Mercedes T. Bass Lecture: Leonardo da Vinci and His World

[Music] [Music] [Music] welcome everybody welcome to what is part of our Leonardo da Vinci symposium but is also the inaugural Mercedes T bass lecture it's about Leonardo in the world the good news is I'm not going to give you a full lecture we've invited five of the great speakers that are part of this Leonardo symposium so I'm gonna give a little talk but then we're going to also have you all involved and we're gonna have five speakers from our symposium we're also gonna in the afternoon or evening with Jeff burkas who designed this room and this building and he did so as did Herbert Beier who designed the other buildings on this campus with vitruvian man specifically in mind so he's going to explain that to you but first I want to say a few words about Mercedes Bass who has endowed this lecture Mercedes isn't with us as some of you know she's not feeling well but I think she's watching it on livestream so I want to say to Mercedes thank you and also as I think about Mercedes bass and Leonardo da Vinci I realized that one thing they share is an interest in everything from art to music to science to learning and other people and I think that's been the theme so far of this event which is you lead a much richer life and you're far more likely to be creative if you'd loved everything there is to learn about the world including how we fit into it another thing that were said he's dead for me I'm going to ask Luke to say something when it's his turn on the panel but she introduced me to Luke's Ison as well so Mercedes be assured that Luke I think is having a great time here and we thank you so let's thank for Sadie's bath we've talked about the word genius a lot and I just threw it around the way we often do earlier today I mentioned a Martin Kemp that words that we slap on to things whether they're acronyms or commonly used words sometimes keep us from seeing things rather than reveal things to us it's something I learned from Walker personally who said the minute you label something you quit observing it quite as closely and so I do think that in the spirit of Leonardo we ought to be careful about any labels we put on one problem with the word genius is that it makes it sound like it was a superhuman trait as if somebody is touched by a ability that's beyond our mortal Ken Leonardo's very first biographer I think made this mistake he said he didn't mean it intentionally but Vasari said that sometimes a person is endowed with such superhuman traits that every work from his hand feel it is divine rather than a work of human art one thing we've learned about Leonardo in the past couple of days is that it wasn't some just divine thing it was divine but it was also by human hand human will human effort he was a very human person and his successors came because he willed himself to be observant willed himself to be curious and willed himself to do the type of things that you or I could do he not that we could paint the Mona Lisa but we can at least try to observe every time we see a smile flicker across somebody's face we can try to think about the inner emotions every time we see people making gestures at a supper we can say what are they reacting to what are the gestures all about and one of the signs that Leonardo was human that we've talked about quite a bit in the power two days is that he left a trail of unfinished projects the very beginning the question was asked what would you ask about Leonardo and I think we've all wrestled with the unfinished projects that he left among them was a horse model that was reduced to rubble by archers the adoration of the Magi tanks that never rolled flag machines that never flew a battle mural that was abandoned and brilliant treatises that went unpublished one of the things in his notebooks I think it was every time he had a new pen he had to figure out how to use he'd say tell me tell me tell me if anything has ever done tell me if I ever did a thing of course he did things in fact the things he did the things he finished weren't enough to prove his genius the Mona Lisa alone does that and by the end of the day today as I was thinking it through and hearing all the thoughts about it I began to appreciate even more the genius of the things he left unfinished the genius of the things uh neck Secutor the mystery surrounding some of what he did the finger that he didn't finish that was pointing but left a little bit hazy the flying machines and military projects that were fantasies but as he says in his own treatise on painting of those notebooks that ability to see things that not only can be seen but things that are unseen that ability to have an imagination and fantasy that to made him a genius and by refusing to churn out works that he had not perfected he sealed his reputation as being one of the great ingenious artists of all time rather than a master craftsman I think that he enjoyed the challenge of conception more than the task of completion we've heard the different reasons I'm going to add one that I've been wrestling with about why some things were left on uncompleted I think it's partly because he had an uncanny ability to feel motion and to convey the idea of movement one of the most sophisticated things in his notebook that involves math and I wish he it had been more mathematically theoretical he would have invented calculus because he comes close with this which is that a point is infinitely small has no space same is true of a line and same is true of an instant of motion it contains what happened before what happened afterwards and with all due respect to the quantum theorists in this room there are no discrete particles of either motion or points or time and yet we do have a flux of motion that does exist in our world and that's what intrigued him whether it was a body moving or water moving of rivers no instant he said his self contained no action in a theatrical pageant no a drop of water and a flowing river his self contained each moment incorporates what comes before and what becomes after and I think he looked at his art in engineering as something that was moving not something that could be declared static he carried around with him the Mona Lisa and so many other works even st. jerome he paints it and i think he probably from what we know gets the neck muscles wrong but 20-30 years later he does his Anatomy studies he goes back to it and gets the neck muscles slightly different he changes them slightly gets the two of them crossing so that he gets it right all of this to me is what adds up to make him a genius but a very human genius it sets him apart from people who are just extraordinarily smart those of us who live in Aspen know a lot of people who are very very smart they're kind of a dime a dozen and we know that sometimes they don't amount to much it's that imagination that creativity and that's what sets them apart Schopenhauer once said talent hits a target that no one else can hit but genius it's a toy that no one else can see and as I said at the very beginning part of Leonardo's human genius was its universal nature there were thinkers who were far more profound far more theoretical some who even wiser and more practical but none who was as creative