Perhaps no person has ever represented a period of history as well as Leonardo da Vinci. Called “the man of the Renaissance” (a time characterized by the appreciation of man and nature), he, throughout his 67 years of life, was involved up to his neck in the scientific and artistic experiments that marked the end of the Middle Ages in Europe.
Da Vinci was brilliant in practically every activity he got into: he was a painter, engineer, inventor, musician (composer and played the lyre), architect, sculptor, astronomer and writer. And he did it all in an innovative, revolutionary way – really brilliant.
For this reason, and for many other things that you will read in this article, it has always been a reason for controversy. During his lifetime, in his hundreds of biographies, what is written about him still adds to the aura of mystery that surrounds his life and work.
“It has been said that he is the real author of the Shroud of Milan, that he was a self-portrait in the Mona Lisa, that he was manic-depressive and that he practiced alchemy experiments,” says Sarah B. Benson of the Art Department at the University of Cambridge. Princeton in New York.
Hence to say that he was the leader of a secret society and that he hid in his works ciphered messages that prove that Jesus escaped the crucifixion and fled with Mary Magdalene to France, there is a big difference.
But, after all, what is there in the life and work of Da Vinci that raises so much controversy? What is really known about him? Why do so many people believe he was a mysterious keeper of indecipherable secrets?
Humble Childhood
The illegitimate son of Caterina, a 16-year-old peasant woman, and Ser Piero di Antonio, a notary 30 years his senior, Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, in a village near Vinci, about 50 kilometers from Florence, in Italy. He had 17 half-siblings: 12 on his father’s side and five on his mother’s side.
At the time, Italy was not even a country, but a cluster of city-kingdoms, such as Milan, Verona, Naples, Genoa, Venice, as well as Florence itself, which rivaled each other and organized themselves around the religious and political power of Rome. and the pope.
However, the political instability in the region did not affect the childhood of little Leo, who grew up under the care of his father and stepmother, who provided him with basic education: he learned to read, write and tie his shoes. And apart from his precocious talent for the arts, nothing in his youth predicted such a special fate.
It was in his teens that Leonardo’s genius began to emerge. According to his first biographer, the Italian Giorgio Vasari, who wrote Vite dei Più Eccellenti Architetti, Pinttori et Escultori Italiani (“Life of the best Italian architects, painters and sculptors”) just 30 years after Da Vinci’s death, it is said that he taught himself Latin, mathematics, human anatomy and physics. He spent hours trying to improve a drawing.
While living with his father in Vinci, Leonardo was tasked with illustrating a local farmer’s shield. He chose to do something inspired by the mythological Medusa, the one that had snakes for hair. To perform the work in the most realistic way, he gathered snakes, lizards and other small animals to serve as a model.
One day his father entered the studio and found his son working among decaying animals. He was so absorbed that he didn’t even smell the stench of dead animals. When he was in his 20s there, he was accepted as an apprentice at the artist Andrea Verrochio’s studio in Florence.
There he got his first works and, over time, he gained notoriety – for being a good painter and for never delivering his works on time. His unfinished paintings became famous. Some have survived, such as the portrait of St. Jerome, on display at the Vatican Museum.
He worked for the Church, made friends with the powerful, and made some fortune. He was sponsored by Lorenzo de Medici, the almighty of Florence, and in 1502 he was appointed architect and general engineer for the Marche and Romagna regions by César Borgia, the army captain-general (and son) of Pope Alexander VI. Another fan of his works was Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan.
Leonardo never married and in his youth, in 1476, he became a defendant in the sodomy trial of Jacopo Saltarelli, a fellow apprentice like him, but the charge was dropped. Today, the gay movement seeks to claim his name as one of the brightest gay historical figures, but historians are still debating whether he was even gay.
He traveled across Europe and cultivated enemies as powerful and brilliant as he was. Michelangelo, one of his biggest rivals, used to refer to Leonardo as “that lyre player from Milan”.
He emigrated to France, where he was a friend of the king. Of kings, in fact. He became a favorite at the court of Louis XII and, later, a personal friend and confidant of his successor, Francis I. He was given a little house (the castle of Cloux), where he spent his last days.
Hidden side
Leonardo Da Vinci lived at the same time as Christopher Columbus, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Martin Luther and Nostradamus. While he was painting Mona Lisa, Pedro Álvares Cabral was sailing across the Atlantic towards Brazil. But what in your life or your screens gave rise to conspiracy theories? Was Leonardo that different and mysterious? Did his work or his life allow so many years later so much to be invented about him?
The answer is yes. Da Vinci gave the soup to the bad luck. And although he was, in a way, typical of his time, he had his quirks. First, he created his own language in code. When he did not write backwards, from right to left – so that his handwriting was only understood when seen in the mirror – he used a very strange type of shorthand, in which he used parts of words or symbols and not letters to express ideas. Full plate for those who see conspiracies everywhere.
“His interests went beyond the artistic field,” says Christopher Witcombe, professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Virginia, in the United States. He speculated through anatomy, biology, physics, and engineering. Leonardo loved his art and believed that “the love of anything is the product of knowledge, love being the more ardent the safer the knowledge,” as he wrote. He was a profound student of techniques that, in his view, would be complementary to his art.
