Leonardo da Vinci is widely regarded as one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived; his acute observational eye, together with his knack for experimentation, helped him anticipate advances in fields like anatomy, astronomy, geology, and hydraulics that wouldn’t become mainstream for hundreds of years. And though he’s best known today as a painter, during his lifetime he was celebrated as an engineer, geometer, strategist, and even theatrical impresario.
Connecting Truth and Beauty
The archetypal “Renaissance Man,” Leonardo da Vinci, connected art and science in his work, often failing to see the distinction between them. His drawings of architectural plans, skulls, rocks, and mathematical polyhedrons (for example) are so exquisitely proportioned and beautifully finished that they function simultaneously as useful diagrams and inspirational artworks.
Da Vinci’s architectural sketches for a domed church that was never completed / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Why did Leonardo lavish such care on mere sketches? Because, for this Renaissance master, to draw something beautifully was necessary for capturing its whole essence. Beautiful, soulful, well-rounded imagery was more than just a momentary appearance captured from a particular angle; it could seem to make a thing present in its existential entirety. Leonardo’s beautiful scientific drawings also show the care and admiration with which he approached the natural world. They prove that the best, most fruitful kind of curiosity is accompanied by love.
Da Vinci’s exquisite sketch of crabs / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
A Jesus He Could Relate To
Often, figures like Leonardo da Vinci (or slightly later geniuses like Galileo Galilei) are held up as precursors to modern, “enlightened” scientists whose breakthroughs came from their dismissal of a supernatural worldview. It was necessary (so it was thought) to discard older, “superstitious” ways of viewing the world in order to make real progress. Now we know, however, that Galileo and many other pathbreaking early scientists sincerely retained religious ways of thinking even while doing innovative science. Leonardo da Vinci, though complex and morally conflicted, is no exception.
Leonardo da Vinci was born out of wedlock, was marginalized in his own family, was accused of sexual crimes, and sometimes spoke disparagingly of religiously devout people. However, there is evidence that Leonardo’s nonconformist lifestyle masked a sincere, if idiosyncratic, faith. As a scientist, Leonardo thought “seeing was believing,” preferring experimentation to the study of textbooks. It is likely that his religious affections were the same. Though Leonardo may not have appeared to be the most dutiful Christian on the outside, his work and many aspects of his life reveal a deep, experiential spirituality harmonious with his experiential approach to the material world. This would culminate (arguably) in the earnest religious sentiment of his later years.
Curiosity and Struggle
One example I see of Leonardo’s personal spirituality is shown in two paintings from around 1500, the Madonna of the Yarnwinder and the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. While Leonardo is today best known for his Mona Lisa, these two religious paintings were much more famous during the master’s lifetime, attracting considerable public fame.
Da Vinci’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder / |
Da Vinci’s Virgin and Child with St. Anne / |
Both of these pictures have something important and new in common: they show the child Jesus with insatiable, reckless curiosity. It seems that the young Jesus, for Leonardo, was a bona fide infant prodigy who needed to touch and grasp even disagreeable things, and whose experimental drive was tinged by a sheen of prophecy. Sound familiar? The Jesus Leonardo related to (and depicted as no one else did) was a Jesus like Leonardo—a Jesus to whom Leonardo could relate in both his curiosity and his pain.
In the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, for example, Leonardo showed the baby Jesus grasping at one of his mother’s tools as she spins yarn. (There are shades of Sleeping Beauty here, touching the spindle.) A yarnwinder is plain, scratchy, and pointy, but it is also shaped like a cross. In Leonardo’s image—like no other image in the history of art—the baby Jesus lunges toward this strange tool, wriggling out of his mother’s arms. He can’t help it—and one senses he knows what it foreshadows.
In the Virgin and Child with St Anne, meanwhile, a similarly wriggly and headstrong Jesus lunges free of his mother’s grip in order to wrestle (or ride on) a lamb. This prickly and unpredictable animal also foreshadows Christ’s death, in addition to being a fascinating object of curiosity (Christ is called the “sacrificial lamb”). In both of these images, there is precocious individualism, curiosity laced with danger, and an uncanny attraction toward things to come. No one in art history had ever represented Jesus in quite this way. But Leonardo did, because on some level, this was a Jesus he could relate to. This was the Jesus he experienced deep down.
And then there’s Leonardo’s Last Supper, showing a resigned Jesus surrounded by fervent disciples lost in shock, debate, and recrimination. Maybe there is no other painting in art history that shows Jesus so fully “alone in a crowd”—even when surrounded by friends. Was Leonardo able to make this image because he, one of history’s first cultural “celebrities,” felt the same way? Was this, too, a Jesus that Leonardo intimately “knew” and related to?
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The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Reconciling with the Church
Sometimes, the most innovative thinkers struggle to match typical ways of expressing thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. This is at once a source of genius and a kind of isolation or blindness. Leonardo struggled to relate, perhaps, to the most common religious expressions of his time. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have religious experiences of his own, filtered through his own difficulties. As a result, he gave us new ways of thinking about Christ’s struggle and sacrifice. What must it have been like to intuit a harrowing fate even from a young age? What must it have been like to see so much and yet not be seen for who you are?
Late in his life, Leonardo da Vinci moved to France and worked in the court of King Francis I. At this time, he was accompanied by a young secretary and aspiring painter named Francesco Melzi, who helped care for the aging artist and who compiled the master’s copious personal notes, now so admired by later thinkers.
Melzi, by all accounts, was a serene, conscientious, pious, and organized counterweight to the mercurial older artist. Much earlier, his aristocratic Milanese family had sheltered Leonardo in a time of uncertainty, and it is believed the Melzis may have given Leonardo the only true sense of belonging and care he had ever known. Under this influence, it is thought, Leonardo embraced more common, public forms of piety. As an early biographer wrote, “[Leonardo] wanted to be instructed with all diligence in the Catholic rite and the correct doctrine of the holy Christian religion” under Melzi’s care.
Nature Reveals the Divine
Some scholars believe Leonardo’s last commissioned painting was the Salvator Mundi, or “Savior of the World,” a portrait of Jesus that became world famous in 2017, when it was auctioned for $450 million. If so, the commission would have been poetically and spiritually appropriate for this loner and seeker near the end of his life. In this simple painting, Jesus Christ gazes piercingly outward and holds a liquidly transparent orb in his left hand.
The Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
It was common in earlier Christian art for Jesus to hold orbs representing the universe, but a transparent one like this is exceptional. The palm and garment of Jesus are seen through it clearly and without distortion. Why?
For Leonardo da Vinci, everything was connected. In his notebooks, da Vinci juxtaposes curls of hair with whorls of water and blood vessel networks with branching trees. Across the natural world, beautiful patterns united divergent things, showing how everything was part of the same, marvelous fabric. Maybe, in the end, Leonardo wanted to show that the whole world was also connected to its incarnate Creator, yielding transparently onto divine power and beauty.
Today, despite his many scientific accomplishments, Leonardo da Vinci is best known for his paintings - most of which were religious, and all of which showed keen spiritual insight. Pictures like the Madonna of the Rocks, the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, the St. Anne, and the Last Supper, while showcasing precocious knowledge of botany, geology, optics and mathematical perspective, are also spiritually poignant in ways that would later be widely imitated. Almost despite himself, Leonardo da Vinci bore witness to a universe suffused with divine splendor and meaning. By the end of his life, this inspiring truth became clear; indeed, as Leonardo realized, it had been there all along.