in so many different fields some people are geniuses in a particular arena Mozart in music Euler and math but Leonardo's brilliance hit multiple disciplines as we're about to hear as you go into the Renaissance the Renaissance has produced a lot of Renaissance men it produced a lot of polymaths but none of them did it while painting the Mona Lisa none of them did it while producing unsurpassed Anatomy drawings dealt on multiple the sections with a visual display of information none of them did it while coming up with schemes to divert rivers explaining the reflection of light from the earth to the moon opening the still beating heart of a butchered pig to show how heart valves work designing musical instruments like the one right outside of that door they're choreographing pageants Leonardo was a genius but he was more he was the epitome of the universal mind one who sought to understand all of creation but most importantly how we fit into it and so with that I would like to bring the people who taught me all the things I knew about Leonardo and still have a lot more to teach me bill cook Martin Kemp Ross King Luke's Ison and Bill Wallace and we're going to ask each one of them [Applause] you know you must be plugged in this is a rule in the door Hoosier Center to make I'm here by fraudulent means because by trade I'm a medieval historian and for many people who talk about or read about the Renaissance the Middle Ages is that thing we finally got through it was a thousand years of barbarism it was the dark ages and so very often we assume that the switch from what we call medieval to Renaissance periods is a switch from darkness to light from barbed barbarianism to an extraordinary kind of sophistication and intellectual genius and as my chemistry professor once said when I gave the wrong answer it just ain't so and this ain't so either and what I want to do is just briefly illustrate a few things that are part of the medieval heritage that whether consciously or unconsciously Leonardo has absorbed thought about and taken forward far beyond his medieval predecessors we know that one of the things that Leonardo is so extraordinary with is his careful observation we know that from all of his drawings from his paintings from everything we know about him well I want to point out that he's not the first careful observer of nature and let me suggest a couple reasons why that is true first of all the writings of Aristotle were translated and used in Western Europe beginning at the end of the 12th century long time before Leonardo and when I teach my students about Aristotle I say let me sum up Aristotle in one sentence he believed the following all knowledge begins with sense perception if you believe that and Thomas Aquinas did there are consequences that follow from that if all knowledge begins with sense perception you better use your sense as well and they better be accurate because as one theologian said if you make a mistake about the world then you will make a mistake about God so for reasons perhaps somewhat different than Leonardo observation was very important secondly a fella came along at the beginning of the thirteenth century named Francis of Assisi and his most famous biographer st. Bonaventure wrote this for Francis nature was a series of footsteps leading to God if you believe that there are consequences you want to follow those footsteps carefully you want to observe nature carefully so it's important for us to realize that these ideas are already hundreds of years old and deeply woven into the fabric not necessarily unchallenged but woven deeply into the fabric of medieval society now let me give you another example I want to look at one painting of Leonardo very quickly by looking at three predecessors the one you see now is the painting by Simona martini who lived about a hundred and seventy five years before Leonardo it is an Annunciation painted in Siena for the Cathedral of Siena and you'll see although it's very different than Leonardo's it's a very beautiful painting and you'll see the elegance of the pose of the Virgin Mary and you'll notice that she is sitting with a book in her hand although it says nothing about that in Luke's Gospel it is an extraordinarily beautiful painting we want to be sure we don't make the mistake that necessarily the more realistic painting is by definition the most beautiful let's look at the next one I guess I have to do that myself this is an annunciation by Frangelico a painter from the middle of the 15th century this wood that he died about the time Leonardo was born and you can see there is perspective in the architecture there is perspective in the background on the left side you can see back there in fact Adam and Eve being expelled and you see this beautiful Virgin Mary there in prayer with again her book to receive the announcement from the angel the she's going to be the mother of Jesus and let's look at the next one Botticelli he's a pretty good painter Botticelli just a few years older than Leonardo but look at this lyrical figure of the Virgin Mary look at the angel look at the light look at the at the gossamer the gossamer outfit that she's wearing sort of fluttering but look also at the background look at that beautiful view through the window into nature so in the sense Leonardo didn't start from zero plus not only is the Annunciation an important event for Christian because it's exactly nine months before Christmas but also in Florence at this time it was the new year it was the time when the new year began and the calender changed and so this was a civic and a religious event so commonly depicted in Florence listen let's look now at Leonardo's well we have the Virgin Mary in the same colors you'll notice in front of a Renaissance Palace but all the other paintings also showed contemporary settings rather than historical settings we have the angel we have a beautiful background and so for me as somebody that comes from the older stuff the question I always ask is okay old story faithfully told and retold what's new what's exciting what's extraordinary well look at the wings of the angel they may not be as colorful as FRA Angelico's or as big as Botticelli's but by golly those ATS lie and that's an important thing to say and look at the landscape yes Botticelli's landscape is extraordinary but look at this almost mystical landscape we have as we stayed into the light behind and Mary as Renaissance woman sitting at a reading desk been there done that but not this Virgin Mary at this reading desk but in front of that palace with that angel with those wings with that background this is a wonderful story old and retold so many times it seems to me with Leonardo its new bill cooke that was the suit he got into it before I could even give it back but it's always great to start with a great medievalist but in some ways it brings up pictures that had been done before and one of them we haven't talked about enough is Salvador Monday and both Luke Luke's Ison has been very involved with it and he and I have discussed it and Martin is about to come up come out with a book on proving its profit I mean proving it's autograph status look let's why don't you help us put this in the context let me give you a little bit of