In my recent interview with Ken Burns about his excellent new film on Leonardo, we discussed Professor Francesca Borgo’s challenge in the film regarding the Mona Lisa: “If we are to begin taking a painting like this seriously….”  Ken and I agreed on the urgency of meeting this challenge.  However we didn’t have time to discuss Professor Borgo’s compelling observations on Leonardo’s much earlier portrait, of Ginevra de Benci: “By facing us, she is also telling us that she has the right to her own gaze, her own experience of the world (esperienza del mondo).” 

Could this incredibly powerful image, created almost thirty years before the Mona Lisa, already include some of the allegorical, literary, and philosophical methods proposed by the “Esperienza allegory hypothesis”?

The earlier portrait certainly uses a small distant landscape to suggest the deeper connection to nature we see magnified in later works.  The juniper background, “ginepro” in Italian, echoes the sitter’s name to express the inner starkness and sharpness of her personality while also symbolizing virtue.  This is again layered into the work by the painted motto, Virtutem Forma Decorat (“Beauty Adorns Virtue”), depicting a juniper branch flanked by palm and laurel.  All these symbols and verbal meanings have become intrinsic parts of the portrait.

We can see here early beginnings of how “scrittura infinita” (infinite writing), an approach to interweaving text and image that Leonardo practiced in his notebooks, might be translated to the more time-consuming and monumental medium of oil paint.  Every compositional element of painting – not just color, depth, shape, and light effects but symbols, puns, allegories, and even phrases – can be unified into a fabric that “adorns” and outwardly embodies the inner qualities of the subject, “the motions of the mind.”

If Leonardo’s written personifications of Esperienza are implicit in his portrait of La Gioconda, might not this be a corresponding “virtue” which the art of painting can make visible through outward forms? 

Among Leonardo’s greatest writings about Esperienza is the short text of the Codex Atlanticus 520r, “Body born of the perspective of Leonardo of Vinci, disciple of experience,” which provides the title of the film’s first half.  The rest of the text adds: “Let this body be made not of examples from another body, but only of simple lines.” 

This idea of a “body” born from simple lines, i.e. the works of writing, art, and science, is discussed in marvelous detail in Professor Lea Dovev’s article from the 2010 issue of the Leonardo journal.  The hand that writes as well as paints, drawing both geometries of light and the vessels, tissues, and bones of human anatomy thus making a corpus of knowledge available to minds other than its author's, must be the conduit or source of the “garment” of learning mentioned on the first page of the Leonardo journal’s inaugural 1968 issue and in this blog’s first installment.  In this context, the subtle finger-touch of the left sleeve by the right hand of La Joconde acquires definitively allegorical potential.

Such an animation of inanimate matter also reflects Borgo’s concept of “pittore-dio” or “painter-god,” creating the “artifice of a life,” which culminates the film’s beautifully rich interpretation of the Mona Lisa and provides the title of its second half.  (Ironically the hands of Ginevra de Benci have been lost, possibly from damage, and can only be guessed at based on drawing studies.) 

What humanity chooses to design, draw, imagine, and create will become our planet’s fate, its future fabric so to speak, which will be born, woven, and “written” into being by our actions and achievements both for better and for worse. 

The most important theme in Leonardo’s philosophy of planetary conscience may ultimately be that humans are not all-powerful princes atop a hierarchy commanding all below, but equal participants in a shared web affecting and in turn affected by all life and all the world’s phenomena. 

Next blog:  “scrittura infinita”