And if you are alone you will completely belong to yourself
(Leonardo da Vinci)
Everybody knows Leonardo da Vinci. “La Gioconda” is, maybe, the most famous and admired picture of all time. Even the innumerable machines of the Italian genius are well-known. It isn’t so easy to suppose how many publications and studies about Leonardo da Vinci may be found. And yet, in my opinion, I think Leonardo hasn’t really been known in the deepness of his thought.
Obviously I’m not speaking about his presumed homosexuality also because, from a point of view of a psychic and cultural evolution Leonardo got to, sexuality, no matter how it is expressed, is a heritage of man animal origin(1). But instead I refer to the general refusal, from Leonardo, of metaphysics and religion. Such refusal can be found only in another giant of human knowledge, that is in Titus Lucretius Caro. The latin writer, in the first half of the first century B.C., with his “de rerum natura” (2), lays the bases of what will be, till nowadays, the refusal of every trascendence. And yet either for Lucretius or, above all, for Leonardo da Vinci, there is something that has “divine” characteristics: this “something” is Nature. The true God is Nature itself with its laws for Leonardo da Vinci. At this point we would wonder why the Church never opposes Leonardo’s thought about religion as it did, for example, with Lucretius subjected to a real “damnatio memoriae“(3), so that the only copy left of his philosophic poem de rerum natura happened to be discovered by Poggio Bracciolini, the humanist, in 1047. Leonardo didn’t scare the Church since the latter hadn’t understood the innermost essence of Leonardo’s thought and even if the Church should have understood it, it would immediately have realized that the thought of the Renaissance genius was so advanced or anyway far from the schemes of judaism and western thought that nobody else would have understood it. The idea of Leonardo’s solitude comes from all this: who would Leonardo da Vinci have expressed the real essence, the nucleus of his thought to? While Lucretius had systematized his refusal of religion by going back to the philosophical tradition of his time, Leonardo contained his thought in himself, we could say, it was something unexpressed, maybe, even to himself. The idea of Nature like “God” could hardly have been spread around and what’s more the purpose of Leonardo wasn’t this. So the Church wasn’t afraid of Leonardo.
There is a religion-philosophy that is very similar to Leonardo’s philosophic thought and this is Buddhism. Its origin is much earlier than Lucretius, while the interpretation of Shakyamuni’s teachings(4), closer to Leonardo da Vinci’s thought, is the one by Nichiren Daishonin. This Buddhist monk, who lived between 1222 and 1282 , after studying, for long, all Buddhist scriptures, concluded that what better reveals Budda Shakyamuni’s original teaching is The Lotus Sutra and as a consequence he spent his whole life to assert the supremacy of this treatise over all the others.
According to Nichiren’s doctrine, the universal law Buddha enlightened to, is nothing but the reality of life in all its phenomena. The law of Buddha is life itself and that is to say just the Nature Leonardo often refers to in his writings.
Therefore if we think Leonardo couldn’t communicate his own thought to other people only as far as the philosophic-religious aspect of his work is concerned, as a bearer of truths not so typical of the western thought, we are mistaken. Leonardo da Vinci is the author of pictorical works well-known all over the world and perhaps the most famous ones in any time. His ability of acting in advance of his time is also recognized in the technical field, for example, as a forerunner of automatic gear, rotor blades and many other mechanisms. But nobody knows or anyway lets people know the fact he sensed and discovered a law of a real fundamental importance for man. So he anticipated his time in such a way that, till nowadays, as far as I know, this discovery isn’t known by most people and above all also by those who declare to be experts or admirers of Leonardo. We can find these intuitions and discoveries of Leonardo in one of the codes containing his writings. In Disputa pro e contra le leggi di natura (code Arundel;1478-1518) he writes:
“Nature, being eager and taking pleasure in creating and making lives and forms over and over again, because it knows they are an increasing of its earthly matter, is willing and faster in creating than time in using up and so it ordered many animals should become food to one another and this not satisfying such a desire, it often gives off a kind of poisonous and pestiferous vapours and a continuous plague over the great reproducing and flocking together of animals, and above all over men who increase so much because other animals don’t make them their food and once causes are taken away, effects will fail”.
(1)We will tell about this when we explain the meaning of The Original Sin according to the thesis of “The Intelligent Virus”.
(2)Lucretius’s poem begins with a paean to Venus, the symbol of “voluptas“, that is of pleasure.
(3) Damnatio memoriae is a Latin expression the literal meaning of which is condemnation of memory. In the Roman law it meant a penalty consisting in the cancellation of the memory of a person and destruction of anything could be handed down to posterity .It consisted in a particularly hard penalty for “hostes”, that is the enemies of Rome and the Senate.
(4)Shakyamuni: the literal meaning is a wise man of the Shakyas. He was the founder of Buddhism .There are different opinions about the period in which he lived. According to Chinese and Japanese Buddhist tradition he lived between 1029 B.C. And 949 A.D., but recent studies say that he was born about five hundred years later. He was the son of the king of the Shakyas, a small tribe whose kingdom was at the foot of Himalaya. He renounced his standing and left to research on a solution about the questions of birth, aging, disease, death .He studied many important philosophies and practised many austerities, but he realized they wouldn’t have led him to enlightenment. Shakyamuni, near the town of Gaia in India, is said to have been sitting under the tree of Bhodi, start meditating and get enlightenmemt .In order to lead other people to the same enlightened condition,in the following fifty years, he expounded his teaching that later was compiled as Buddhist Sutras. Siddharta,the novel by Herman Hesse, made Shakyamuni’s story very famous in the Western World.
Translated from ” Il Virus Intelligente” by Enrica Narducci
To be continued in:
The solitude of Leonardo: second part
Ferdinando Gargiulo offers you a new perspective on why new viral epidemics, assaults, infanticides, suicide epidemics and even environmental catastrophes. Always engaged in his research decides to create a blog to offer his readers content of high value.