Leonardo's Brain Page 9
* Flicker fusion is the speed that a series of stills must pass before a projector to create the impression of a motion picture film.
Leonardo’s studies concerning multiple positions in time joined to sequential views of space, found in both his Leda sketches and his anatomical illustrations, qualify him as the originator of the principle of cinematography. In his anatomical studies of the shoulder and his Leda studies, Leonardo explored the ideas that were central to the invention of the movie camera, half a millennium prior to the point when inventors working in different countries arrived at the same solution.
Leonardo left an unusually high number of his works unfinished. Art historians have offered many plausible reasons for why this peculiar habit so afflicted him. Among them is one that does not reappear until the advent of modern art: An unfinished canvas forces viewers to complete it using their own imagination. The very power of Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi (1481) [Fig. 7] and his St. Jerome (1480) [Fig. 8] can be partially attributed to their state of incompleteness. Not until Paul Cézanne, working in the 1880s, and Henri Matisse, working in the early 1900s, would other Western painters purposely leave empty reaches of a canvas bare with the intent of letting the viewer fill them in.
Carrying sfumato to an extreme, Leonardo began to blur the distinction between figure and ground by blending, ever so subtly, the borders of his figures with the surrounding ground. As his work progressed, it became increasingly unclear where one began and the other ended. Previous artists prepared their compositions by outlining the figures in black and then filling in the borders with color. This tended to give their paintings the appearance of a stage filled with cardboard cutouts superimposed upon a perspectivist background. Leonardo abandoned the outlining technique, and by subtly blurring the border between background and foreground, he gave his paintings a more realistic yet otherworldly quality that made them unique. Leonardo introduced a principle into his art that had been previously considered poor workmanship. The principle was painterly ambiguity, and he began using it at a time when artists were striving to achieve the exact opposite—leaving nothing to the imagination by meticulously painting every detail.
In his Treatise on Painting, Leonardo proposed that the boundary of a body is neither a part of the enclosed body nor a part of the surrounding atmosphere. Yet despite his observation, painters and viewers alike remained sure that the boundary did lie on this crisp margin. Five hundred years later, Henry Moore understood that the sharp boundary between the mass of an object and the negative space around it was an illusion, and he expressed this difficult idea with smooth-flowing statues, such as Internal and External Forms (1953–54), in which the space pours into the mass, and, conversely, the mass surrounds empty space so the distinction between inside mass and outside space is blurred. Moore required that the viewer at some level integrate the notion that space admixes with mass; both affect each other and seem to inform each other. The rare physicist who could understand Einstein would have to have reached the same conclusion. Leonardo grasped the principle five hundred years earlier.
Leonardo was an artist who loved paradox. He wrote books of riddles and presented paradoxical-themed poems at court. The boulders forming the ceiling of the cave in his Virgin of the Rocks (Madonna of the Rocks) [Fig. 9] resemble René Magritte’s boulder in the sky. And the puzzling battle between two men on horses in the background of his Adoration of the Magi is an example of paradox that Magritte would heartily admire.
In 1915 the psychologist Edgar Rubin introduced the public to his familiar optical conundrum of a vase versus the outline of two faces in profile [Fig. 10]. Rubin used it to examine how the human visual apparatus distinguishes between figure and ground.
When Rubin asked subjects to concentrate on seeing the two faces, they could not see the vase. When they were instructed to visualize the vase, the faces mysteriously disappeared. It became impossible for all but a rare few to see both images at once. Rubin’s work concerning visual perception had implications for artists and their public.
Rubin was the first scientist to make a thorough study of the nature of dual readings of the same image. For four hundred years, the subjects of compositions might have suggested ambiguous themes or symbolism, but painterly ambiguity of the kind Rubin had identified played no role in art for centuries following the Renaissance. The principle of ambiguity—and, in particular, the ambiguity associated with dual readings, in contrast—became one of the defining constructs of Modernism.
The Spanish painter, Salvador Dalí, converted Rubin’s scientifically expressed principle into a work of fine art. In his Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940), a woman in the foreground looks upon a scene in the slave market where people interact in front of an arched doorway. The two clerics dressed in black-and-white cassocks form the face (eyes, cheekbones, chin, and neck) of the French philosopher Voltaire as he was portrayed in a bust sculpted by Jean-Antoine Houdon in 1781. The archway forms the top of Voltaire’s head. Dalí created a highly sophisticated version of Rubin’s vase and two faces. One can either see the face of Voltaire or the two clerics walking through the archway. One cannot, however, see both at the same time.
In seeking precedents for this kind of trompe l’oeil (the expression means “fool the eye”), we would find almost none before the modern age except for one artist who played with this optical illusion. As Leo Steinberg pointed out in Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper, Leonardo painted the moldings on the wall in a manner that re-creates Rubin’s visual puzzle. Similar to the familiar Necker cube [Fig. 11], they can be seen in two distinctly different ways. But the two versions, both optically correct, cannot be visualized simultaneously.
Chapter 7
Duchamp/Leonardo
O writer, with what words will you describe the entire configuration of objects with the perfection that the drawing gives? If you are unable to draw, you will describe everything confusedly and convey little knowledge of the true form of objects; and you will deceive yourself in imagining that you can satisfy your hearer when you speak of the configuration of any corporeal object bounded by surfaces.
