendering of the universe. Leonardo’s knotty emblems of the
Academia, as if following the tradition of the kolam and the mandala, have the capacity to simultaneously
represent irregular fracturing and unity anchored in a centre. If we want to
decipher their quintessential message, we could do worse than point to the
recuperation of harmony from dispersed fragments or, if you will, the
affirmation of the creative self entrapped in the gyratory context of the
universe.
While
it is impossible to precisely date the Academia logos, it is likely they were
drawn in Milan around the mid-1490s. What we do know to the day is that the
painter was visited on 16 July 1493 by Caterina, the mother he had not seen
since childhood except on a few scattered occasions. This time, however, she
came to stay, and she did, for the remaining few years of her life. It is
tempting to whip up a nice romantic story by envisioning a palimpsest of
mother, son, and the traces of kolam.
Leonardo’s notes, however, only mention that “Caterina showed up on the 16th of
July”. Yet I said romantic on
purpose. What I have in mind here is the novel The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci (1900), in which the author,
Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky identifies the rather common female name as
belonging to the artist’s mother. This fictional assumption was later embraced
by scholars without reservation and has since come to be regarded as an
established fact of art history.
A
good number of the technical inventions described in extant manuscripts by
Leonardo, or at least reconstructable on the basis of recollections and reports
by others, are closely linked to an Arab inventor named Badī az-Zaman Abū
l-'Izz ibn Ismā'īl ibn ar-Razāz al-Jazarī, or Ismail al-Jazari for short. His
oft-repeated, bombastic epithet “the Arab Leonardo” should perhaps be reversed,
if for no other reason than for that of chronology, to the effect of referring
to Leonardo as the “Italian al-Jazari” instead. Al-Jazari himself completed his
illustrated book on the theory and practice of mechanical devices in 1206. His
descriptions and illustrations are so meticulous and vivid that they easily
lend themselves to the actual reconstruction of various contraptions such as
water-raising machines, water clocks, water dispensers, musical devices, pumps,
camshafts, crankshafts and, most notably, his various automata, which earned
him the title “the father of robotics”, and employ many similar, often
identical, solutions to those found in the inventions of the Italian master
some ten generations later. Of course, one remains free to conclude that
Leonardo and his Muslim forerunner arrived at near identical results incidentally,
simply because each approached his subject from a similar technical vantage
point and possessed a comparable knowledge base.
Experimenting
with optics, mirrors and other aspects of imaging, Leonardo could not possibly
have circumvented the Arab Alhazen and his seminal work, Book of Optics. It was in honour of the thousandth anniversary of
this book, translated into Latin as early as in the 12th century, that the
UNESCO declared 2015 the Year of Light. The Arab scientist, credited with
developing the idea of the camera obscura, among other inventions, is often
referred to as Leonardo’s master. Most of the optical problems that preoccupied
Alhazen are so obviously addressed in due course in Leonardo’s sketchbooks that
there can be no doubt about the latter’s fascination with, and inspiration by,
the Arab scientist’s work. For instance, both pondered the laws governing the
correlation between the original image and its reflection in a curved mirror,
particularly of the concave kind. I personally believe that it was these
reflections that ultimately led Leonardo to experiment with catoptric
representation, even if none of his extant works could be regarded as an
example of anamorphosis proper.
Since
Arab medicine was less subject to restrictions by religious guidelines,
physicians there did not feel their hands tied by doctrine in studying the
structure of the human body, and their findings clearly encouraged Leonardo’s
own anatomical inquiries. In this field, the master was most profoundly
influenced by Ibn Sina, better known to us by his Latinised name Avicenna.
The
knowledge accumulated in Ancient Greece was for the most part handed down to
the Renaissance via the workshops of Medieval monks, although in the process
many texts underwent fundamental revisions thanks to theologically informed
censorship. The other channel led through Arab mediation, specifically through
the works of the authors of Antiquity as reworked, expanded and elaborated upon
by Arab scholars and scientists. While these also had to conform to
ecclesiastical criteria, more often than not they represented a more accurate
and more authentic corpus – at least one that Leonardo found more comfortable
to work with and draw upon.
If
Leonardo may be declared a Catholic artist on the evidence of the pious
portraits he painted on commission, the seasoned eye will not miss the numerous
features scattered across the oeuvre that seem to imply a downright heretic
ethos, or certainly one that did not readily align itself with the teachings of
the Holy Church. Further proof for this assumption comes from Leonardo’s
apocryphal subjects, his portrayals of John the Baptist, and his tendency to
give precedence over Christ to the prophet John the Baptist, equally revered in
the Islam by the name of Yahya. Leonardo’s surviving notes, which run to some
seven thousand pages, do not contain a single admonition to concede one view or
another solely on the grounds of faith. Instead, he is only willing to accept
knowledge obtained through personal experience, along with the conclusions and
inferences drawn from that empirical substance. Anticipating Copernicus by
forty years, his famous assertion Il sole
non si muove (“The sun does not move”) was considered thoroughly
anticlerical, and as such could easily have put his person in danger had he
chosen to propagate his observation or explain it in deeper detail.
