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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The first Renaissance man, December 16, 2006
Nothing of Leonardo DAVinci's sketchbooks were published until the 20th century. These are some of the most important documents of the Renaissance, and they did not become known until the 20th century. There are still people who do not know how important this work was. His anatomical studies were a watershed moment, because they introduced visual diagrams as the standard for communicating knowledge of the body and self. This was no more and no less than the conviction that the true knowledge of the shape of any body could only be arrived at by seeing it from different aspects. The truth of the body, the truth of the human being can only be discovered by looking at the body from multiple aspects, like; level, motion, perspective, transformation and growth. He opened up the body, it had always been closed, now its open. Now, what goes on inside the body is going to give us the essence of what it means to be human. It is the internal struggle, the self with the self, within .you. When you look at his sketchbooks, you see just one place where the whole world opens up.
Leonardo DAVinci-- Leonardo DAVinci invented the modern self. He invented the modern self precisely in this way, through the perspective of disappearance. What he tells reality and us about the self is that it only exists by that which is perceived by the eye. Reality is a product of nature; reality is that which we perceive by the eye. Reality is only that by which we can see. Moreover, in his notebooks he gives us another foundational belief about the human subject and its form. That the sound rules are the issue of sound experience and observation. Experience and observation can only be our best teacher. Of course, this is also, what Voltaire is telling us to by the way. The challenge comes when we realize that we are both to the subject observing and the object that is observed. In our search for self, we experience a kind of division between our constitutions as objects and our constitution as subjects. However, when we look at the human form, when we look at the self we find that the body is in harmony with nature, and that it is in harmony within nature. How does DA Vinci make these kinds of claims? Alternatively, how does he ground these kinds of claims with the function of the eye or the power of the eye? Well, one of the ways he does it is thru the camera obscura. Earliest record of use of camera obscura is in DA Vinci's writings. The camera obscura gave birth to the science of optics, the science of seeing. It is with DA Vinci, that the science of seeing became the foundation of self-representation, a representation called the self, thus the representation of the human form. Now DA Vinci embodied his own concept of the painter, as philosophers. He saw painters principally as natural philosophers. To him, nature was all important, absolute, the image of the eternal. In one very significant passage of his notebooks, he defines the relationship of art to nature and its process of evolution. "The painter will produce pictures of small merit, if he takes for his standard the pictures of others. If he will study from natural objects, he will bear good fruit, as was seen in the painters after the Romans always imitating each other until their art constantly declined from age to age. Therefore, this was paramount for him in some ways what he was doing, and thinking was very radical and revolutionary and in other ways, it was very traditional. He appears to be quite a traditionalist, he studied ancient sources, Greeks, medieval sources, he studied anatomy, and these traditions get him to compare the microcosm of the body and the macrocosm of the world. These analogies extend to everything that he attempted to trace, to record and to know about the human form. Comparisons between the arteries in the body and the underground rivers of the earth. The flow of blood to the head in relation to the circulation of water to the summits of mountains. How does blood get to your head? If you want to understand that then understand how water flows up to mountains. Blood when it bursts in the veins of your nose and water rushing out of a vein in the earth. Almost everything that occurs in the human body can be found in the natural world. His interest in these analogies becomes very evident in the notebooks and sketchbooks. Scholars argue that these microcosm and macrocosm analogies are more than outright comparisons that belong to a pre scientific age, they lead him to compare the study of the body and Ptolemy's study of the earth. Consequently to use Ptolemy's method in the geography as the starting point for his own systematic study of anatomy. Therefore, anatomy and geography here become one in DA Vinci's mind. The forms of the earth and those of the human body have a parallel. "Thus in 15 entire figures you will have set before you the microcosm on the same plan as was before me adapted by Ptolemy in his cosmology, and so I shall afterwards divide them into limbs as he divided the whole world into processes. Then, I will speak of the function of each part in every direction putting before your eyes a description of the whole form and substance of man as regards his movements from place to place by means of these different parts. Thus if it please our great author I may demonstrate the nature of men and their customs in a way I describe this figure." Therefore, within the human form and within the kind of intricate details of human anatomy he discovered a way of describing and recording, not only the geographical construction of the natural world, but of Divinity itself. And when you look more closely at the system he devised to study the body, the more carefully you look at his drawings of the human form the more clearly you begin to recognize how strikingly stunningly original it is.
Earlier authors had relied exclusively on verbal descriptions of the human body. The human body had been a verbal entity but he emphasis visual description and some of the illustrations he has to bring visual dimensions to the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle the descriptions put forward by these men he presents in visual terms in these kind of body scapes. In the course of 20 years, roughly from 1489 to the end of his life, he dissected about 19 corpses and became very much obsessed with dissection. He drew these parts of bodies in minute detail every part of the human anatomy, he would draw each piece separately, together and at different angles. He laid out bodies in his drawings to mime classical poses in painting. He is referencing the history of art with the poses and the visual representation of the human subject. It is presented to us that deeply challenge these values of human nature, of life and death of living form and the cadaver it really raises some profound questions. The problem is in order to get to those questions, in order to explore some of the deeper philosophical implications of his work you have to get past the gross factor and the moral and ethical questions that his work raises. He is an artist that works very consciously with the sense of the ethical lines that he is crossing; he is not an artist that wants to make you comfortable. He sees that blood gets in the way of his observations, so he advises that you make a model of the body part and then you draw it. Model making and scientific art go hand in hand for him. You have to reconstruct reality before you can represent it. Therefore, before you can draw what is real you have to make it yourself. One of the most striking features of the notebooks is the manner in which he presents his work to us. There are no criticisms of the shortcomings that he has discovered in earlier authors, he does not boast about his own accomplishments, his writing style is pedagogical, and he is writing a teaching manual with descriptions and advice. Therefore, if you want to draw a lung, here is how you should do it. What he is trying to do is to convey to a larger audience this method of presentation and by representing human form, he relies on diagrams, and his reliance apparently causes some serious problems for the printing presses of the day. It also caused real issues for publishers because of the graphic nature of the work.
This was very important for medicine. He shows us we can separate human emotions and passions from the human body in understanding human form, and what it means to be human. There is a purely clinical dimension and this other dimension of feelings and emotions, and they do not have to come together at all, this is radical.
Thus again, this inside outside, you see it everywhere in his work. Why are we fascinated with the painting of the Mona Lisa? Because of the question we always ask, what is going on inside? The study of the Mona Lisa, it seems to me has always been organized around precisely the question that drove DA Vinci in his research. All his sketches in this obsessive and fanatical devotion to drawing every part of the body in relationship to every other part of the body at multiple levels and multiple perspectives and in motion, outside inside. There is the outside, what is going on inside, isn't that why we are obsessed with this? This painting just demands that we try to find out what is going on underneath. The truth is underneath, behind her smile, something she is keeping from us. Yet she is revealing just enough of it to make us have to find out what is going on inside of her. It is that relationship once again between the inside and the outside.
I read this book for a graduate class in the Humanities. Recommended reading for anyone interested in history, psychology, philosophy, art, and science.
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