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Art for Our Sake: a 21st Century Mona Lisa
This year marks the 150th anniversary of what some consider the most famous
prose ever written about a painting: Walter Pater’s 1873 collection of essays
The Renaissance. Transcending and departing from Victorian thought, Pater’s
description of the Mona Lisa as “the presence that rose thus so strangely
beside the waters” was declared “the first modern poem” by Yeats; and the
book's controversial “love of art for its own sake” inspired a generation of
young writers like Wilde, Joyce, Eliot, and Proust.
Could a parallel use of ekphrasis – human writing about human art – be required
by the already daunting twenty-first century? Duchamp interpreted La Gioconda
for the twentieth with a mustache and racy acronym which reverberated as
powerfully as “art for art’s sake.”
A new reading of the portrait, like Dupin’s purloined letter hidden in plain
sight, might be found in the title itself. Leonardo did not provide any, but
later commentators settled upon Mona Lisa – the customer’s name – or “The
Jocund One.” What if the true subject is Esperienza, an allegorical
personification akin to Apelles’ Calumny, which Leonardo revered as “the common
mother of all the sciences and all the arts,” “the interpreter between humans
and nature,” and “the one true maestra”?
Surprisingly this hypothesis has not yet been proposed by scholars.
The Italian word for both experience and experiment, esperienza has deep roots.
Dante imbued it, in the words of G. Mazzotta, with “extraordinary overtones.”
Throughout the Divine Comedy Dante and Beatrice use the term to capture both
the empiricism of scientific method and the experiential nature of art, poetry,
and spiritual change. In its Latin form experientia it features prominently in
even earlier precursors like Nicolaus Cusanus and Roger Bacon. One can discern
in this single word much of what emerged from medieval rigor to reach full
flower in the Renaissance.
Just as Pater believed a look back to Leonardo could help his society adapt we
too may want, in our own age of global crises and technological upheaval, to
look back: not returning to an impossible past but seeing our present afresh to
better choose paths toward the future. Pater saw the Renaissance equally
emerging from prolonged stasis by blending antiquity with modern innovation.
Ekphrasis ironically is itself a function now fully mastered by our own
machines. The “GPT” family of computer programs can generate both aesthetic
images indistinguishable from human ones and prose or even verse
interpretations thereof. (Curiously, Calvino foresaw this in his magical novel
If on a winter’s night a traveler.) What risks may lie in performing these
most human of tasks by machine? There is no doubt that intelligent
technologies already manage a great deal of our imaginative lives for us.
Pater’s characterization of the Mona Lisa is yet again starkly relevant:
“The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is
an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought
upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life.”
He declares the portrait “embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern
idea.”
The celebrated fragment, in its own way both prolific and immortal, uses the
word "experience" twice for emphasis and from an author acutely conscious of
design this matters. In the book’s four-page Conclusion we find it seven
times, including thus: “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is
the end.”
Partly to rebut accusations of decadent Aestheticism Pater subsequently wrote
his philosophical novel Marius the Epicurean. In this work he uses
“experience” a full eighty-five times (according to Ctrl-FGPT), with overtones
one may reasonably call extraordinary, attempting to trace the double-helix of
philosophy and art from prehistoric Rome to the present. Could this be the
same Marius cited by Leonardo's Proema, asking of his critics "Do they know
that my subjects are based on experience rather than the words of others?"
It may be tidy to consign Leonardo to an antiquarian, wordlessly smiling past.
It might also be unnecessary. Some have taken the strange step of splashing or
smearing paint on artworks from the Louvre to the National Gallery in desperate
hope of raising environmental awareness. Few realize Leonardo understood even
this, e.g. "Of the Cruelty of Man": “Nothing will remain on earth, or under the
earth or in the waters which will not be persecuted, disturbed and spoiled, and
those of one country removed into another.”
Little is more modern or Anthropocene than to recognize the survival of the
planet’s biosphere will depend on the choices we make, in art as well as
science, over the next several decades. Perhaps our present century deserves
an attempt to address the Mona Lisa by its potentially truest and most intended
name: experience, experiment, Esperienza.
And really, what have we got to lose?
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Links:
1. Text of The Renaissance
*
https://archive.org/stream/renaissance034976mbp/renaissance034976mbp_djvu.txt
2. Ekphrasis
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekphrasis
3. La Gioconda
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa
4. Text of Marius the Epicurean
* https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4057/pg4057-images.html
* https://gutenberg.org/files/4058/4058-h/4058-h.htm
5. “The Purloined Letter”
*
https://americanliterature.com/author/edgar-allan-poe/short-story/the-purloined-letter
6. G. Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge
* http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zvmzw
7. If on a winter’s night a traveler
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_on_a_winter%27s_night_a_traveler
8. Leonardo Wikiquote
* https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci
9. Botticelli’s Calumny of Apelles
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calumny_of_Apelles_(Botticelli)
10. Nicolaus Cusanus
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_of_Cusa
11. Roger Bacon
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bacon
12. Dante
* https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/
13. Beatrice
* https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/
14. Text of Montaigne’s “Experience”
* http://essays.quotidiana.org/montaigne/experience/
15. Text of Emerson’s “Experience”
* http://essays.quotidiana.org/emerson/experience/
16. Aestheticism
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestheticism
17. The Louvre
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvre
18. "Art for our sake"
*
http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-03-03-art-our-sake-artists-cannot-be-replaced-machines-study
19. Tokarczuk’s “Ognosia”
*
https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2022-06/ognosia-olga-tokarczuk-jennifer-croft/
20. Fritjof Capra: Learning from Leonardo
* https://www.fritjofcapra.net/learning-from-leonardo/
21. Pater’s “Diaphaneitè”
* https://www.laits.utexas.edu/farrell/documents/DIAPHANEITI.pdf
22. Marius and experience in Leonardo’s Proema
* https://www.discoveringdavinci.com/proem
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