Leonardo da Vinci by Michael Bywater - New Statesman

[applegrove]

Decoding da Vinci
Arts - New Statesman
Michael Bywater
Monday 18th September 2006


"He was the original Renaissance man: master painter, an inventor of flying machines and weapons of war. But Leonardo's genius is misunderstood, writes Michael Bywater

.. SKIP

Nobody can doubt that the vast, and inexplicable, success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code will swell the visitor numbers. Animations of Leonardo's drawings and models of his great weapons of war, such as his flying machine, tank and crossbow, will attract some; the collection of pages from his notebooks or "codexes" - tiny but jostling and tumbling with force, curiosity and invention - will attract others.

But perhaps the most powerful attraction will be the sheer idea of Leonardo da Vinci, Renaissance man. Few artists exert such a hold on the public cultural imagination; the man from Vinci remains in a class of his own. And it is we, of course, who put him there. Why?

One reason is that he was different. To us, he seems an artist who uniquely straddled the worlds of individual creativity and rational science. He detected similarities and metonyms in the physical world, depicted them and worked upon them with forensic skill. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis: Leonardo was a master of the visual dialectic. His work does not just offer us a world-view, nor (whatever Dan Brown's readers may believe) create clever puzzles for the illuminati. It engages us in argument in the clear, rational light of day - and his conclusions are written upon the modern world.

....SNIP"

http://www.newstatesman.com/Ideas/200609180034