—Leonardo da Vinci
As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.
—Marcel Duchamp
Really, we can speak only through our paintings.
—Vincent van Gogh
Of the many modern artists whose work was adumbrated by Leonardo, Marcel Duchamp resembled his predecessor the most in temperament and character. Like Leonardo, Duchamp’s outsized reputation stood in contrast to the small number of pieces in his completed oeuvre. He frequently left works unfinished, was continually experimenting with new means to express himself, initiated many radical ideas that completely challenged the artistic conventions of his day, and even wrote copious notes concerning his ideas about science that he secreted away from the eyes of the public.
Although both were capable of technical mastery, both expended considerable time and effort on other endeavors. For Duchamp, it was his abiding interest in chess; for Leonardo, it was his interest in scientific pursuits. Both started major works and left them unfinished for years. And both loved practical jokes and riddles. Leonardo drew the first caricatures, and Duchamp was a founding member of the 1915 Society of Cartoonists. Duchamp, like Leonardo, emerged as one of the most influential artists of his age, and the works of both have withstood the judgment of time.
Born into an artistic family in 1887, Duchamp passed through a series of phases during which he experimented with styles initiated by others. Once he had extracted what he considered necessary from each one, he moved on and rarely repeated himself.
In the second decade of the twentieth century, Duchamp reached a bold conclusion concerning the state of art: The retina of the eye held art hostage. While the audacity of the Impressionists, point
illists, primitivists, and other artistic -ists continued to dazzle most of his contemporaries—who were convinced that they were rebelling against the moribund conventions of the Beaux-Arts Academy—Duchamp intuited something very different. With a few exceptions, he noted that these avant-garde artists, similar to the academics they sought to supplant, appealed primarily to the eye. Their work demanded minimal introspection. Decrying “pretty pictures” and “retinal art,” Duchamp strove to move the interpretation of art from the gossamer layer at the rear of the eyeball to a haunt deeper within the interstices of the brain’s neuronal ganglia. Duchamp fought for nothing less than a great rethinking concerning what exactly constitutes art. He challenged viewers to question everything that they had previously taken for granted by creating works that both the critics and the public increasingly struggled to understand.
Duchamp achieved instant recognition when his iconic Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. It created a succès de scandale. This inscrutable painting attracted considerable attention, as it was the first time Americans were getting a glimpse of the new art emerging from Europe.
In 1912, Marcel Duchamp put the finishing touches on the second of two versions of his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.
In one of his more clever titles, Duchamp even managed to spurn the futurists’ embargo against the nude as subject matter, even if (in true Duchampian fashion) art critics cannot be sure it is a representation of a woman due to the painting’s high degree of abstraction, and because Duchamp never clarified the issue. In Nude, Duchamp allows the viewer to see where the woman was, where she is, and where she is going to be. In a single gestalt, the past, present, and future of her motion are on display.
Was there an artist in the preceding centuries who also managed to accomplish the feat of inserting more than one duration of time in a single major painting? There is this one exceptional drawing finished five hundred years earlier by Leonardo, “The Vitruvian Man” [Fig. 12]. Here, we see the figure as a double exposure. Is not the Vitruvian Man a prelude to Duchamp’s Nude? Are not these two images a chance to see more than one duration of time simultaneously?
It may be worthwhile to examine another work by Leonardo in this context—considered the most complex composition in all of art history, The Last Supper. Five hundred years before Duchamp and the futurists, Leonardo provided a preview of their coming innovations. Similar to so many of Leonardo’s artistic firsts, this one is subtle and not easily discerned.
Prior to Leonardo, artists depicted the Last Supper merely as a meal during which Jesus and his twelve apostles broke bread. Compositionally, artists desired to project an air of piety. Leonardo departed from this convention and captured the emotionally charged moment immediately following Jesus’s stunning announcement in John (13:21–26):
After he had said this, Jesus was troubled in spirit and testified, “I tell you the truth, one of you is going to betray me.” His disciples stared at one another, at a loss to know which of them he meant. One of them, the disciple whom Jesus loved, was reclining next to him. Simon Peter motioned to this disciple and said, “Ask him which one he means.” Leaning back against Jesus, he asked him, “Lord, who is it?” Jesus answered, “It is the one to whom I will give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” Then, dipping the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, son of Simon.
As one would expect, Jesus’s accusation threw the diners into chaotic confusion. Leonardo assigned Jesus’s companions facial expressions, body language, and hand gestures that intimated their inner thoughts at that moment, and also used this state of shock to accentuate the prominent character trait of each apostle. Philip, the third figure to the left of Jesus, whom the Gospels characterize as the naive apostle, bolts to his feet anxiously. His expression, overall demeanor, and the position of his hands are such that the viewer can almost hear him imploring Jesus, “Will it be me, master?” In contrast, Leonardo depicts Peter, who is known for his temper and protectiveness toward Jesus, clutching a knife in a threatening way. His facial expression closely follows the written narrative, in which he demands that John the Younger ask Jesus the identity of the traitor among them. Judas, his face darkened with guilt, clutches a purse containing, no doubt, the thirty pieces of silver that was his reward for betraying his master. The enormous range of feeling he paints into the disciples’ experience in that one singular moment covers the spectrum of emotional response.
