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"In Italy in a brief period
of 50 years under In Switzerland you have one thousand
years of democracy Harry Lime's witty remark expresses the common view that artistic genius - the Great Artist - appears only in times of strife, and that without high tension there can be no great works of art. The close relationship between "great art" and war sheds light on a major aspect of the modern European psyche, which had its birth in Renaissance Italy. The core of this relationship lies in the idea of the artist as a unique ego. In this respect the Renaissance artist was a precursor of the egotism which became the glorified cultural ideal of 19th century European and American laissez-faire individualism.
In view of his uniqueness, however, it would seem that Leonardo blazed forth as a mutant, androgynous model of psychotechnical, right- and left-hemisphere integration. He passed on before he could fully comprehended - even by himself. Leonardo looms at the pinnacle of the European Renaissance - a troubled, puzzling giant whose left-handed, backward writing, which can be read only with the aid of a mirror, dramatically reveals the degree of neurocerebral integration he had experienced. Yet, in the visual character of the ideas he articulated, there is a strong left-hemisphere bias that is uniquely European, the Gutenberg touch. Justifying Castaneda's description of European membership - "Our eyes feed our reason and we have no direct knowledge of things" - Leonardo, echoing Aristotle on the five senses, wrote: "The sense which is nearest
to the organ of perception functions most quickly; Here Leonardo set forth the basic left-hemisphere visual bias of the European world view, giving greater weight to the eye as an instrument of knowledge than to the other organs of sense and the body as a whole. There is a mystical truth to the symbolic function of the eye as the organ of divine light. However, Leonardo confounded this truth with an inherited Platonic-Christian prejudice that denigrates the body and elevates the eye, whose medium of information is light, symbolic of the spirit, above other senses and modes of knowing. Ignoring that heliotropy (literally, "turning towards the sun") is a fundamental property of all life, regardless of whether, for instance, a flower has eyes, Leonardo wrote: The eye is the window of the soul...
Oh, excellent thing, superior to
all others created by God! It is not a big step from Leonardo's reflections
on the significance and importance of the eye - and his implicit
denial of anything but visual knowledge - to the thought of Descartes,
who in 1637 published both his classic study on optics and his famous
"Thus it follows that this ego,
this soul, The irony of the emphasis on visual knowledge is that beginning as an assertion that the eye is the window of the soul, and hence that the soul exist absolutely distinct from the body, it generates a dualism that creates a belief in matter which, under the banner of triumphant materialism, finally all but eliminates the doctrine of the transcendent soul- while retaining a belief in a nontrascendent individual ego. The point here is that Descartes' absolutely dualistic statement was possible only because of the already existing cultural tendency - exemplified in Leonardo's comments - to view the body as best as a prison for the soul. Visual knowledge alienates the psyche and degrades the body, which comes to be equated with the world of matter. In contrast to the soul or ego, matter is considered dead and inert. The dualism of body and soul, matter and mind, gives rise to the two extremes of human behavior, asceticism and libertinism. The ascetic is motivated by fear and disgust toward his body and a desire to maintain the purity of his eternal element, mind or spirit... The ascetic denies his emotions, which seem related to the body and will employ the most drastic means to preserve the purity of what to him is eternally true, and negate what is "dirty." At the other end of the spectrum is the libertine. Dismissing the body altogether as a frivolity, and the world as useless and vain, the libertine indulges completely in a maelstrom of passion... Corresponding to these two extremes of behavior are the archetypes of the scientist and artist. The former is the self-effacing ascetic, cool and objective, purging himself of human emotion... at the extreme he becomes a faceless, soulless zombie, sacrificing all to the demands of the technocratic state. It was the scientist who created the atom bomb, the ultimate weapon of those who would destroy in order to save.
Related to the ascetic/scientist archetype on one hand, are the general/conqueror, the politician/priest, and the merchant/entrepreneur. Related to the artist are the female archetypes - muse, housewife, sex object - the revolutionary and the socially maladjusted... Essentially, however, all of these modern types are imbalanced personalities whose behavior reflects repressed, sublimated, or poorly understood elements of the neglected hemisphere. < < b a c k < < |::| > > Chapter Continues > >
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The
personality and achievement of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) have
enthralled numerous European scholars, poets, artists, and psychologists.
Often Leonardo is referred to as the epitome of the "Renaissance
Man," the universal genius who combined the ideal of the artist
and the science in one personality.
Discourse
on Method, with its world-shaking declaration: "I think, therefore
I am." The body-negating and visual, reason-affirming dualism
hinted at by Leonardo was more emphatically expressed by Descartes,
who denuded Leonardo's premise of all sensory input:
The
artist on the other hand, is the libertine, careless with his own
emotions and body to the point of self-destruction, drowning in
a whirlpool of passion, crucified by the "evil" desires
of his own flesh; such has been the lot of Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
and van Gogh, to name a few.