In the above image (Codex Atlanticus 520r, c. 1490) Leonardo writes:

“Body born of the perspective of Leonardo Vinci, disciple of experience.  Let this body be made not with examples of another body but only with simple lines.”

This is one of his greatest declarations of respect for esperienza, meaning both experience and experiment.

How can we interpret his reference to a “body born of the perspective” of its disciple?  Some commentators suggest the “body” mentioned is the beautiful and mathematical drawing adjacent, of a double-helix torus not unlike many of Leonardo’s drawings of “continuous geometry” such as curling hair, flowing water, spiral plant forms, twisting textiles, and the like.  Yet this may be too literal a reading.  Perhaps we should consider Leonardo’s lifelong practice of juxtaposing diverse elements in a shared context to highlight subtle similarities of pattern or meaning by the use of analogy, a technique he called “comparazione” or “relazione.” 

His pledge of loyalty to experience (at age 38, near the midpoint of his life) could apply to his own larger oeuvre or legacy, his corpus or whole body of work.  In this expanded sense the beauty of the torus form gains both meaning and depth, nuance and exactitude.  The idea of a “body of work” born from scientific and artistic learning, practice, and effort is both like and unlike the concept of the “Great Work” in medieval alchemy.

Leonardo explicitly rejected alchemy in the literal sense of transforming metals as charlatanry, yet also knew the stasis and rigidity of much medieval science and cosmology were profoundly incorrect.  (That all things were in motion, and changing into all other things, was both fundamental to early modern science -- inspired by Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura -- and like that poem itself often subject to severe censorship.)  Leonardo even chose “quintessence”-- the fifth element of alchemy after earth, air, fire, and water -- to describe the flow of nature’s forms woven of matter and energy through varying cycles of birth, growth, erosion, decay, and recurrence.

Esperienza (experientia in Latin) was a core value for Leonardo's predecessors Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon (both sometime alchemists), Dante, Chaucer (contemporary and friend to Boccaccio and Petrarch), Cusanus, and many others.  Later poet-scientists like Browne and Newton invested great effort in both “chymistry” and what we today consider real science.  Do not today’s conceptions of quantum principles – of probability that is only semi-extant – and evolution at scales large and small not resemble such imaginative speculations at least partly in tone? 

Jung had a balanced and open approach to alchemy as part early science and part culture: simultaneously fake and real, honest and fraudulent, physics and psychology, imagination and experiment.  Faust is a highly modern archetype, absurd yet ominous, and unquestionably an alchemist.  Even in modern political theory, such as the 18th century framing of constitutional democracy, the images of alchemy like masonry and rose-crosses once served a central shorthand purpose for imagining how to build stable yet free institutions.  Hamilton’s Federalist Papers cite experience and experiment in their opening sentence and concluding paragraph, quoting Hume. 

As Hume the empiricist once asked, what is it that bundles perceptions into consciousness?  Perhaps the perceiving body, like Varela says, forms “enactive cognition” in a local network a la Sporns.  Perhaps like each perception itself, as Anil Seth theorizes, the bundle is only a “best guess” or predictive form of inference and itself a “controlled hallucination” which embodies consciousness.  All these probabilities and possible states interweave in network fashion to form unfixed, flowing, and metamorphosing phenomena which generate the moving images of complexity through time.  On these images depend not only our perceptions but our politics, philosophy, and even consciousness itself.

To affix the “quantum state” of Esperienza to the famous portrait, even if speculatively, may be key to unlocking its greatest and deepest levels of meaning.

Next blog: bridges of peace and understanding