The interpretation of Leonardo’s The Last Supper has occupied an army of copyists and art critics and many who are unfamiliar to the field of art criticism. For centuries, the dominant interpretation was the one put forth by the literary giant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. A great admirer of Leonardo, in 1817 the famous German playwright and poet wrote an extensive essay outlining his interpretation of The Last Supper. He and a great many of the secular Romantics of the Enlightenment wanted to move Leonardo’s masterpiece out from under the rubric of religion and characterize it as a psychological study concerning betrayal—a subject with which just about every viewer has had an unpleasant experience. Goethe and his followers championed the view that the only valid interpretation possible was that Leonardo froze the dramatic moment that followed immediately after Jesus’s accusation, unus vestrum . . . , “one of you . . .”
In 1904, a Polish art critic, Jan Boloz Antoniewicz, delivered an impassioned lecture disputing Goethe’s interpretation. Antoniewicz observed that Goethe had viewed The Last Supper only once, and had reached his conclusions concerning the meaning of the painting by repeatedly referring to a faithful engraving of The Last Supper copied by Raphael Morghen in 1794, before the original had significantly deteriorated. While Morghen’s copy seemed identical to the original, Antoniewicz observed that there were several crucial changes. Morghen omitted the two items that were near Jesus’s hands—a wineglass and a bread roll. In the original, Jesus’s right hand adopts a gesture of reaching as it nears the wineglass. Adding to the ambiguity, Jesus’s right hand, while apparently reaching for the wineglass, is also in close proximity to the dish containing oil that Judas’s hand is also nearing. Jesus’s left hand adopts a palm-up and open position in a gesture of acceptance of the bread roll nearby. Remember, Leonardo was the first artist to make the position of his subject’s hands symbolize something in each of his paintings. This, then, is the incongruity. Leonardo did not arrange Jesus’s hands as one would expect of a person who has just accused another man sitting at the same table of committing the ultimate disloyal act, which would lead to the accuser’s painful death.
Antoniewicz’s interpretation reopened the debate concerning what exactly is going on in The Last Supper. Prompted by this outspoken and public challenge to the august Goethe’s interpretation, other voices were emboldened to recall that earlier painters who had seen the work prior to its sorry twentieth-century state had also interpreted it as Jesus announcing the Eucharist. Peter Paul Rubens roughly copied the schema of Leonardo, but in his version he cleared the table of all plates, silverware, and condiments, except for a chalice and a loaf of bread. Other painters, too, faithfully copied The Last Supper to emphasize the presence on the tabletop of bread and wine. They re-created the similar facial expressions and body positions of the apostles that appeared in the original, but instead of anxiety and fear over a shocking accusation, these painters render the apostles in a state of awe, reacting to what was to become a far more portentous moment in the history of Christianity.
Since these new interpretations have resurfaced in the modern era, Leonardo scholars have debated which of the two interpretations are valid. In his book Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper, Leo Steinberg wrote:
I am trying to track in the painting [The Last Supper] a mode of thought pervasive and all-embracing—an intellectual style that continually weds incompatibles, visualizes duration in one seeming flash, opposites in marvelous unison. Again and again, whether in choice of subject or formal arrangement, wh
ether addressed to a part or the whole, Leonardo converts either/or to both.
Presently a diplomatic truce has coalesced around a consensus that Leonardo accomplished the impossible: He managed to represent in one classic, perspectivist painting two distinctly sequential moments.
In Nude No. 2, Duchamp shows his model in all three durations of time—past, present, and future. If Leonardo revealed both the past (accusation and identification) and present (communion) in his composition, where, a viewer might ask, is his representation of the future? In his final mind-bender regarding time, Leonardo cleverly inserted in the painting intimations of events that had not happened yet. Extrapolating from the New Testament and legendary accounts concerning how the Romans martyred some of the apostles, he inserted these forewarnings into the painting. The knife held in the outstretched hand of Peter that menacingly appears as a disembodied threat points directly at Bartholomew. The New Testament reports that Bartholomew was flayed alive. Further, the knife foretells of Peter swinging a sword the following night in the Garden of Gethsemane, in a futile attempt to prevent Jesus’s arrest. Jesus’s feet under the table are held in an unnatural posture. Viewed in an alternative way, they assume the position they will be in when he is nailed to the cross. Leonardo managed in this single masterpiece to reveal multiple durations of time simultaneously. His depiction of the past (accusation, identification), present (sacrament), and future (foreordained actions) would not appear again in art until the modern era.
Duchamp shocked the art world in 1919 by painting a mustache and goatee on a reproduction of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. Adding to his outrageous gesture, he further desecrated what many in the art world felt represented the pinnacle of highbrow art by entitling his hirsute La Gioconda with what, at first glance, seemed like a meaningless acronym: L.H.O.O.Q. Pronounced out loud in French, however, the title’s letters sound out a slang French expression that roughly translates to She has a hot ass.*