The Writings and Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci: Order and Chaos in Early Modern Thought.

Robert Zwijnenberg. The Writings and Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci: Order and Chaos in Early Modern Thought.

Trans. Caroline A. van Eck. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999. viii + 232 pp. $55. ISBN: 0-521-63239-0.

In the words of its author, The Writings and Drawings of Leonardo do Vinci seeks to demonstrate that "for Leonardo to think was to draw and to write, and to draw and to write were to think" (46). Robert Zwijnenberg's contention is that "Leonardo's method of working makes it evident that thought cannot happen without the activity of the hand" (100). Proof of that fusion between verbal and artistic thinking is contained in the master's remaining notebooks, now preserved in Madrid, Milan, and England. A careful and contextual analysis of the structure of those notebooks is the task set by the author of this valuable addition to Leonardo studies.

The very word "notebook," imposes in our minds a sort of conventional, classroom meaning inappropriate to the Leonardo manuscripts. His notebooks actually were never meant as a means to some end but, rather, represent a realized process of continuous thinking. According to Zwijnenberg, Leonardo's notebooks were a fundamental and constant endeavor. "Without doubt, working on his manuscripts was the most important of his activities, perhaps even the foundation of the others" (7). In fact, as the author makes clear, Leonardo used his notebooks as a stream-of-consciousness dialogue with himself. Zwijnenberg's analysis allows us to listen in.

This book was born of the author's "fascination with Leonardo's obsessive writing and drawing. It proposes to answer why incessant writing and drawing were so important to Leonardom, and in what way was the apparent disorder of the manuscripts productive for him" (7). Much of the difficulty we have in understanding the nature of Leonardo's writings and drawings lies in what the author has defined as the "labyrinthine gaze," a thought process in constant motion and of such diversity that it obscures the focus of his textual and visual notes. It describes the fusion of synoptic and micrologic approaches and it typifies Leonardo's intellect.

While aiming at an understanding of how and why Leonardo wrote and organized his notebooks, Zwijnenberg presents, along the way, a sequence of perceptive investigations into Renaissance philosophical reasoning and visual conception. We learn much of the mind of Leonardo and so much more: of the impact of Quintilian and Giceronian rhetoric on the formation of Renaissance thought, of Aristotelian method and its Renaissance application, of the new illustrative treatises of Mariano Taccola and Francesco di Giorgio, of the far-reaching influence of Nicholas of Cusa, of the geometrical and rhetorical underpinnings of linear perspective. We revisit, with new understanding, the ancient debate of the paragone, the discussion of the hierarchy of the arts of painting and sculpture, and learn that much of the controversy was contrived by the late sixteenth-century editors who selectively presented the relevant contents of Leonardo's notebooks. We also review the old arguments involving the primacy accorded manual and me ntal labors and the nature of artistic invention and execution (46-52). For those interested in the evolution of Florentine philosophy during the quattrocento and who have read George Holmes's The Florentine Enlightenment (1969) and Arthur Field's Origins of the Platonic Academy in Florence (1988) and still remain a bit perplexed, Zwijnenberg offers a succinct excursus into the Renaissance response to classical rhetoric (12-16, 25-27) and, thereby, provides a needed background against which to view Leonardo's literary and artistic compositions.

Zwijnenberg has subjected the entirety of each page of Leonardo's notebooks to careful and integrated scrutiny, reading text and drawing against each other. His care in explaining such a seemingly mundane page as that of folio 22v of Madrid I, showing a waterwheel, is a case in point (97-99). Art historians who have skimmed such pages looking at only their immediate pictorial impact will be unable to do so again, for "the act of writing itself and perhaps also rereading what he had written made him consider new options" (98). With Zwijnenberg's aid, we can finally "see a fragment of Leonardo's thinking that has become quiet and that only needs Leonardo's reading eye to start moving again" (99).

For those interested in following the evolution of Leonardo's stylistic method as it relates to the progress of his thinking, chapter 6, dealing with the master's anatomical studies, should prove especially intriguing. Many of us have cast admiring glances at these studies of the inner workings of the human form, but the author's illuminating and contextual analyses should provoke more extended and respectful examinations. Seeing Leonardo's "exploded view" renditions of vertebrae as the result of a new awareness of the mechanics of Galenic teleology is a revelation. That Leonardo's dissections aimed at a total understanding of how organs functioned within the entire corpus can beset against the totality of Leonardo's world view and can be seen as emblematic of the new universal imperative of the Renaissance.

Zwijnenberg's contextual considerations of Leonardo's method extend even to the artist's curious (and quirky) practice of "mirror writing." He explores, in chapter 4, the practical explanation that, since Leonardo was left-handed, such reverse writing avoided (in the days before pencils and ball-points) the danger of smearing the wet ink of words already written. Yet Leonardo is the only person known to have practiced this technique with any consistency. An alternative rationale might be found in Zwijnenberg's argument that Leonardo intended to set his writings into print and, thus, developed the practice to facilitate this process. At this point another interesting aside intrudes, this time dealing with the history of writing and the development of the italic letter and the separation of words. One learns much, and not just of Leonardo, in these tangential excursions. At first they seem a bit distracting, but then one remembers that such an approach is quite in keeping with Leonardo's own method of discours e; Zwijnenberg seems so attuned to his subject that his own organizational mode has become harmonized and energized by its structure.

In fact, Zwijnenberg's volume proves a fascinating and adventuresome read not only for what it purports to do but also for how it does it. Taking the physical evidence contained within the surviving notebooks, analyzing it against the contextual setting of such phenomenon as the rhetorical revival, the author presents a perceptive reconstruction of an extraordinary, wide-ranging, yet calculated working methodology and he does so in a manner which clearly reflects the "style" of his study.

Leonardo is no easy person to understand and the extent, scope, and organization of commentary and drawings on the pages of his many surviving notebooks is bewildering. The most obvious questions are, of course, why he made the effort and how he set about it. Zwijnenberg brings to his thoughtful analysis the talents of an aesthetician and the understanding of an historian of Renaissance philosophy. The term "provocative" is overused in reviews but, in this case, it seems to truly fit. Appropriately enough, this intriguing look at the Leonardo notebooks is contained in a handsomely packaged volume and presented in a discursive manner which perfectly complements its subject.