There
is one circumstance in Leonardo’s biography that is difficult to account for.
In 1481, Pope Sixtus IV asked Lorenzo de Medici to recruit a handful of the
finest artists in Florence for the job of painting his chapel in Rome, the
Sistine. Leonardo somehow did not make it to the list, even though he should
have been the top candidate to pick. Indeed, he never received a well-paid
commission from the Pope – something that all of his colleagues coveted – then,
before or thereafter. Was it because everybody knew he was hardly comme il faut when it came to matters of
faith?
One
cannot help but wonder why Vasari, his biographer, set such great store by
emphasising the moribund Leonardo’s conversion, why he went into such vivid
detail depicting his contrite confession and zealous acceptance of the host on
his death bed. Undoubtedly, in light of his oeuvre, it was at that point no
longer feasible to withhold recognition from Leonardo, to persist in
symbolically quarantining him as an enemy of the Holy Church based on the
stigma inflicted upon him by his sheer atheism or, what is even more likely, by
his flirtation with Islam. That something like a “Muslim blemish” did indeed
tarnish his otherwise immaculate curriculum
vitae is a view I can only attempt to corroborate obliquely, by means of
some rather vague propositions.
A
recently much hyped claim by the Iranian researcher Morteza Khalaj Amirhosseini
that Leonardo actually converted to the Muslim faith has thus far been rejected
by all forums that can be taken seriously, and the “19th-century source” the
author invokes as testimony but consistently fails to identify is impossible to
verify and therefore doubtful, to say the least. Perhaps it would have been
wisest not to bother with this contention any further. Yet I felt compelled to
try to track down the identity of the mysterious Frenchman whom Amirhosseini
claims has been deliberately swept under the carpet in Europe, for fear of
“losing” the greatest artist ever reared by the continent. At first I thought
of the Swiss Jean Louis Burckhardt, who wrote in French and in fact converted
to the Islam himself – probably not out of conviction so much as to gain freedom
of movement since he sought to explore the corners of the Arab world off limits
for infidels. I myself would not put such a ruse past Leonardo, who was never
averse to make-believe. For instance, he did not have any qualms about acting
the turncoat in a Milan alternately occupied and reoccupied by the House of
Sforza and the French, whenever the other side held out the hope of a more
lucrative commission. I have turned every page Burckhardt ever wrote in vain; I
have not come across a single reference to Leonardo’s alleged conversion. Nor
have I been able to determine whether the author was related to the art
historian Jacob Burckhardt, another Swiss but one who preferred to write in
German, and who devoted much effort to studying Leonardo and, more generally,
the Muslim influence in Italy. Needless to say, this other Burckhardt never
said anything about Leonardo’s conversion, either. Incidentally, the greatest
French Leonardo-specialist of the 19th century was Gabriel Séailles, the author
of Léonard de Vinci, l’artiste et le
savant (1892). Séailles made no more mention of Leonardo’s conversion than
his colleagues, but he dropped an ironic bon mot that I cannot bring myself to
pass over in silence, if only for its relevance to our day and age. He said
that Leonardo was the kind of artist whose legend keeps more people busy than
do the facts of his life and work.
At
long last, I came upon the German Jean Paul Richter, one of the foremost
19thcentury authorities on Leonardo, widely recognised as the translator and
publisher of the master’s notes and diaries. Lo and behold, in a study
published in 1881, Richter did venture the assumption that Leonardo converted
to the Prophet’s faith. His hypothesis was ardently opposed by many at the
time, as it has been since then. Yet Richter stood fast against the attempts at
refutation. He never had a doubt about the reality of Leonardo’s Oriental
outing. He believed every word the artist wrote about his visits to Cyprus,
Egypt, Mesopotamia and Armenia, all the way to witnessing the sky-high peaks of
the Caucasus and the Taurus.
Conjectures,
vague assumptions, half-finished thoughts – possibly none of this would have
made it worth my while to embark on this project were it not for the poignant
relevance of the subject today, when thousands of migrants are marching to
Europe. Do they all know who Leonardo da Vinci was? I suspect not. Then again,
familiarity with the artist in the West these days relies more on trendy
mystifications à la Dan Brown (The Da
Vinci Code) than on facts verified by art history. I might as well leave
this essay hanging in the air, as it were, content to admit my failure to
unearth conclusive evidence regarding Leonardo’s extraction and faith. But that
would be beside the point. The point I want to make in closing is that his
background of origin can or should not have any bearing on our judgement and
appreciation of the painterscientist’s oeuvre. Was he European or Arab? Who
cares, really?
Translation by Péter
Balikó Lengyel
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