De Figura Umana: Fisiognomica, anatomia e arte in Leonardo.

Domenico Laurenza. De Figura Umana: Fisiognomica, anatomia e arte in Leonardo.

Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2001. xxxii + 242 pp. + 103 b/w pls. index. append. bibl. [euro] 26.86. ISBN: 86-222-4997-6.

This book is about the role played by the sciences concerned with the human body in Leonardo da Vinci's thought. A major trend in Leonardo studies is to locate the artist's writings in a historical framework of ideas, considered by some to be a more historically significant project these days than pinning down the precise sources of the artist's knowledge. Like several other noteworthy studies of the past two decades, this one also tries to distinguish Leonardo's original ideas and syntheses from what was available in his sources; and it stresses developmental aspects of Leonardo's enduring concerns, drawing concrete connections with his art at many points.

Laurenza states the aim of his study "to demonstrate that in Leonardo some important points of physiognomy (the study of the external form of the body as an expression of character) are part of a more general investigation of somatic form, of equal concern to his anatomical studies as to his art." (xiii; my translation). This interdisciplinary focus on "somatic form" in itself is an original scholarly contribution that has only recently become possible to envision. And the methodological strategies required to demonstrate the relationship among Leonardo's various activities demand sophistication, for it is not at all obvious today that his study of craniology, embryology, and cardiology necessarily has anything to do with his ideas about composing effective paintings, as this study suggests. To rely on edited anthologies of the artist's writings for such an ambitious undertaking would have produced dubious results: the way to proceed is by turning directly to the surviving holograph writings, as Laurenza has done. This book consistently demonstrates the author's sensitivity to the manuscript context of Leonardo's recorded statements and drawings. Readers familiar with Martin Kemp's earlier work on the role of the fantasia in Leonardo's studies of the skull, or David Summers's work on Leonardo's senso comune, two studies on which Laurenza draws extensively, will recognize the artist's pragmatic materialism when he searches for the origins of anger in the dynamic anatomy of the heart, for example, in this synthetic account.

Laurenza proceeds by first presenting an intellectual tradition to the reader, constructing a medical history of issues on the nature of the soul from Aristotle and Galen through Albertus Magnus and his vernacular disseminators such as Mondino and Hieronymo Manfredi (the latter a new addition to the current provisional list of Leonardo's possible sources). On this basis, it becomes easier to imagine why Leonardo might have studied cardiology as an aspect of physiognomic science when he anticipated, or was actually charged with, portraying psychological dramas like The Last Supper or The Battle of Anghiari. Laurenza's success in describing the ways in which Leonardo made connections among distinct topics--such as physiognomic accounts of human appearance based on the origin of the passions of the soul in the heart, cardiovascular studies of the heart, and the depiction of emotion and character in narrative paintings--is obvious.

The information that Laurenza presents about artistic use of medical literature on the nature of the passions is as important as the ostensible focus of the study on Leonardo's unfolding ideas about permanent character and fleeting emotion (ethos and pathos respectively, according to the classical taxonomy that physiognomic science and literary theory shared). The first part of the study sets Leonardo's overriding interests in the human figure into a chronological framework--"la figura umana" is a title once given by the artist to his research on anatomy and later used by Rubens (whose short Leonardesque treatise is published as an appendix to the study). The second part of the book focuses on several leading ideas that Laurenza identifies as preoccupying Leonardo for a long time.

The subject of composition, surprisingly, turns out to be central to Laurenza's enterprise. The study opens with a discussion of Leonardo's anatomical interests around 1489, when he made the breathtaking set of pen-and-ink skull studies that Kemp first related to the artist's deep interest in the fantasia and the inner senses. The skull studies also turn out to be important for charting Leonardo's unfolding interests in physiognomy because they provide evidence for the manner in which he linked external appearances with internal organic structure. An important part of Laurenza's argument is that the skull studies, with their emphasis on cranial structure, provide a strong quantitative moment in Leonardo's somatic conceptions. The other, qualitative approach, favoring a more fluid and dynamic vision of the human body, began to take precedence when Leonardo turned his attention to the cardiovascular system around 1504-09. Around 1506-08, Leonardo studied Galen intensively; and slightly later, his anatomical research was greatly advanced by his association with the brilliant young anatomist Marcantonio della Torre.

