Leonardo da Vinci

"Yes. Leonardo da Vinci is a beautiful book. And Leonardo has been fortunate in some of the writers who have tackled him, like Walter Pater and like Théophile Gautier in France. He has attracted some fine pens to write about him. Kenneth Clark is up there with them. In terms of art history, Clark is rather sniffily regarded by academics. He’s been called Lord Clark of Civilisation because of his famous television series. He has also written Landscape into Art and The Nude which he saw as very much about the intellectual history of art. They’re regarded as popularising. Now, for me, communicating in a broader framework is terrific and to do it as well as Clark is wonderful. But there is a natural sniffiness amongst academics when he rides roughshod over some beloved subtleties that they hold dear. The book as a whole conveys wonderful shape to Leonardo’s art and life. And Clark is more right about aspects of his science and engineering than he has any right to be. He kept clear of the science, he didn’t really tackle it head on, yet via the art and via the drawings, he gets an enormous amount right about Leonardo’s scientific opus. There’s also his great catalogue, which he did before the monograph, of the drawings at Windsor Castle which holds the greatest set of Leonardo drawings. Most of the anatomical drawings for example are at Windsor. If you look at what he says about them, even when he doesn’t really deal with the science, he gets things extraordinarily right by intuition. Clark had that instinctive penetration into how Leonardo worked even when he was short of detailed knowledge of the area that he was looking at. To me, that’s a testimony of a certain kind of intuitive insight; having got a toehold Leonardo’s art, he was able to make more of the rest of Leonardo’s work than he really should have been able to do. Absolutely, yes. He was a lateral thinker to a kind of pathological degree. He couldn’t be contained in an area without seeing its implications for other areas. But it has to be done on a different basis now. In Leonardo’s era, though you couldn’t know everything about everything, this universal knowledge – that is to say, understanding the rudiments of physics, optics, anatomy and so on – could potentially be understood to an effective level by someone with Leonardo’s ambitions. And he wasn’t the only person who aimed at universal understanding. Roger Bacon in the middle ages was the Doctor Mirabilis who aspired to universal wisdom. Yes, Goethe is a supreme manifestation of that ability to work across boundaries and, indeed, to make your understanding of one area stronger because you’ve really got a sense of what is analogous elsewhere. Hermann von Helmholtz, the nineteenth-century physicist and physiologist is rather good as well and rather underrated. We should at least be able to understand what is going on in other areas, even if we can’t be experts on them. I reviewed a book on quantum mechanics for the Times Literary Supplement which, in a sense, is barmy but it was about the beauty of quantum mechanics. Could I teach students about quantum mechanics? Perhaps not in ways that would be conducive to work in the laboratory. However, I would argue that whatever the discipline, we should know the nature of the enterprise: what kind of thing is going on, what criteria are being used, and so on. Above all, in terms of Leonardo’s search for universal knowledge, he relies upon a profound respect for the orders of nature and how nature works. He doesn’t see us as separate from that natural world. We are in our bodies. As a microcosm, we embody the nature of the wider world. We are locked into its imperatives, and into how nature works. If you’re a canal engineer and you’re trying to alter the flow of rivers, the way to do it is to work in a friendly and cooperative way with the nature of water, rather than trying to push it around. Leonardo has a profound respect for the order of nature and the human being’s integral place in that. There is a big message here, which is embedded in that notion of trying to get a universal understanding of how nature works. Since we did the Leonardo show at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1989, I’ve been immensely interested in getting Leonardo to talk to computers, not just as a database but in thinking how we can effectively put computers in dialogue with Leonardo. If you look at Leonardo’s drawings, he clearly wanted them to move. There’s a clearly an inherent sense of animation. For our show at the V&A, I worked with a very brilliant animator called Steve Maher and we animated some of Leonardo’s drawings to tremendous effect. We found that some of his serial drawings – drawings of serial movement – just needed smoothing out; he got the key stages. For 2019, I’m talking further to Steve for the five-hundredth anniversary of Leonardo’s death about doing a virtual reality reconstruction of aspects of Leonardo. Now, that doesn’t mean to say that he anticipated computer graphics or whatever, but it’s a question of what is inherent in his work and how it can be put into a dialogue with the new media, which he would have been completely sold on. This is not – I hope – an anachronistic enterprise. We are always looking back. We also have to be careful as historians that we’re not manipulating the historic Leonardo and coming up with something which is simply a mirror of our own time. But, provided we’re responsible about that dialogue, then I think it can be immensely stimulating and good public communication as well. People often ask me what would Leonardo be doing if he were around at the moment? which is unanswerable in a way. I say he would certainly be in moving media. He would be doing something with images that move and with virtual reality. He would have been spectacularly impressed with that."