أومبرتو إيكو و آراء حول دافنشي
أسوق نص الحوار الآتي بعد و الذي تم إجراؤه مع الأديب و اللغوي المعاصر "أومبرتو إيكو" حول عبقرية فنان النهضة الأشهر "ليوناردو دافنشي"، طبقا للمصدر المنوه عنه في نهاية الحوار:
Leonardo's Mystery: An Interview with Umberto Eco.
by Thomas Regnier
Even after five centuries, the world continues to marvel at the prolific genius of Leonardo da Vinci. Today, perhaps more than ever before, his astonishing creativity conjures a wonderful enigma--and fuels wild new flights of interpretation. How to make sense of this phenomenon? Umberto Eco, the great Italian novelist and scholar, helps us to decode the personality and intellect behind the great master.
THOMAS REGNIER: How do you explain the fascination exerted by Leonardo da Vinci across the centuries?
UMBERTO ECO: Leonardo da Vinci was first and foremost a great artist. And, like any great artist, he is bound to stir up a lasting fascination. Within him there are as many ambiguities as unique features, and these have contributed to the shape of his legend. Consider his handwriting, for instance. Being left-handed, he wrote from right to left, and created inverted characters that are indecipherable without the help of a mirror. I'm thinking also of the androgyny of his characters, which art historians have studied so exhaustively- -whether it be those represented in The Last Supper or his Saint John the Baptist, or of course the Mona Lisa.
Aside from the wondrous quality of his painting, which is beyond debate, the man himself was rich enough in paradox to shape his own legend. He probably delighted in creating it.
I don't think that in painting the Mona Lisa Leonardo just thought of himself as painting a portrait of a lady. I believe that he knew very well that he was creating something that would spark people's curiosity for centuries to come. He must have known that generations of people would busy themselves trying to unravel a great mystery--a mystery which may or may not exist. Leonardo was a great clown, and he knew better than anyone how to play with people's imaginations in order to create an impression of mystery.
The parallel with Raphael is very revealing. Raphael is also a genius, but everything in his work is clear and limpid. He is very much the opposite of Leonardo, who strikes me as one of those "teases" of which Decadentism was so fond, always wearing an enigmatic smile that could well mean one thing--or else another. In a word, he's a great mysterian.
If he fascinates us so much, is it not also because he is the very archetype of the Renaissance genius, an individual who embodies that great intersection of art and science?
Indeed, Leonardo was simultaneously an exceptional painter and an inventor of genius who--even though he was wrong about almost everything-- had wonderfully innovative ideas, and he never stopped putting them to the test. To answer your question, I would say that Leonardo injected art into his science but that he was incapable of putting science into his art.
Take, for instance, the technical aspects of his colour chemistry. Some of his works, like The Battle of Anghiari in the Palazzo Vecchio, have become unrecognizable because he was unable to understand the nature of his materials. And if The Last Supper is in such a pitiable state today, it is because of errors in calculation on his part. He was an appalling paint mechanic, and he was in the habit of creating new tempera blends that subsequently proved unstable.
There's the extraordinary da Vinci paradox: the paradox of a man who could conceive of such extraordinary machines, but make mistakes in colour chemistry.
Leonardo was undeniably a genius. As for the strictly scientific aspect, I would say that he was a great tinkerer. The fantastic devices he designed over the course of his whole life--be they flying machines or submarines or models of diving-suits- -fire the human imagination to this day. But again I think we need to portion out the contributions of the artist and the scientist. As an artist he foresaw and anticipated all sorts of extraordinary technical possibilities. But it is equally true that most of his drawings could never be realized in practice. In fact they were essentially impractical.
Yet the fact remains that humanity needed such a visionary genius, who also was possessed by an immensely powerful creativity, to give wings to the imagination, so that afterwards humble technicians could come along to bring these things into reality. If there hadn't been the ingenuity and the fancy of such precursors, the technicians would have had nothing with which to work.
History is constantly illustrating the productive power of mistakes. The productivity of mistakes is what the English call "serendipity. " Serendipity is precisely the capacity to make happy and unforeseen discoveries by accident. There is serendipity in looking for one thing and, having made an error, finding something else.
