Calling Leonardo

Among Americans in Amboise


‘Not again,’ mumbled my despondent friend as our gaudy double-decker tour bus rolled into the premises of yet another Chateau in the quiet town of Amboise. Awe gave way to architectural ennui once it became evident that our cameras could no longer distinguish the façade and interiors of one Chateau from another. Feeling ‘underwhelmed’ by the opulence of the erstwhile French aristocracy, our band of bourgeois brothers decided that we were officially ‘Chateau-ed out.’ Within a few seconds, boredom gave way to delirious anticipation when I overheard an off-handed remark that Leonardo Da Vinci spent the last three years of his life in Amboise.

Leonardo was living in Rome completely eclipsed by his worthy rivals Michelangelo and Raphael who were themselves producing more than a handful of masterpieces. When Francis I invited Leonardo and offered him patronage at the Cloux palace (now known as Chateau du Clos Lucé ) in the vicinity of the King’s own stately Chateau d’ Amboise, Leonardo must have seriously considered it. While the exact date is unknown, it is believed that Leonardo took up residence at Amboise in 1516. Armed with this trivia, a few of us set out on a pedestrian pilgrimage to find Clos Lucé. We were greeted by an old pointed archway through which Leonardo entered his new home in 1516.

Leonardo first entered through this archway on the back of a mule with the Mona Lisa, Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist safely tucked into leather saddlebacks. Crossing the Alps all the way to Amboise, this beast of burden must have been only the second most famous mule in Western history. Next to the mule that carried Jesus Christ into Jerusalem. From leather saddlebacks to the Louvre is a few hundred years of iconic history.

Da Vinci has become a household name, unequivocally associated with genius in every part of the globe. Yet, a cold and cruel irony emerges. The man behind the Mona Lisa would have been ignored were he alive today. As a painter, he might have been dismissed as a portrait artist by his panel of peers. As a thinker, he might have been shunned or dismissed by the vast majority of universities (at least American universities). Humanists would deny him tenure for not publishing enough academic articles on topics that resonate with mainstream scholarship. Professional scientists might sneer at him as a charlatan for neither having the credentials nor a well-defined research agenda. In all likelihood, Leonardo would never have been able to teach at a major university since he had very little formal education.

A specialization-only model that has come to characterize much of post-war twentieth century university life (that is being carried over into the twenty first century) would have no room for him, despite the fact that Leonardo’s intellectual legacy single-handedly dwarfs the collective wisdom of academics. In spite of the growing recognition that ‘great ideas’ are not ultimately discipline-specific ideas, the culture of specialization is so deeply entrenched that boundary-spanners are sometimes pejoratively referred to as ‘generalists.’ This leads me to believe that this culture of specialization if taken too far might become counterproductive towards fostering a spirit of discovery.

Most of the greatest thinkers and discoverers including Albert Einstein, Watson and Crick made breakthroughs by seeing rich connections between seemingly disparate concepts. At the zenith of their creativity, they were young upstarts who did not fit comfortably well within ossified institutional settings.

The muse of Leonardo invites us to shed our deep-seated methodological and disciplinary prejudices and seek truth and beauty in their entirety. A little bit of clarification is necessary. In recent years, an icon has been turned into an ideologue by ventriloquists and conspiracy theorists. Even a perfunctory examination of his work gives us actual insight into who he was and what he symbolized. Leonardo was the purest embodiment of the Renaissance man – a person who sought to bridge, in his own words, ‘the science of art and the art of science.’

A brief digression is in order. The term ‘Renaissance’ has been overused and frequently misappropriated. Naturally, this might lead us to believe that the word has lost its potency. I would like to argue the opposite position briefly. The posthumously celebrated cultural critic Walter Benjamin eloquently argued that the age of mechanical (now digital) reproduction is rapidly devaluing art. And doesn’t it? For years, imitations of the Mona Lisa in restrooms, television commercials, coffee shops and a variety of other settings have seemingly rendered a beautiful masterpiece into a banality. I believed every word of Benjamin’s argument until the day I found myself standing face-to-face with the original in the Italian section of the Louvre. All those imitations and reproductions became irrelevant when I realized that the imprimatur of an impostor does not impinge upon the imprimatur of an artist. If this is indeed the case, misuse does not warrant disuse.

In a similar vein, if it possible to rejuvenate a new Renaissance by recapturing the original intent, Leonardo’s haunting legacy will not be lost on us. Bulent Atalay in his thought-provoking book Math and the Mona Lisa states “five hundred and fifty years after Leonardo’s birth we use Leonardo’s model to seek again the consilience of science and art…and to remedy as far as possible the dissociation that exists between cultures.” While Leonardo was by no means a systematic thinker like Aristotle (who provided us with invaluable means of classifying different branches of learning), he had a unified conception of knowledge. His way of seeing art in science and science in art is manifest in his contributions to diverse areas such as painting, architecture, sculpture, mechanics, hydraulics, ballistics, naval and aeronautical design, mathematics and so forth.

While some progress is being made with the advent of think-tanks and research institutions that inspire cross-pollination of ideas; our society as a whole might once again need to take the journey of Leonardo.

The gift of the imagination is our surest vehicle to get us there. As Albert Einstein himself famously remarked, “imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Groundbreaking discoverers rely more on foresight and (counter)intuitive leaps than methodical thinking. The moral of this lesson is still lost on us as most university-trained intellectuals choose safety over a perilous life of discovery.

Those who risk it all for a dream pay a costly price. Leonardo’s story in itself is fraught with pain and personal tragedy. It is believed that Leonardo wept on his deathbed because he felt that he had offended God and his fellowmen for not consummating his craft.

May his tears speak to us.


---Roy Joseph