background we were just looking at one of Leonardo's earliest if not the earliest paintings he executed in Florence this was painted perhaps in Florence perhaps I've suggested right at the end of his first Milanese period but that said it's come onto our onto the scene incredibly recently we've always known that Leonardo painted a picture of this subject there are lots and lots of copies of it and it's documented in a print from the mid 17th century by Wenceslas Hollow but until about two years before the National Gallery exhibition in 2011 the original was thought to have been lost if it was ever even painted and so when I remember I had an incredible privilege of being of flying to New York where it was then and examining this picture in the conservation studio at the Met I think just two or three scholars have seen it up till that point and probably the reason for that was to try and decide whether we would be going out on a sort of serious limb to show it in London with works which were universally agreed to be by Leonardo it's if you want to do something that that sort of attracts almost immediate opprobrium try a tributing of a painting to leonardo device so and they're done there so it's so so I wanted to talk about a little bit about why in the end there was a pretty immediate consensus that this was indeed the the lost work it was examined at the National Gallery by a range of scholars including Martin here and and that was an important ingredient attribution does to some degree at least depend on consensus but what are the ingredients then of a successful attribution to to Leonardo I was struck this morning when Jeff Koons was talking about collapsing the hierarchies between the the high and the low that in a sense Leonardo is the artist who who most bridges miss straddles that that gap you know we all know him as perhaps the greatest most famous artist who ever lived and yet his images are also imprinted on our on our memories and our imagination in a way that the way that almost the authorship doesn't doesn't matter it's come it's it ceased to be the key the key issue and I think that was something that actually arises precisely from Leonardo's own desires about what painting should be he believed in a painting of in rules for painting that whereas in their own way as absolute as the rules he was seeking in in nature some of those rules he was finding in nature itself but others he he truly believed him were to do with divine inspiration what to do with perceiving he his famous quote about that the stains and blots on a wall and how and how those can take shape into a into an image is a very important concept for this for this picture so what we're looking at here is a painting of Christ as the savior of the world I'm glad it's this session is called Leonardo in the world because Salvator Mundi is exactly that and it had been in a collection in in England from 1900 to 1954 where it was attributed to a copy a copyist after Bowl trophy oh one of Leonardo's pupils it was severely over painted at that point and made its way to America where it was then rediscovered in something slightly more glamorous in a garage sale but but not much brilliant a brilliant rediscovery cleaned and restored subsequently by an modest tinea and we were able to follow the process of that of that restoration because of the copy is of course it was important to the scientific examination was incredibly important we had to establish that the the way it was made was consistent with the ways in which we know Leonardo executed his pictures so for example there is there are tiny spoilery the dots from the transfer of a cartoon in the head the the the rest of the body as I remember is much more freehand and that's a classic combination for Leonardo a carefully prepared face or head and then something much more improvised around and actually even that process of planning and improvisation says something about this this question of the balancing act between the visionary if you like and the observed in in his in his work and I think that what we see here is is a work that in which Leonardo has done all the things that we've now come to expect in order to arrive at an image which has that essential quality that absolute quality that when it comes and I hope that one day we'll be in a you know into a into a public collection will I think imprint itself in on the memories of all of us in the same way and I was just taught most quickly through three of those things and I never has a question let's let's look at the hands the blessing hand first that's a that is a piece of in which the the observation of anatomy of the fall of light of a volume of really evil as the soul of painting as as Leonardo called it is all extraordinarily present despite the slight abrasion that this picture has had it's not in great shape I can talk about that in a minute if you like the the hand is one of the best-preserved parts and it has a quality when you see it in the flesh of projecting out of the out of the frame and into our space is that because he draws it much more sharply and the visual acuity makes it seem it's closer I think it's partly that it's it's simply more deer is much more defined and and I think in lots of when when this picture first appeared I among others felt that the reason for the difference between the hand and the head which which people found very troubling some people found troubling when it was shown at the National Gallery newspaper critics rather than Leonardo experts I presume to be damning then was was that sort of essentially that kind of spectral numinous quality in the in the head of Christ can we just don't forward one slide or are just showing you this because I think the reference for Leonardo was this it was this image here the frontality of the head of Christ is so unusual in in Leonardo's work others to demand some kind of explanation and what you're looking at here is one of the three possible candidates for the so-called Mendelian of Edessa so this is one of these these images that was miraculously imprinted the features of christ on a piece of cloth he that he sent in fact to cure somebody when he himself it's like a sort of long-distance cure and by and by the beginning of the by the beginning of the sixteenth century one of those examples was in paris so remember milan has just been invaded by that by the french and another was in general which was a which was a lombard possession so there were lots of reasons why this might be a good candidate and i think what you're seeing is leonardo just as bill just said looking at a tradition of image making of miraculous image making where he himself is is giving us a sense of what that almost miraculous appearance of christ might look like and then there's of course yeah let me before we go to the ball and now before we go over the things let me bring martin into this because martin was somebody who is writing a book with some people on how you show that this was an autograph leonardo first of all is this the first painting of Leonardo to be by consensus put into authenticated in how long in over a century the last one was the Madonna Benoit in Hermitage and some petersburg rain so they come along very seldom now there's not like buses