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

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”?

For this fiftieth blog about La Joconde, we might do well to consider Christopher Marlowe’s cautionary tale of Dr. Faustus. 

Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) is one of the most influential scientific texts of the early modern era.  Interestingly, in the context of this blog’s novel hypothesis that the Mona Lisa may be an allegory of “Esperienza” -- Italian for both experience and experiment -- Bacon’s tract uses the word “experience” over thirty times, including examples like this: 

• “The foundations of experience (our sole resource) have hitherto failed completely or have been very weak; nor has a store and collection of particular facts, capable of informing the mind or in any way satisfactory, been either sought after or amassed.”
• “(O)ur only hope is in the regeneration of the sciences, by regularly raising them on the foundation of experience and building them anew, which I think none can venture to affirm to have been already done or even thought of.”

In the above image (Codex Atlanticus 520r, c. 1490) Leonardo writes:

“Body born of the perspective of Leonardo Vinci, disciple of experience.  Let this body be made not with examples of another body but only with simple lines.”

This is one of his greatest declarations of respect for esperienza, meaning both experience and experiment.