Carlo Vecce, acclaimed author and scholar featured in Ken Burns’ film about Leonardo, has used the phrase “scrittura infinita” (infinite writing) to describe the rich complexity of text, drawing, design, and thought which Leonardo integrated so organically in his notebooks.

“’Scrittura infinita’ meant that there were no boundaries between forms of expression, languages, intellectual disciplines, and experience.  It also meant, however, not recognizing the act of separation that constituted the closing of a text, the conclusion of an argument, the final word.”

“Scrittura tessile,” or “textile writing,” is another possible coinage we might consider (given our hypothesis of the bridge-garment metaphor symbolizing the fabric of art, science, and their historical flow).  From this perspective we may understand Leonardo’s writing as interwoven with and unifying not just visual expression but all fields of knowledge, just as all natural phenomena interact and interweave with each other in worldviews ranging from Ovid and Lucretius to indigenous cosmology and contemporary ecosystem theory.

Robert Zwijnenberg, who has confirmed his agreement with the Esperienza hypothesis, and whose excellent 1999 book on Leonardo is referenced by Vecce in the essay quoted above, has proposed the concept of “a labyrinthine gaze” to describe Leonardo’s distinctive method and practice of art and science.  Using the example of intricate knot patterns which Leonardo created as his personal emblem or “imprese,” Zwijnenberg suggests "This change of perspective, typical of the contemplation of a labyrinth, can be compared to the alternating points of view in Leonardo's observation of the external world.”

Buckminster Fuller is another recent example of such an interwoven approach to interdisciplinary work in all the arts and sciences.  He did not write extensively on Leonardo, but both dealt with “geometry in motion,” or what Leonardo called “de ludo geometrico” and “Of Transformation.”  Fuller’s call for “ephemerality” in built technology echoes the light garment of engineered environment Leonardo advocated, and both saw experiential values as the key to progress in science and art as well as a thriving sustainable society. 

Fuller wrote, "by Universe I mean: the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated (to self or others) Experiences."

Fuller applied similar ideas in the eulogy he wrote for his colleague and fellow teacher at Black Mountain College, Bauhaus artist Josef Albers (who had been forced to flee Europe in the early 1930’s), in the autumn 1978 issue of the Leonardo journal.  Fuller praised Albers’ workshop background, experience-based approach to teaching (influenced by John Dewey), and lifelong dedication to aesthetic experimentation -- all of which Leonardo shared. 

A line from Albers’ poem “Seeing Art” brings many of these themes together with concise elegance: “Thus art is not an object // but experience.”  Similarly, Fuller’s daughter focused on “Experience and Experiencing,” the title of her essay on his 100^th anniversary, as central to her father’s credo for the pursuit of art and science in the service of all humanity. 

Or as Fuller wrote:

“In spite of all humans' innate interest in the interrelatedness of all experience, long ago these world-power-structure builders learned to shunt all the bright intellectuals and the physically creative into specialist careers.”

Indigenous traditions, like the ancient Peruvian textile art which influenced Anni Albers, illustrate similar truths.  One example in context here is the Navajo/Diné concepts of Biniik’eh and Doo t'áá biniik'eh, immediate present-moment lived awareness and stored subconscious experience (paralleling the German words for experience Erlebnis and Erfahrung), whose distinct but interwoven nature is symbolized by the five fingers of the human hand in combination with the spaces between.

Next blog:  Albers’ On Weaving, Auerbach’s Mimesis, Alberti, and the labyrinthine gaze