they don't come along together twice yes yeah could I just pick up on what Luke said about the difference of the sharpness of the hand and the and the blur of the head this is at a time that we know roughly when this picture was painted when there nardoo is looking again at the human eye and rather than thinking it's a simple instrument as he did initially as a young man finds it's incredibly complicated and he doesn't have a concept of a focusing lens so he says at one point in a manuscript D which is titled de la kiya on the eye he says the eye does not know the edge of any body with absolute certainty but he knows there's a median range if we're too close and he discusses this we can't see if we get to the right point it depends everybody can do it it's further out for me now that used to be and then as it gets away it gets less certain so you can read this as a kind of optical statement it's the exaggeration of what actually and he had three forms of visual perspective he did right yeah typical one that shows lines converging and then but what I would say on from that is that if that's an optical statement it actually serves a spiritual function saluting because you've got the head rendered ineffable you cannot really know the true features of Christ so you can know the hand so there's a there's a in a way the optics and the spirituality that is part of learn others extraordinaire and he's able to get the science and the spirituality working together in an extraordinary way now with the science and spirituality working together this is one of my favorite paintings so I'm going to drill down on it there's something unbelievably puzzling which is he knows optics and he's got this solid crystal orb that represents a world even the inclusions those tiny little dots are done with scientific precision and yet there's something that's not quite the way you would normally expect it which is a crystal globe like that would distort and invert what's behind it if you take a glass of water and you look through it it's upside-down the robes of Christ would be changed but they're not I'm gonna ask both Luke and Martin to me their three explanations one is he wasn't really studying optics he had no idea what he was talking about and he just got it wrong secondly he thought well I'll let you all do it well so I think what we have to just remind ourselves is what this object is it's meant to be a perfect a perfect sphere or one of the great Platonic solids of made of solid rock crystal the most pure form of quartz that was known and at a moment when I'm told craftsmen didn't actually know how to form quartz into that perfect sphere so it is in itself a miraculous object and of course what it represents is the is the orb of of Christ as as king of heaven in the various copies that were made some of them sort of chicken out of the of the of the rock crystal and put you know much more conventional or now I think there are actually I think you'll I'm not sure that the degree of distortion that you're looking for would indeed be present if you're pressing the flesh against the robes yeah it's the robes that of the robes that are essentially wrong well I mean he I mean Martin can talk about this more but I mean he certainly talks about crystal and grass in in both a scientific but also in sort of metaphysical and metaphorical terms as the things that let light through without without altering it and so he's he's thinking here I think about about that sort of purity of vision and it's there because it's assumed it's there because it's a symbolic object and were you to be disturbed by a sort of weird distortion of the of the robes of Christ then then that balancing act that careful balancing act that I've been talking about between the symbolic and the observed would be disturbed and the picture would be pushed off too much I think in one Martland direction yeah the in one word why he doesn't do anything much with the refraction behind his decorum the Latin word mich means good manners exactly and it wouldn't be pictorial good manners to have some extraordinary optical effect taking over the whole picture though Nardo wouldn't for instance so he know about refraction wouldn't show Christ and John the Baptist's legs bending in the water and baptism of Christ I mean in the way or in any baptized area that Leonardo says and acknowledges there are certain visual effects which are for the specular Tory for the speculators blur he knew about blur but he wouldn't paint blur the last question didn't ask mean own ass but that's extraordinary that he knew about blur he knew about optical effects which were not pictorial good manners and he's making after all functioning pictures for the client and the devotional images and they need to as bill implied they need to to some degree to be familiar Micah know graphically one of the things I was struck by when this picture first appeared and it's been much written about and I think I didn't make this exactly clear earlier on it's been said quite regularly that the face of Christ is very badly abraded by over cleaning in the probably in the early 17th century when it belonged to the British heir to the English royal family or perhaps even earlier when it was in the French when it was in French possession we do know that the background was completely repainted green according to a French fashion and the background that you see now is the black background that you see now is actually the work of Dan modesty knee but the but almost everything else apart from a single crack that runs through the through the panel is actually in it is abraded but it's in better shape them than one would think and so the so what that's bringing me to is the is the kind of weirdness if I put it like that of his beard because and what you're seeing there is a again a deliberate contrast between those classic Leonardo light-filled curls and a sort of what's now now is no night I believe as a scruff around his around his chin it's it's actually again part of a pictorial tradition you see this quite regularly that that the beard of Christ is not described with too much detail you know the painter isn't a barber so he's not having to shave Christ and as a result you know you're not having to think about it in that sort of detail and as soon as you receive your being as soon as you're distracted your devotional is distracted by too much realism at that point then the fifth the pictures devotional function will will will collapse so that contains the orb as well let me go back to the topic which is Leonardo in his world and I'm an ass Ross King who wrote the great book The Last Supper many other things what was it about Florence at that time that allowed such creativity well in the first place what you needed was a patron you could not do a painting like this on spec I think it's not known who the patron of this was or some it's surmised that it might have been that the the French monarch but Louis the 12th of one point I have need of maestro it's a layering art in advance see as he called him and but Florence was filled at that point with a rising middle class and rich merchants building Palazzo who needed to show their good - exactly and there and there were people to requite that good taste