{"id":84191,"date":"2019-04-13T16:30:12","date_gmt":"2019-04-13T20:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gayfriendschat.com\/socialblog\/leonardo-da-vinci-saw-in-animals-the-image-of-the-world\/"},"modified":"2019-04-13T16:30:12","modified_gmt":"2019-04-13T20:30:12","slug":"leonardo-da-vinci-saw-in-animals-the-image-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gayfriendschat.com\/socialblog\/leonardo-da-vinci-saw-in-animals-the-image-of-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Leonardo da Vinci Saw in Animals the \u2018Image of the World\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leonardo da Vinci Saw in Animals the \u2018Image of the World\u2019<\/b><\/p>\n

From cats to dragonflies, Leonardo sketched scores of animals.\u00a0Leonardo da Vinci\/Royal Collection Trust<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

About six months ago I stopped eating meat. I was teaching a graduate course at UCLA that investigated how Italian Renaissance writers conveyed their concepts about the human through writing about the nonhuman \u2013 plants, animals, objects, angels, demons, gods and God. As weeks passed, I found myself becoming more and more attuned to the nonhuman entities all around me, more aware of their vibrant lives. Cutting flowers for a short-lived bouquet seemed wrong; chewing on animal flesh became flat out impossible.<\/p>\n

Leonardo da Vinci was one of the authors we were studying in the course. Out of the thousands of pages comprising his 25 documented codices, known collectively as his \u201cNotebooks<\/a>,\u201d we read passages describing the natural world and its inhabitants, and some of his philosophical maxims, fables and riddles. In a striking passage that introduces his \u201cTreatise on Water,\u201d<\/a> he wrote:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cBy the ancients man<\/a> has been called the world in miniature; and certainly this name is well bestowed, because, inasmuch as man<\/a> is composed of earth, water, air, and fire, his body resembles that of the earth; and as man<\/a> has in him bones \u2014 the supports and framework of his flesh \u2014, the world has its rocks \u2014 the supports of the earth; as man<\/a> has in him a pool of blood in which the lungs rise and fall in breathing, so the body of the earth has its ocean tide which likewise rises and falls \u2026 \u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Unlike many thinkers of his time who anthropomorphized the Earth, Leonardo terramorphized man<\/a>. But it was not just man<\/a> that Leonardo saw as a Platonic microcosmic-world-in-miniature. Animals, he wrote, are \u201cthe image of the world<\/a>.\u201d They reflect the Earth, just as we do.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Leonardo\u2019s animals hold their own against human beings.<\/span>
\n Leonardo da Vinci<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Humans not superior to animal world<\/h2>\n

Leonardo never challenged the Christian belief that human beings were made in the image of God, nor the classical notion that man<\/a>\u2019s proportions and symmetries (albeit a white, middle-aged, able-bodied, European man<\/a>) were beautiful and worthy of imitation in architecture and art. But he also never claimed other living beings were less beautiful, soulless, or lacked intelligence.<\/p>\n

When comparing animals and humans \u2013 which he did often \u2013 animals often came out looking better. In one of his notes, Leonardo wrote<\/a>, \u201cMan has much power of discourse, which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie.\u201d He often pointed out how much more powerful animals\u2019 senses were, how much faster, stronger, more efficient and capable they were of performing remarkable feats, such as flight.<\/p>\n

And animals were not nearly as \u201cbestial\u201d to one another as humans could be. \u201cKing of the animals<\/a> \u2013 as thou hast described him \u2013 I should rather say king of the beasts,\u201d he wrote. Leonardo lamented how human stomachs have become \u201ca sepulcher for all animals\u201d and how \u201cour life is made by the death of others<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n

Leonardo the vegetarian?<\/h2>\n

This passage, along with other writing about humans as killing machines and their esophagi as animal cemeteries, as well as a few comments by his contemporaries, have led many to believe that Leonardo was a vegetarian. <\/p>\n

There is a 1515\/6 letter by the Italian explorer Andrea Corsali to Giuliano de\u2019 Medici that \u2013 in discussing how the Gujarati of India won\u2019t eat anything with blood or allow hurt to come to any animate thing \u2013 says they are \u201clike our Leonardo da Vinci<\/a>.\u201d Corsali, however, did not know Leonardo well, and the sentence is ambiguous; it could just mean that Leonardo never hurt animals or wanted to see them hurt. <\/p>\n

<\/a>
Leonardo was captivated by birds\u2019 power of flight.<\/span>
\n Leonardo da Vinci\/Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) noted that Leonardo was famed for buying caged birds and setting them free<\/a> and Leonardo did, in fact, advocate for eating Nature\u2019s abundant senplici (\u201csimples\u201d)<\/a>, a term which seems to imply plant-based recipes. He pondered why Nature had created a world in which animals ate each other<\/a>, but concluded it was because life is compelled to reproduce and endure, and consequently, Nature needed a way to keep numbers down.<\/p>\n