There is a long list of false beliefs that have proved fruitful. Consider Columbus , who made a huge miscalculation about the dimensions of the earth but who was driven by the idee fixe, and as a result discovered America --by accident. Aside from strict serendipity, we should reflect also on the practical effects of deliberate fakery. Take, for instance, the celebrated letter of Prester John, which plays a role in my novel Baudolino. This specious document conjured a far-off and mysterious Christian kingdom, first in the middle of Asia and then in the middle of Africa . All of the Portuguese exploration of Africa was sparked by this bizarre story--which was nothing but an enormously successful medieval hoax.
But to come back to Leonardo, let us add that without his unworkable machines we would never have had Jacquard's ingenious loom! In the same way, if there had been no Jules Verne, perhaps we would not have NASA and humanity's voyages into space. Who knows? Perhaps, more than anyone else, Leonardo embodies an era--the Renaissance- -in which art, science, and spirituality are all caught up in a game of perpetual exchange.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote that "the divine aspect of painting is such that the painter's spirit is transformed into an image of God." In the middle of the sixteenth century, Giorgio Vasari noted the heresy in such formulations. Would you say that Leonardo was a heretic?
When it comes to heresy, as well, I would say that Leonardo was a man of his time. Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Italian humanism as a whole is fundamentally heretical. That's the case for Pico della Mirandola as well as for Marsilio Ficino, who embarked on a study of Eastern wisdom, including Egyptian and Chaldean wisdom, where he located the sources of Christian teaching.
The Renaissance, in contrast to the Middle Ages, had no very clear theological foundations. It was the great period of syncretism, which was also, of course, a way of leaving behind medieval theology. In Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man we see that, at a certain point, man becomes the master of creation; it falls to him to transform everything. In that cast of mind Pico argues for the use of magic and a whole host of things that make us laugh today--which doesn't mean that they should not be taken seriously, since these mistakes turned out to be fruitful.
With humanism, the learned were all heretics from the point of view of official Church orthodoxy. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were an era of incredible imagination, a great historical tremor of creativity. Ficino believed in magic, which he did not at all regard as false science, but rather as inseparable from science, since it allowed man to put his genius to work. Ficino intoned what today would be called "mantras," in other words, magical invocations. Nowadays it would be seen as all-purpose occult mumbo-jumbo.
Why have people been so obstinate in their search for esoteric significance in Leonardo's paintings, particularly The Last Supper?
In the occult realm, you can say and do all kinds of things! I recently wrote a parody of The Da Vinci Code for a bibliophiles' almanac, in which I offer an interpretation of Leonardo's Last Supper through a series of mysterious clues in the painting: there are thirteen windows, but only eleven doors, and so on. Playing on those numbers--since numerology allows for any hypothesis-- I found the number 666 at the heart of The Last Supper. Of course, the number of the Beast of Revelation is always turning up in such calculations.
One can find these astounding depths of meaning everywhere. It has been demonstrated (tongue in cheek, naturally) that from the dimensions of a typical newspaper box it is possible to discover the same kinds of cosmic revelations and magical dates (such as the fall of the Roman Empire) that so many people have read in the dimensions of the Pyramid of Cheops.
Over-interpretation didn't begin with Dan Brown--far from it. If Freud had directed his psychoanalytic investigations at Raphael rather than da Vinci, he probably would have found the same things. In Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910), Freud "unearths" a negative drawing of a vulture in one of the master's works, The Virgin and Child with St Anne.
Look for a vulture in the work of Mondrian, and there's a good chance you'll find it--as long as it's a geometrical vulture, of course.
UMBERTO ECO, professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna , is one of the most celebrated writers of our time. His most recent book is The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2005).
THOMAS REGNIER is a French writer and journalist. A French-language version of this interview appears in the review L'Histoire (No. 299, pp. 58-60).
Publication Information: Article Title: Leonardo's Mystery: An Interview with Umberto Eco. Contributors: Thomas Regnier - author. Magazine Title: Queen's Quarterly. Volume: 113. Issue: 2. Publication Date: Summer 2006. Page Number: 168+. COPYRIGHT 2006 Queen's Quarterly; COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group
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