Leonard was pretty was as I'm sure everyone who's been with us for the past couple of days knows he was born in 1652 and he is fortunate yes aborted 1450 to his first recorded in Florence in 1472 when he was 20 years old but clearly he was there for at least a few years before that probably by 8th of 1466 I've been running out Claude Monet so maybe not he's coming back to me and so yeah he by 1472 he'd been there for a couple of years but we know for a fact that in 1472 there were 44 goldsmith workshops in florence which was a city of around 50,000 people probably a maximum in the 1470s of 50,000 people which is the and I don't want to pick on anyone who might be from here but that's the population of Pocatello Idaho and so you have their forty four master workshops of master Goldsmith's and silversmiths into one of who's Andrea del Verrocchio Leonardo went there were also more than 30 master painters so if you were going to be a young apprentice as a painter you would go into one of these workshops and so in this relatively small City you had a huge number of workshops of artists who were requiring as Walter says that need among this group of wool merchants and bankers in Florence for works of art for altar pieces for example for family chapels that they were endowing into various churches that were being constructed at that time and also really from the middle of the 15th century on there was a great building boom a Palazzo building boom in Florence's people began building very large city city homes for themselves it also places in the country and so there was a kind of critical mass of wealth because of course someone needed to pay for the Renaissance it was no use being a genius if there was no one who was going to pay you to do your genius work and so if Leonardo da Vinci did not have patrons his first patrons were people like that city fathers of Florence the politicians in Florence who in 1478 when he was 26 years old commissioned him to paint an altarpiece for a chapel in the Town Hall a very prestigious Commission which sadly he didn't complete or all of the monastic institutions in and around Florence and so you needed to have people who were willing to buy your work and the other thing I would say about that I mean if you think about 44 workshops of Goldsmith's in Florence some of them they're not all going to be great obviously but there's a handful of really really good ones and there is inevitably going to be competition between and among them and the Florentines really exploited the Florentines the Florentine patrons whether it was the wardens of the Cathedral or whether it was the city fathers managed to exploit this kind of competition whereby they would pit artists against one another they did that they did that for centuries they did that around 1300 when they stir first began constructing the Cathedral and they did it famously in 1406 when they had four blocks of marbles for the evangelists that they're going to put on the facade of the cathedral which had been started just over a century before and they took three young sculptors one of whom was Donatello of whom I'm sure many of you have heard they gave each of them a block of marble and they said whoever wins the company was the best evangelist gets blocked number four and can work on that but it seems that it was more than just artists that there was a mix in Florence where you have more wood carvers and you have butchers that's right but you also have mathematicians you also have people in painters inventing perspective you have architects and artists working hand-in-glove you even have people inventing double-entry bookkeeping and so there's sort of a a mix of talents that all sort of crammed together at that one time and also the other thing they didn't mention and that really impressive list is the the classical scholars because Laurence by the middle of the really by the first decades of the 1400s becomes the the center of classical studies and the year Leonardo is born is around when Constantinople Falls right so you have a whole influx of what the of Greek manuscripts which had already been going on before then the fourteen 20s a Sicilian named Java or a spa that flooded Florence with hundreds of Greek manuscripts many of which were on mathematics so Constantinople was a big moment but it only increased aggravated something that was going on already we're also in 1452 the year he's born is when Gutenberg opens his first commercial print shop well so could I just say something in favor of Milan as well because it's true that Florence is an incredibly important cradle sponsored here by the Friends of Florence at some point somebody makes about the Friends of Milan and you'll be invited back but we'll give you a minute thank you very much now I just wanted to wanted to make the point that that the incredible creativity of the Florentine as it was system if you like of creativity was then harnessed by the greatest of all of his patrons really is Yoda V Cohen model in in Milan who was looking for Florence I'm looking for somebody who's been precisely trained in that in that mode somebody whose work would stand out against the kind of sort of glamorous no style of lombard art at that time and what i but what i think is important is that it released him from this world of of contracts and and deadlines and so on and so forth and martin van co the german art historian wrote a piece about the fort artist in which he argued that them that the concept of modern artists all the modern artists as we understand it begins at the court because that's the place where they're given the freedom to essentially explore they're given the time to experiment they're given the the space to think really hard about what they want their art to be and that that's that's that's the point they're there to be there that difference and between Florence and Milan at the time is Milan had a koi exactly in Florence is practically a republic with behind the scenes the Medici running things but they don't sort of have a castle in which they're putting on you know mathematical discussions each evening I would add one thing and that is you know today if we look at the Middle Ages or modern America we tend to look back to those great heroes of the past and say well we can never catch up to them there's not going to be another Abraham Lincoln or there's not gonna be another Plato or whoever it is the Florentines who are more and more educated about the classic said Aristotle's good plato's good we can do better not we can try to come close in the Middle Ages the sort of motto was we are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants I think we could say in Florence although I don't know anybody who ever articulated this we are bigger Giants on the shoulders of giants and that's a very big difference if I could put a plug in for Brunelleschi I think he was the one who allowed those really flowers and moving out from literally they've been living the shadow for over a thousand years of all of the ancient Roman monuments which had been built by pagans after all and suddenly with Brunelleschi who built something that was 80 18 inches in span wider than the greatest Roman building the Pantheon suddenly gave a kind of boost of