Leonardo and God

    Paul Valéry wrote a memorable essay on "Leonardo and the Philosophers." He very appropriately saw him as an obsessively questing visionary freethinker, akin to Galileo, unchecked by official doctrine, theological and/or philosophical. Clearly, he was for Valéry a "godlike man" (Aristotle, Politics), ancestrally in the mode of his adored mentor, Mallarmé.
    He saw him, as Mallarmé saw himself, like the "sacred spider" of the Vedas at the near-zero center of a universal web of vision, whence he could nimbly command any specific direction of inquiry, always keeping, through "feedup"/"feedback," the inspired olive-tree-sap sense of the whole, "universal analogy."
    In my "Mallarmé's Windows" and elsewhere, there is a presentation of the cross (and more temporal x-cross) deep pattern visible in the drawing-sketch of "The Virgin and Saint Anne" and the Mona Lisa—the hands, the sphinx-like smile, having to do with the mysterious unknown, whence grace/gravity, the male-female "crossing" in fecundation, generation (the transverse laps of the grandmother, mother) topped by the boy-child, and crucial Judeo-Christian succession. A text (from the Latin textus, "woven") is involved, scriptural or painterly, or their inner version, as vision. Aristotle, in Book 6 of the Nichomachean Ethics, has a web like that, but so do our best minds generally including biblical "oceanic" visionaries such as the authors of Genesis, Job, the Psalms, the Gospels, Plato, Plotinus, Dante, Shakespeare, Keats, Kierkegaard, Heidegger (Keats and Ingmar Bergman refer to the spider).
    The web Leonardo spins is, again, primarily inward vision itself, which draws on external wisps of flotsam as a bird does for its nest or a woman for her makeup, trapping floating male spirits for her godlike sacred/natural purpose. Of course, he is indelibly a mama's boy, and we sense the mysterious figure of his mother, Caterina, behind him always, obviously in the madonnas and Mona Lisa, but really ubiquitously throughout alluring mother nature and the glimpse of endless sky beyond it all.
    Naturally, as the Hebrews insisted—so important in his personal tradition (more than for "Greekifiers"—as Mallarmé testily put it—e.g. Michelangelo), he had no specific knowledge of God, but maternal love is our best clue, along with the derivative mama's boy, "juggler of Notre Dame," artistic expressions of it, yes?
    So he was, like all of us, only more so—poor bastard—a human child in the complexly ambiguous sacred/natural/maternal/paternal image of the mysterious beyond. If it is glimpsed in the sacred spider and its web, then he is a version of that too, trying to trap understanding of his long lost mother and elusive real father. No wonder he almost never finished anything. The routine churchmen chided him for the delay in completing "The Gift of the Magi," but Leonardo was ever waiting for the reality, like for Godot—a sort of wistful telescope antenna-web scanning the sky for a clue to life out there—the final image of Mallarmé's "Un Coup de Dés."
    And he had that rare abiding-creature childlike humility of Mallarmé, who gently remarked to the clumsily ego-bound and brain-bound, willfully innovating, modernizing secular-materialist René Ghil, "You can't do without Eden." That still gets past the defenses of the most sophisticated French writers I know of, and often knew or know personally.
    But so many, including the admirable Lord Kenneth Clark, miss the key point here: they go rattling on about his "Renaissance humanism" and its multiple virtuoso expressions, whereas, he, in his "Treatise on Painting" said, once and for all, that he preferred his painting to all his other work because it was "closer to God."

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The "Virgin at the Annunciation" by Antonello Messina, painted in 1460—it is now showing in the United States—has the mysterious soft and gentle light in the countenance that we see later in the Mona Lisa; Leonardo notes it on faces in the misty Lombardy twilight which characterizes the background atmosphere altogether in his masterpiece, it has been observed.
    Moreover, her hands sketch an x-cross—of mystery and fertility—which returns in the sphinx's smile, the fully crossed hands of the Mona Lisa.
    It is ancient indeed and, as we have noted previously, an early form is the tetrapolarity of light and dark in the wheel of the Tao.


P. S. François Premier physically imported Leonardo into France, but his spirit has gone from there except on the wall of the Louvre and in the memory of him at Amboise. Mallarmé's memory similarly lingers on for a few at Vulaines. Almost everyone else, "too attached to the things of this world" (Leonardo's saying inscribed over the entrance to the Clos Lucé at Amboise) goes on prattling about abstract legal-statist schemes for a cleaning out of the Augean stables of decadence, sclerosis, and faint-heartedness. The rebirth of a once magnificent culture or anything like it will never come about that way, here or there.