Times of crisis and change, like the dawning of the Anthropocene, can sometimes make eras of profound transformation like the Renaissance of Leonardo’s day possible or even necessary. 

In such cases it is only by means of a renewal of original aspirations and ideals, combined with present-moment innovation and applied effectively to concrete problems, that societies evolve, adapt, and achieve sustainability.

The Enlightenment age which first proposed the modern democratic form of government was itself an example of such a renascence, translating the modern intellectual ideals of Leonardo and others into a practical model for founding a social and political order, a kind of blueprint or “novum organum” as Bacon wrote to “rebuild the arts and sciences” – including the political – on a solid "foundation of experience.”  Thinkers like Kant and Hume applied the ideals of reason and experience in their attempt to ground philosophical progress on stable yet just principles; and poetically Blake affirmed in 1788 “the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences; This faculty I treat of.”  Emerson, Pater, and Dewey, Montaigne and Cervantes, Roger Bacon and Dante all placed experience, esperienza, and experientia at the center of gravity of the modern orbit. 

Perhaps today’s crises demand that we rediscover and reorient ourselves yet once more to this multifarious and moving center, and as many before us have done “make it new.”

Unfortunately, present challenges can also make alternatives to renascence attractive for many societies facing turbulence and stress.  Some prefer the illusion of return to a romanticized cultural past in which diversity and inequality were ignored, or even more severe regress and retrenchment like that which plagued the early twentieth century and by which Hamilton warned in Federalist 85 the colonies would be endangered if they remained fragmented without a unifying Constitution.

To adapt positively in the face of crisis via renaissance requires imagination and improvisation as well as much hard work, and any such culture-wide progress is a social phenomenon.  There is no one person, not even Leonardo, who can solve every problem for us.  We must all play a part.  Some may see the better way earlier, or more clearly, and can point it out to us like a koan-writer or map-maker, but only our own footsteps can carry us forward in real space and time.  A “renaissance of democracy” cannot function according to individual greed or an ethos of exclusion but must engage all citizens from all walks of life, and indeed all nations together worldwide in the common enterprise of making our planet, our communities, and the natural world itself sustainable. 

Leonardo’s “universal portrait” and most famous painting, perhaps allegorizing the ideals of “Esperienza” which he personified as “the common mother of all the sciences and arts,” is arguably such a map to a sustainable modernity in all its imaginable facets including the political.  This interpretation is at least partly implicit in Robert Zwijnenberg’s assertion that “We need to approach Leonardo’s ideas and activities involving art and the philosophy of nature by looking at how he articulates the experience of his body in his texts, paintings, and drawings, in order to understand the interconnectedness of his various activities.”  Here we may find both the microcosm and the macrocosm, as above so below, and perhaps even a hint of e pluribus unum.   

Ken Burns’ forthcoming film about Leonardo, of which the first part is titled “Disciple of Experience,” provides a rich aesthetic and intellectual gathering place for such a new approach and presents an invaluable opportunity to advance the kind of transdisciplinary renewals which the onset of the Anthropocene has made so urgently necessary in all realms of society and among all peoples.    

Or as another artist-scientist and subject of an earlier Ken Burns film admonished almost a quarter-millennium ago: “a republic, if you can keep it.”

Next blog: art, science and Ginevra de' Benci