Nowhere in his writing, however, did he speak of not eating meat. His grocery lists have meat on them, although it is possible he was purchasing it for members of his household: students, servants, guests, animals.<\/p>\n

Whether he ate a totally meat-free diet or not is unclear, but his love for animals is unquestionable. He lived with animals on a farm as a child and they were ever-present in his studio \u2013 likely cats and dogs, insects, birds and reptiles (some alive, some deceased). Leonardo studied them, depicted them, wrote about them and built machines \u2013 even war machines \u2013 inspired by them.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Leonardo\u2019s \u2018Allegory of a Dog and an Eagle.\u2019<\/span>
\n Leonardo da Vinci\/Royal Collection Trust<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Literary animals<\/h2>\n

Leonardo\u2019s literary writing \u2013 fables, riddles, aphorisms \u2013 is filled with animals. While they often serve as Aesopic moral stand-ins for humans, Leonardo also used them differently than other classical, medieval and Renaissance fabulists, contrasting them to humans, celebrating their strengths and wisdom and critiquing how humans treat them. <\/p>\n

In his \u201cProphecy<\/a>\u201d riddles \u2014 which read like predictions of a horrendous apocalyptic future \u2014 one encounters legions of cruelty and pain. \u201cI see children of thine given up to slavery to others \u2026 paid with the severest suffering<\/a>, and spend[ing] their whole life benefiting those who ill treat them.\u201d As a riddle, this is not what it seems. He\u2019s writing not of humans, but rather, of donkeys, and how humans repay their services with unkindness and even violence. That said, in an empathic move, Leonardo was also linking humans to donkeys, and pointing to the ever-present fact that humans subject other humans to terrible fates. <\/p>\n

In another riddle he noted the twistedness of horned animals being slaughtered by horn-handled knives<\/a>, and the ostensible cannibalism of masters of estates \u201ceating their own laborers<\/a>\u201d \u2013 oxen.<\/p>\n

And in a particularly chilling prophecy, he described animals so full of evil that they were destroying all life on land and sea: He cries, \u201cO Earth! Why dost thou not open and engulf<\/a> [these animals] in the fissure of thy vast abyss and caverns, and no longer display in the sight of heaven such a cruel and horrible monster!\u201d The monster, of course, is man<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Although many people assume Leonardo\u2019s Vitruvian Man<\/a> is an indication of an adherence to the commonly, but not universally, held Renaissance notion that man<\/a> was the most perfect of beings and \u201cthe measure of all things,\u201d his literary and artistic production seem to show that he saw animals as the true \u201cimage of the world.\u201d While he included human beings in the group he called \u201canimals,\u201d it was not as preeminent entities, but as one of the world\u2019s infinite, beautiful varieties.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Horses were among the animals Leonardo most frequently sketched.<\/span>
\n Leoardo da Vinci<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Animals on their own terms<\/h2>\n

Animals proliferate in Leonardo\u2019s visual art. In his sketches we see horses run, trot, rear up on back legs, fall. Birds, bats and insects extend their wings. Cats stretch, wrestle and lounge. Lions roar. Bears, dogs, crabs, rhinoceroses quietly stand or walk. Beetles and ants bend their appendages.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
\u2018The Lady with an Ermine (Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani)\u2019<\/span>
\n Leonardo da Vinci\/Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

His animals are anything but nature-morte<\/a>; they are alive with motion and, seemingly, emotion. Within his paintings one can see, for example, a gentle, communicative lion in the unfinished \u201cSaint Jerome in the Wilderness<\/a>\u201d (c. 1480); an affectionate ermine in \u201cLady with an Ermine<\/a>\u201d (1489-90); an erotic swan in the 1503-1507 sketches for a never-produced painting, \u201cLeda and the Swan<\/a>\u201d); a lamb being hugged by the child Jesus in \u201cThe Virgin and the Child with Saint Anne<\/a>\u201d (1510). And, of course, horses: ceremonial and military (\u201cThe Adoration of the Magi<\/a>\u201d (1481), \u201cThe Battle of Anghiari<\/a>\u201d (preparatory studies, 1504-1505).<\/p>\n

All these animals are present in his writing, too, joined by an ark-load more: domesticated, wild, local, exotic, mythical (dragons!) and imaginary (sea-monsters!). Leonardo\u2019s depictions of animals emerge not only as forces that teach us about ourselves and challenge our sense of human primacy, but as powerful, creative forces, on their own terms.<\/p>\n

Leonardo chipped away at the walls between \u201cus\u201d and \u201cthem\u201d by placing all life on a level field, all things as micro-reflections of a macro-whole. And as he envisioned in his terrifying visual and verbal depictions of catastrophic deluges and global disasters, we\u2019re all in this together.<\/p>\n

Arielle Saiber<\/a>, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Bowdoin College<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The post Leonardo da Vinci Saw in Animals the \u2018Image of the World\u2019<\/a> appeared first on Towleroad Gay News<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Leonardo da Vinci Saw in Animals the \u2018Image of the World’<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n