The Mindful Mona Lisa: Perspective, Weaving, and Networks of Sustainability

Leonardo’s marvelous interior of the Sala delle Asse, which depicts an intricate golden knot pattern within a canopy of trees, offers a rich example of what Robert Zwijnenberg called Leonardo’s “labyrinthine gaze.”
This approach to perception and expression, observation and imagination, permeated Leonardo’s practice of science and art, and it shares many similarities with Carlo Vecce’s concept of Leonardo’s “scrittura infinita” or “infinite writing.”
One may even see resemblances to Leonardo’s knot-pattern “signature” in the trompe-l'œil ceiling, a personal statement like that which Michelangelo so boldly dared to affix upon his monumental Pietà (created within a year of Leonardo’s work), or the medieval symbolism of weaving obscure letters into ornate or ceremonial garments referred to in alchemical folklore (which Leonardo knew well as popular culture while clearly rejecting it as science in his Trattato della Pittura).
In Zwijnenberg’s discussion of Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo’s predecessor who also wrote a “Treatise on Painting” as well as works on architecture, cryptology, and literature, he highlights Alberti’s assertion that the technique of perspective brought into oil painting the art of rhetoric and its study of viewpoint. Whose perspective would be highlighted? Would other perspectives be filtered in? These concerns echoed Dante’s “visibile parlare” or "visible speech" and by Leonardo’s day were already deeply developed throughout Florentine culture.
Zwijnenberg then introduces the work of Erich Auerbach to explore how Alberti's theme has influenced the history of European thought in science as well as art. Indeed for Auerbach in his 1953 book Mimesis, the elusive concept of experience is at the center line of these cultural processes. The intrinsic multiplicity of experiential perspective, within each person’s life and among all the varied individuals in every community, can be difficult to represent without reduction and oversimplification thus posing serious challenges to sustainable societies.
Martin Jay’s 2025 book Magical Nominalism offers a fascinating new look at these historical themes. Building on his 2005 work Songs of Experience, it looks at how “conventional nominalism” became a factor in the “disenchantment” of the world. This often meant a removal of nuance, complexity, and imaginative practice which depleted humanity’s adaptive potential. Both art and science focused too often on control, domination, and certainty which in complex natural systems is far from the norm.
Jay also traces a more optimistic counter-current of modernity which he calls “magical nominalism,” bringing in the speculative and imaginative arts and sciences, as a means toward “reenchantment” and retrieval of the phenomena and possibilities which control-oriented approaches can neglect in pursuit of algorithmic certainty.
Physicist Mark Peterson’s 2011 book Galileo’s Muse makes a comparable case regarding another major figure of early modern science. Emphasizing Galileo’s art-based education, Peterson argues that it was Galileo’s aesthetic awareness and craft – reinforced by his father, Vincenzo Galilei, an accomplished composer and music theorist who grounded his methods in “esperienza” – that informed his innovative approach to to science.
Peterson ends the epilogue of his book with the following thought experiment, which we might imaginatively apply to Leonardo’s “late paintings” and our various hypotheses thereon:
“A careful argument will never prevail over a simple and instantly understood caricature. Galileo has an image problem. Galileo needs a public relations makeover…. Perhaps what is needed is a new caricature, one more useful and nearer the truth. In this way we re-enter, having left them on the title page, the territory of the Muses…. Urania [the Muse of Astronomy], I am arguing, is not Galileo's Muse, but she is close enough to indicate what is missing among the Nine, a new art, requiring a new Muse who really would be his, something like a Muse of Earthly Things, or a Muse of Mathematical Experimental Science…. She would need a name—Galilea?.... I can imagine a distant future time… when it would be common knowledge, and simply assumed, that Galileo, sometime around the beginnings of our present scientific age, performed a Pygmalion-like trick: he invented a new Muse to smile on him."
Next blog: Ken Burns’ new film and the democratic nature of experience and experiment.