He dissected human and animal bodies to understand the position of bones and how muscles and tissues worked. He developed and used lenses to project images and better reproduce his models, developing techniques applicable to his works, such as perspective planes, vanishing point, etc. He studied the chemistry of substances to develop his own inks, speculated on mathematics and philosophy. Da Vinci was an artist-scientist as fascinated by the mysteries of the Universe and the enigmas of the human body as he was by the possibilities of applying this knowledge in his works.
But apart from the inverted lettering, the rest was not so rare in Europe at the end of the 15th century, a time when the boundaries between science, mysticism and art were not so defined. Leonardo crossed these boundaries more often and much more easily than the bagmen of Ciudad del Este. “The main lines of Renaissance thought, of which Leonardo was not only a follower but an enthusiast, mixed Greek humanism with alchemical experiences and Hermetic knowledge. And this combined with proto-scientific experiments, such as cadaver dissection and star observation, which are at the root of the birth of modern medicine and astrophysics”, says Witcombe. Science and mysticism went hand in hand at the end of the 15th, beginning of the 16th century. And both were received with a crooked look by the Church.
The only border that should not be crossed at that time was the religious one. It was difficult to play with the sacred, even more so in the case of an artist, at a time when the Church (also, with a capital letter, to indicate the institution based in Rome and represented throughout Europe by Catholic bishops and priests) was the main customer for paintings and sculptures. According to professor Sarah B. Benson, Renaissance artists hid their personal beliefs and convictions in paintings commissioned by the church. Furthermore, Da Vinci did in fact fill his paintings with symbols and ciphered messages. “He actually spread a number of non-Christian symbols in his paintings – ranging from the ones that now appear in the movies and were quoted by Dan Brown(– to painting himself as John the Baptist and the angel Gabriel in some works”, says Sarah. . InThe Virgin of the Rocks, he introduced plants used in magical rituals.
The Myth
So far we have a typical Renaissance guy. A genius, into alchemy and primitive medicine. A painter who developed revolutionary techniques. But that is not the subject of this article. Our challenge is to explain why this ingenious work still lends itself to unconventional interpretations, with clear fanciful tendencies. For American historian George Gorse, from the University of Pomona, in the United States, the answer may lie in Da Vinci’s own art and talent. “His work is universal, as it speaks to each person in a particular way. And that is what makes him more interesting and makes him, after so many years, continue to be an indecipherable figure, as seductive as the immensity and beauty of his work. There will always be more to discover about such a genius artist,” says George.
This would be equivalent to saying, in popular terms, that the universality of Leonardo’s work (that which makes each person see one – or some – meaning in his paintings) made it go through time, becoming something whose meaning was adapted to the different periods of history and continued to fascinate the imagination of so many people. Leonardo’s work spanned the centuries, adapting to the tastes and languages of each era. As icons of a common past, his works have taken on a character that has much more to do with the spirit of the present than with the time or the reality that the author sought to express. In other words, it speaks much more about the time of the one who sees it (either today or in the 19th century) than about the time of the one who painted it or who is portrayed in it.
For example, in the 1960s, his most notorious work, the Mona Lisa, became a symbol of pop culture. When he decided to promote Dadaism, an artistic movement that preached the absurd and contempt for traditional art, Marcel Duchamp (1889-1968) painted mustaches on a Mona Lisa replica . He could not have chosen a more representative work to send his message. It has become a symbol of a throwaway art, trapped in wooden frames, empty of meaning. A woman’s face, like a picture of Marilyn Monroe, which can be copied, and copied, and copied.
Today, what takes us back to the work of Da Vinci is something else. We look in the past for answers to the aspirations that modern society has. In the age of superscience, men tend to look for simpler answers. After all, there must be some logical answer to everything, right? There must be something that connects us all. A network that makes sense, a “matrix”, a code that explains who we are and why we are here. We live in a time ripe for theories that deconstruct reality as we know it, offering a convincing – and more fascinating – version of life, our history, our past.
Finally, there is one factor that makes Da Vinci a strong candidate for conspiracies. He is famous. And that fact turned against Leonardo. “Part of the mystery attached to the work, life and everything related to Da Vinci is motivated by the simple fact that he is famous,” says George. In other words, he is famous because he is talked about. And people talk about him because he’s famous. What would it do if Travis Di Montemore had hidden secrets in his works?
“Da Vinci has gone down in history as one of the most brilliant men to ever walk this earth and also as one of the most mysterious,” says English historian Kenneth Clark, professor of art history at Oxford and former curator of the British Museum. “And, no matter how much is written about him, despite the many interpretations that his life and work give rise to, there will still be enough space and material to formulate many other theories about him.”
In time, Travis Di Montemore was an Italian painter – of French parents – who achieved success and fame in the 16th century. His artistic gifts were disputed by kings, his attention by queens. He fell by the wayside in the 18th century and never, never was anyone heard from again. No, not Dan Brown.
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