self-confidence to the Florentines and there's the great poem but there are something special you have Bernal s key and then Albert II who comes right after Michelangelo yada why I've got to speak up it's I'm actually talking about engineers and architects so somebody who tries to be engineers and architects as well as artists and build things like the dome of the duomo or right as albert ii did a treatise on architecture is that something new in which art and architecture and engineering are coming together I would say not necessarily and bill I'm hoping you're nodding vigorously bill because I think that the whole idea of the there was the cathedrals of the Middle Ages I think you cannot deny how spectacular the cathedrals of northern France are that were done in the 1200 s and so obviously engineering and art came together in an extremely meaningful way but all of their names are lost to us one of the earliest of these Jai this is one of the first person named as a geniuses in Pisa buscetta guido chi whose name is on the front of the Duomo in Pisa and it says the snow-white temple was built by the genius buscetta Guidi chi and that's really one of the moments where a builder gets gets credit for something that is incredibly magnificent so I think what we've all been tried to emphasize maybe some of us like bill more emphatically than others is that Leonardo da Vinci isn't doesn't mark a break he marks Conti there is continuity with the past and so he is just he is very much a product of the environment that he's come out of her an environment that he is very blessed to be a part of Martin and then I'll get to Bill Wallace yeah one crucial difference is from the Middle Ages is that those things which are incredibly high-level crafts began to acquire a theory that it becomes to be fashionable to have a theory and this applied to the visual arts it applied to something like dancing the dancing masters begin to publish treatises with the geometry of steps so during the course of the 15th century in particular sixteenth century if you wished your profession to be taken seriously you need you did a theory and did that mean you had to have a confluence with mathematics mathematics was the obvious way of doing that and perspective the painters was great because it says we have a theory we have a rational basis music had long had that rational basis Pythagorean and the whole mathematics of music so perspective was incredibly good but yeah the whole a whole lot of practical tat gunnery begins to be thought about in actual terms of of how trajectories work and so on and in the power gun when Leonardo's trying to elevate the status of artists he does connect it to other things like mathematics and says that it has a theory absolutely and he can see that music is a serious rifle in this because music has a theory but he says music passes away it's born and dies so could he lie as better now those arguments against the other arts are likely fraudulent but but it's a it's a court sport you know it's a bit like bringing us up up here and generating artificial arguments and I get to belittle it go the wall aside talk about both we were talking about Florence and it's magic but what would have happened if he'd been born in another time why I love this question because there's no right answer so no matter what I say is it gonna be fine but every every every time I fly I kind of think wow if only Leonardo was on this plane you'd be like a little boy so excited or if you give him plastic my god whether you would do with plastic but if he was born in another time I mean Ross has already given them two hundred years ahead in the future he's already been born two hundred years ahead but I think about somebody like Darwin or Newton or Galileo I mean these are brilliant people they're thinking a hundred years ahead or so but if you think about Leonardo we've pretty much established he's thinking four hundred years ahead he's thinking four hundred years ahead so I don't think he's going to be very far out of his time if and we've already established well even in our discussion here this is an artist is gonna flourish in a court culture and he flourished in Milan especially he was given that freedom so he's gonna he give him the court of like somebody like rudolf ii of prague my god Leonardo would have gone wild in a place like that or someone like James the first of Scotland we took over England this is you know he would have probably found a place of it didn't flourished like marvelously on the other hand he wasn't a great linguist so you would have had problems with languages in those various places he never learned Latin he kept 9,000 words of Latin and tried to memorize them but kept lists of Latin words tried to memorize him so in some ways he's going to be a fish out of water in lots of different places other than his own native it but you know in a sense he's never gonna fit other places but in Italy they profoundly believe and this is goes back to antiquity the creativity never dies that it passes from one person to another so there's a reason why Galileo chose to be buried directly opposite Michelangelo in Santa Croce because Galileo believed that he was born on the day that my clan Joe died and that his creativity was inherited from Michelangelo so in fact Leonardo's creativity his genius I think passes on its goes to Bach it goes to Shakespeare is to L on musk it goes to he thanked Christo and two words that I would say that we haven't maybe mentioned enough quite in this two days is scale and ambition and these are things that Leonardo thought of a lot and that are part of the mix of creativity that I think we should add in that are part of genius Martin he bill just said that even Elon Musk is male inheriting what Leonardo what is our inheritance what do we inherit from Leonardo can I begin with a slightly funny answer but how many seats are in this hall 412 yeah this is extraordinary isn't it here you know he's a painter from 500 years ago who did lots of inventions and you're all here so there you're in a sense all providing an answer that there now though must mean something to you you wouldn't just turned up and not the same thing people get lots of different things out of Leonardo whether you're a medic an engineer whether you're an art lover or whatever so but to answer the question and in the way in which you really intended it I can tell us tell it by the story of the number of times I get written to by American high school children asking me about Leonardo and about two years ago there's enough project and one of the questions they asked was about technology what has lair Nardo invented that we now use what does Leonard have done for us I started my answers slightly rudely by saying this is not the right question because it's presupposing that we are in some sort of ideal state to which the past is working which is a complete fallacy and I said it's very self-centered to ask you a question what has he done done for us and in in that in that literal way but if you look at his range of creations and how they speak to us how they speak to us today have they spoken to us in the past as extraordinary and the way I would set up Leonardo is and the kind of judgments we make is not by