Laurenza finds many traces in Leonardo's notes and drawings of the thirteenth-century development of physiognomy as a treatment of signs signifying certain dispositions of the heart or brain. This medical tradition of semiotics provides an connection between Scholastic medicine and early modern physiognomy, traces of which Laurenza also sees in the humanistic writings on medicine that emerged in Leonardo's day, as well as in humanistic art treatises such as Pomponius Gauricus's De sculptura published in 1504, and Alberti's 1435 treatise on painting, known to be an important formative influence on Leonardo and many other artists/writers. Most of the sources discussed are already known in the Leonardo scholarship, and one might have wished for more precise historical contextualization of the artist's contacts and peripatetic lifestyle. Yet this is not Laurenza's main objective. He is primarily interested in the ways that Leonardo was sensitive to conditions that link the exterior body and world to its interior counterparts. Among the textual links is the metaphysical argument made by Galen that the work of nature is superior to the work of the sculptor because "a Praxiteles, a Phidias is limited to forming external material," and deprived of penetrating to the interior parts as nature does. In a sense, Laurenza argues (43), Leonardo never questioned Galen's teleological conception that form follows function, but he broke with his ancient source's separation of interior from exterior realms. According to Laurenza, Leonardo made the "common elements among the[se] two areas of morphological research" the center of his artistic research. The external expression of an internal cause is the fundamental aesthetic that Leonardo tried to realize in his art, that Galen had attributed solely to nature (46).

Part 2 opens with a discussion of connections that Leonardo made between the sciences of embryology and physiognomy on the basis of Scholastic distinctions between compositio and complexio or, to translate into modern terms, between superficial anatomy and the study of internal organs (96). The medical and philosophical notion of composizione individuates the sold structure of the body, and Leonardo utilized the term frequently in this sense. Laurenza suggests that Leonardo, like his ultimate source Albertus Magnus (who was indebted to Arabic commentators of Aristotle such as Avicenna), was concerned with "formative cause," that is, with the formative soul or virtus formativa, responsible for imprinting form and relative function on the dissimilar parts of the body that in sum comprise a compositio.

Another of Laurenza's most important arguments is that perhaps Leonardo's artistic concept of composizione had this medical origin. While there is no doubt that Leonardo would have inflected his understanding of Alberti's rhetorical notion of compositio through the focusing lens of his scientific studies, the two lines of descent from a common Aristotelian root tell us more about the conflation of sources in early modern discussions of art than about their separation. More interesting to consider from an art historian's point of view is the implication of Laurenza's study that compositio signified a corporeal entity formed by the work of the soul whether or not the context of discussion was painting (107-08). Leonardo discussed at length the possibility that the "composition" of the artist's soul reproduces itself in the pictorial work. Laurenza limits his concerns with the pitfalls of "automimesis," or imitating one's own flaws, to Leonardo's ideas for forming a good faculty of judgment through experience.

The last part of the book schematically follows the history of theories of physiognomy to the academic artistic theory of expression proposed by Charles LeBurn and to the scientific study of human character and emotions in the late eighteenth century. Although the word "race" is never used, Laurenza introduces the ominous modern implications of the longstanding western philosophical equation of interior and exterior. He focuses on differences between Leonardo's Aristotelian embryological notion of compositio and the later "notion of predetermined types" that underlies the work of Lavater, Buffon, Blumenbach, and other major protagonists in the history of racial science. Yet it would be well worth bringing the sensitive history of racial science into the same frame of reference as the historical notion of compositio that is one of Laurenza's central concerns and arguably the most original aspect of his study. The generally Aristotelian conception that the soul is the principal seed that models and organizes the body is of central importance to the subsequent history of ideas both on artistic creation and racial science. Is the medical origin of composition a notion readily available to artists and their audiences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? If so, what does the exemplary character of an exemplary artist's composition imply for later scientific theories of the relationship between the interior and exterior of the "figura umana"? These are significant, open questions that Laurenza's study helps to raise, even if the answers lie beyond the scope of his own literary genre.

CLAIRE FARAGO

University of Colorado at Boulder