In Gordon Teskey’s excellent book Spenserian Moments (2019) he articulates a strategy for understanding Renaissance thought, focused on early modern literature, but applicable to all the arts and humanities and thereby relevant to Leonardo as well:

“A third cultural phenomenon essential to the formation of allegory (after rhetoric and mystery) may well be the most important of all.  It is also the least evident of all, although to confuse matters, it is more extensive than allegory in the narrower, generic sense.  In various forms it belongs to all human cultures and, broadly understood, is the very substance of poetry.  This is of course personification.”  (p.188)

Could the Mona Lisa be, on an allegorical level, the visual portrait of Leonardo’s written personifications of experience?  This blog’s interview with Ken Burns, based on his film’s exploration of Leonardo’s self-description as a “disciple of experience,” discusses the possibility.  Viewing the Mona Lisa alongside Leonardo’s late drawing “Woman Standing in a Landscape,” RCIN 912581, what if both personify the same principle, esperienza, Italian for experience and experiment in art and science? 

The latter image has been compared to Dante’s character of Matelda who represents the vita activa or active intellect which complements the vita contemplativa.  Might these two images, in this sense, on a subtle yet implicit level (Leonardo did not title either work or leave any specific writings about them) constitute a twin or mirror portrait of the same abstraction?  Such a correlation would offer a robust context unifying Leonardo’s “late images,” whose thematic interrelationships have long stymied art historians, and could provide deep insights into his thought overall. 

Historically, however, experience as such has rarely been personified.  It is too broad and multifaceted to characterize as clearly as its constituent parts like justice, liberty, fortune, peace, wisdom, and the like, of which so many instantly recognizable statues and paintings have been made.  (The set of all things is no set, or the universal set, in the parlance of category theory.) 

Some precedent for the personification of experience can be found in the “culture hero” figure, trickster or shapeshifter, who teaches humanity through interactive puzzles and adventures.  A negative example is the “golem,” a monster created when technical expertise runs amok and severs all ties to ethical deliberation.  Both types of narrative affirm how moral and ethical discernment are rooted in experience, both past and present, through our respect for and conscientious practice of it.

 
Experience thus becomes the phenomenological instantiation of learning itself, never finished, always evolving, a simultaneous admixture of past, present and future, self and other, skill and observation, imagination and fact.  This partial yet consistent impermanence, which requires dedication from all participants as citizens of the world, paradoxically underlies its resilience, durability, and transformative potential.  It is fundamental, as Leonardo wrote, to “all the sciences and all the arts,” and therefore informs our own time and the challenge of achieving sustainable systems. 

Professor Martin Jay’s work, including his books Songs of Experience (2005) and Magical Nominalism (2025), tracks the centuries-long cultural exploration of experience per se and its relationship to the diverse array of codes of behavior which have sought, sometimes through conflicting evolution and permutation, to guide and advance the ethical practice of art, science, and technology.  These themes require our attention whether or not we can “prove” Leonardo personified esperienza not just throughout his writing but also in his visual art.  We must consider the potential ramifications of this hypothesis being true, even if total certainty remains out of reach. 

In mathematics this approach is called an “implication tower,” where an unproved or unprovable hypothesis is examined by derivation, looking for evidence of consequences that would be implied if it were true.  These can guide inquiry, if not conclude it; and like personification might even aid the development of “concept neurons,” as of the same person located in a different place, for example in the two images above.

Next blog:  Leonardo as literature