Ken Burns’ next film, due out this November, explores the fraught yet fascinating topic of the American Revolution (now approaching its 250th anniversary). 

This represents a sizable leap in subject matter from his last film on the painter, scientist, author, and thinker Leonardo da Vinci; yet given the close symmetry of Leonardo’s recent 500th anniversary perhaps there is a kind of balance.

What did “experience,” Leonardo’s highest ideal and guide as an artist and scientist, a concept which had continued evolving after his time throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mean to the American Framers at the end of the eighteenth?  Burns’ Leonardo film and his interview for this blog highlight many commonalities between the idealistic yet practical innovations of Leonardo and those of the new American project, highlighting the importance to each of both meanings of the Latin “experientia.”

Martin Jay’s Songs of Experience (2005) and his innovative development of related themes in Magical Nominalism (2025) offer many constellations of connection among history’s diverse and evolving understandings of experience, especially within the imaginative arts and sciences, while also addressing their implications for society including political history.  William Blake’s work pertains of course, for example his 1788 assertion that “the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences.”  Hamilton’s Federalist 1 and 85, the latter citing Hume, both place “EXPERIENCE” -- all caps his -- at the core of his argument in favor of the union and the constitution. 

Without question, both the political sciences and the poetic arts considered experience, and its philosophical corollary, experiment, to be fundamental and central in the late 1780’s.

A future vision toward which a diverse citizenry might agree to work, despite their differences, is an aspirational commitment to peaceful progress that requires ongoing adaptation.  This collaborative process of evolution for Hamilton depends upon “time and experience” for success.  Similarly, Shelley’s defense of poetry and poets, in which he considers all imaginative work to participate, would soon call on the arts and sciences to serve as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Did Leonardo understand this mutual interdependence of art and science with political freedom, progress, and peace?  Certainly he knew personally the dangers of censorship, civil war, and social instability which political strife could bring, having directly faced such grave risks in his own lifetime.  Florentine culture of his day was replete with cautionary tales from antiquity such as Archimedes and Apelles, as well as contemporary cases such as the 1516 ban on Lucretius, forming a current which carried through to Galileo and beyond. 

Consider the example of Leonardo’s sketches of a bird in a cage, the Codex Atlanticus 190 verso, circa 1508.  Combining emblem, symbolism, literary reference, and his own text, this page shows his composition and design of a visual/verbal puzzle, or algorithmic image if you will: an intricate knot pattern (called a “vinci” in Italian) of “thoughts” which, when “untied,” opens the cage, expressing a metaphor of freedom and of healing.  The ancient tale of the Caladrius bird (or goldfinch), which in Pliny turns to look at the medical patient if they are destined to recover, is cited by Leonardo in his notebooks and may well allude to the relationship between Leonardo, the artist-scientist, and the patron he sought for both support and safety, Francis I, articulating their mutual need, trust, respect, and future hopes.  The Caladrius knot drawings in this sense can be interpreted as saying “The life of thought revolves toward freedom and healing,” or in Leonardo’s short handwritten text on the page, “i pesieri si voltano alla speraza.” 

This level of allegory could certainly apply to Leonardo’s contemporaneous paintings as well, including his 1503-16 portrait La Joconde and even his 1517-18 “Pointing Lady” drawing (possibly a study for a never-attempted painting).  As Gordon Teskey writes in Spenserian Moments, allegory is about “real life,” society, culture, and even politics, so we cannot exclude these topics tout court from Leonardo’s late imagination. 

Fortunately, all times and cultures have their own rich language and heritage to express the fabric of their experience, whether it be Leonardo’s “esperienza,” the Latin “experientia,” ancient Greek “empeiria,” “Erlebnis” and “Erfahrung” in German, “kokea” and “emulyana” in Finnish, “sdonya” in Dakota, the Hindi “anubhav,” Russian “perezhivaniye,” Chinese “jingyan,” and hundreds more too numerous to list. 

This is therefore a conversation in which the entire community of nations can participate and from which all peoples can benefit.

Next blog: how to visualize experience as a person