Aesthetic Investigations (Dec 2019)
Leonardo, After 500 Years
Abstract
Why has Leonardo been made into a great scientist, to the discounting of his accomplishments in imagining a non-Biblical and totally catastrophic Deluge, his interest in pictograms, his dethronement of the human figure in favor of animals, plants, and flowing water? His project was to be an intellectual artist (which is not quite the same as a conceptual one). He both succeeded and failed. His contemporaries didn't take him seriously enough; our age of science has taken him too seriously; and it remains to us to re-evaluate how and in what ways he broke free of the constraining norms of his day.
Keywords