saying is he a James Watt making the Steen engine is he Edison inventing all the things that Edison visits I think we should look at him as someone like Shakespeare or Dante or one of the one of the great cultural figures and say this is the most extraordinary monument to human vision to human visual understanding of the world the remaking of that understanding of the world and about our position in it and if you want to take a lesson from a figure in the past and I don't much like doing this but let's do it what Leonardo says to us today in our particular circumstance is that we are part of the world we are an organic part of the world we're the microcosm with a little world that's the big world we are not masters of the world we are an integral part of it I think it's incredibly important to realize that with this age of technology we can to easily say we are the masters of the world we can solve all the problems but that's manifestly is not true as we see what's happening around us so if you're wanting this sort of slightly corny thing that you're wanting a lesson from Leonardo let's remember we are absolutely integral parts of nature and if we separate ourselves out from it and say that we're superior we're in trouble and there was a transition I'm going to make this sort of a final one to all of you that created what's called Renaissance humanism which some of the phrases of it Barton echoed which was this notion of how we fit into the world being somewhat different than we had thought number so with you bill because you're the continuity expert but I'm going to ask you the counterintuitive question what was different as opposed to what was just the same a great question and there's a lot different if you asked what were people reading educated people at universities in the thirteenth and the 16th century the answer is sort of the same thing the question is how are they reading those things and that becomes essential because generally speaking coming out of the tradition of st. Jerome and Saint Agustin in early Christian times the idea is we need the classic let's remember every single work of the classics that survives survive because some Christian monk copied it fifteen hundred years ago mmm-hmm we don't want to forget that we don't have Aristotle's own handwriting we have monastic copies so clearly these works were valuable to Christians but in what we would think of is somewhat limited way for Cicero it's great he teaches us how to read Latin well and how to speak elegantly and that's a skill that's important we don't so much necessarily take his ideas as we take the skills he can teach us with somebody like Aristotle the question is how can he help inform our Christianity how can we understand the Bible how can we use our reason better because Aristotle was a good reason er so generally speaking the classics in the Middle Ages had as their primary purpose preparing people for the afterlife they were things that got you closer to God and let kept you on your way as a pilgrim in the Renaissance that continues and prolong after the Renaissance I might add but in the meantime in the Renaissance as there are new discoveries of the classics and as people are rethinking the classic and their relationship to the ancient world people are saying you know not only is Cicero valuable for that he teaches us how a republic works he teaches us how to have good friendships he teaches us things that are valuable in this life not just preparation for the next life and that movement that takes place and ultimately creates a kind of different secular ethic that religious ethic perhaps was no better reflected than that in the contemporary of Leonardo somewhat younger contemporary fella named Machiavelli mm-hmm who becomes a good friend of Leonardo's for a short while at least let me final ask the panel to expand on this which is the did Leonardo know that he was living at a sort of amazing time did he know that humanism was somewhat different Luke well I answer this question somewhat somewhat simply and and as you'd expect very much from an art point of view up till this moment most works of art had had some function or another they were made for a defined purpose Linna don't is perhaps the beginning and obviously artists patrons wanted those works to be done as well as they possibly could be by by by group by great people we would now judge as great artists but Leonardo I think is the beginning of in a sense art for art's sake it's the beginning of a moment when these works are liberated from the normal process of so he was doing the Mona Lisa he not just for utilities say he I mean it's not even clear that the Mona Lisa was actually commissioned by mr. mr. Mona Lisa um you know it's it's but it's but it's a it's a piece it's it's about Anna snow creating an extraordinary work of art that was as we and is that true of his science as well Martin that at a certain point it wasn't for the utility it was for the science and curiosity sake he wants to know how the world works he wants to dissect the world and remake it so yes absolutely and so it it is an amazing thing to be able to understand the world largely in term mathematics that's the ultimate way of understanding us as Galileo said because if you had mathematics what are you have been much different I mean that is the one thing he just he can't do equations let's say well no let's look at there now there was a mathematician he is a genius at geometry correct and he can do it in 3d in his head he's just extraordinary transformation of show he's he's got some rudimentary algebra but algebras which is coming in from algebra it's coming in from Rabia of our surveillance on periods of a Francesca had some algebra but algebra is at a very embryonic stage so we don't see that he wasn't particularly good at her with meticulous of adding up and he made mistakes but and he had Pacioli try to teach him roots but because that would have helped them young know he could do roots all right you know and I would say your original question about is was he aware of the time that he was living it's impossible to say because he never articulates that but other people did other people with whom presumably he rubbed shoulders in the 1860s right around the time that he came to Florence I'm gonna wrote a poem we're gonna get back you to the 1400 if you don't mind you can come back in two hundred years if you want yes a Monat believed he was living in the 1460s when he arrived in Florence thereupon was written saying that there is a new phidias among us ie a new great sculptor and new Appel ease a new great painter and the ancient Greeks would marvel and what was going on in Florence which had resuscitated the arts had been lost for centuries and in 1492 Marcy Leo Fujino the great philosopher wrote a letter to Paul of Middleburg a humanist in Germany describing how the previous century had been so remarkable and he lists everything that had happened all of the advances made in things including the playing on the lira da Braccio me take which we often don't think of perhaps is something that the Renaissance imparted to us but and he can closes by saying and all of this happened in Florence and so there was this tremendous idea that the Florentines in the 15th century were creating something unique and I think Leonardo da Vinci being celebrated by the 1480s of such a genius would have been aware of the fact that he was living this thumb it was very much a part Bill Walsh absolutely not I think he was quite aware mm-hmm surrounded by so many other people that were accomplishing so many great things you've got this generation of what I've called the super artists who separate themselves out from the regular run Leonardo Michelangelo Raphael and they were interested in fame they knew about the writings of pliny they knew plenty talked about Zook assists and practice leaves and so on and they were interested in fame learn are there would be fantastically delighted by what we're doing now and we get it right or wrong he's being famous and he the only artist who preceded well Brunelleschi preceded that he's called a Divino in genuine and his tomb and the divine genius as it were but this new generation they're very competitive and they're competitive with the great masters of antiquity not just with their contemporaries and they understand that the roles of what we now call Arts and Sciences and everything else all belted together in a way that was creating something new one of the poets and millions had come to this new Parnassus right the the mountain where all the divine creators assembled and I don't think they would have understood your question I don't think they would have made that distinction they would not have had the vocabulary to say the arts and scientists have come together yeah they with that distinction is ours is the one that we've made and I think what the brilliance of what was able to happen at that time is because they were what today universities madly seeking it call interdisciplinarity yes or universality because what it does it I want to invite Jeff up I know they're probably questions but I think I'm gonna do something more informal which is I want Jeff to give his presentation and then those who want to stay and ask questions just come join us and we'll do a more informal discussion up here if you don't mind but let us thank the panel thank you this is a wonderful opportunity to be talking with a whole bunch of academics who understand a heck of a lot more about the Vitruvian Man and Leonardo than I do but I will say from day one when Walter challenged me to design a building that would fulfill the mission of the Aspen Institute which is to find common ground the first thing we looked at was the Vitruvian Man as man's width equals his height the square is a circle the circle is about meeting in the round and every room in this building has a geometry so Leonardo might have bent not been a great mathematician but he was absolutely amazing with geometry so it is human nature nature and man and the man in nature with purpose to find this common ground so understanding patterns and patterns of movement and patterns of flow when I looked at Leonardo's work I want one of the most compelling things to me was actually the clothing on the people and the drapery and it wasn't so much what was seen it was what was unseen and what was felt and that is what this building was designed around it is to bring people together to feel to find that common ground to move energy around to see what is beyond what is seen and to feel into this unseen so the building when you come into it is a perfect cube or a sphere and you are looking in perfect alignment at the Vitruvian Man window which is the square here the unfolded square in the corner which connects us directly to nature the square on the center axis of this room and behind the screen the square which invites nature's energy of Castle Creek and the feminine energy of the river Leonardo understood flow coming from water and was very preoccupied by it so we are on the Oxbow of the Roaring Fork is the only building that's at that intersection so with this building benefits from that Herbert Beier who designed this campus worked with was a total Renaissance man like da Vinci and drew everything and when he worked with layer two worked in watercolors and when I looked into his work its what was unseen versus what was seen as well and Herbert very definitely had an intention to bring people closer to nature it is when we find our nature and can do the most for ourselves and others there's a painting in the Murdoch room that which is a perfect square with a golden section on top as his caddo room with a golden section upstairs which connects his to nature but that painting is called moon bridge moon bridge was a painting I had the privilege of growing up within our house who with my father who was obsessed with Leonardo so moon bridge has an arc in it which is the arc of this bridge and in the evening when you cross this bridge you see Herbert's work and the moon bridge which is concentric circles within a square so fire was looking at the same things that da Vinci was looking at and when we put this building together we put all these perfect geometries together in an imperfect way because this is the reality of the way that the world works it's the flow that connects these spaces when you are moving you are the most activated when you're using your perception it's when you have the greatest ability to connect the windows outside here facing north or that way for a reason your eyes are dilated you can connect to yourself and each other this building was designed to bring nature deeply within and without and for us to connect within it and for that I thank the Institute and the patrons who we've addressed because this wouldn't have happened without patrons to allow us to pull together these perfect geometries of da Vinci of Beyer and I'm going to end with Andy Goldsworthy so Goldsworthy was our artist that time because to me art and architecture are the same thing so Andy made a wall of common ground that wall is all stand stone that is colored by iron which is the blood which binds us all Andy in a brilliant way made a line out of a wall which is precisely five foot six tall what is precisely what the Vitruvian Man is because that's the average height of man and and II wanted you to be able to come down and touch the common ground that came from five continents in this world so that not only is as billing design to find common ground it has common ground it is art and architecture thank you the Andy Goldsworthy technique McDowell when you look at Andy Goldsworthy wall I want you to look at something symbolic we've done because it flows right into the floor and look right on the floor there that's the wall itself and he lived here while he was building it so it could be done just at the same side of the floor and that was the show that the flow of art the flow of nature and what we do in this room are all one in part of something universal I want to thank William and Bill and Dylan William and Luke and Ross and Martin and of course Jeff burkas and thank you all for being here I know you have two questions come on up we'll talk some more thank you [Music] I am [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Aspen Institute

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Id: 3oq8-4PJQBU

Length: 69min 55sec (4195 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 09 2017