How comes Leonardo (by C. Marchetti)
A few years ago a friend of mine, Lisa Venerosi Pesciolini, a well established restaurateur of Renaissance objects, calls me telling she is working on a crucifix of breathtaking beauty and she wants to extract from it a musical motive to present to the conductor of the Duomo choir where she sings. According to the renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti, she said, the proportions of an elegant visual structure can be mirrored into a musical one, preserving the elegance. 'Well, ' I said 'simple to do, send me a photo. Impossible she said as the sponsor had formally prohibited to circulate photos.
We reached a compromise, she would take a photo, draw an outline and fax it to me. The segmentation of the figure necessary for drawing the proportions would have been preserved. All OK but the outline gave me the feeling of deją vu. However I could not remember where I had seen the elegant bend of Jesus body and the precise angle of head and legs. However the subconscious mills kept grinding and about six months later I felt that outline could be in a book of Mathyla Glyca on the golden proportion. Found the outline, brought it to size and superposed it to that of the Christ. Perfect match. I call Lisa and say: do you know you are restoring a Leonardo. Deep silence, well as you found the line, the crucifix comes from the Bottega of Verrocchio. Well I had cheated a little, but the matching outline was that of the Leda of Leonardo.
Lisa was half skeptical and wanted proofs. I convinced her to pass me the x ray of the crucifix that formally were not the photos she was forbidden to circulate and I could start peering into the infinite tricks of LV. The crucifix was made with an hollow piece of wood whose internal surface was filled up with tiny carvings of all description, from the banal LV scratch to all sort of tiny heads and bodies and edifices. I also started superposing golden ratio grids to his paintings and found still other tricks. Leonardo could draw a garden dinner in the folds of the mantle of a Madonna and hide it with points of varnish whose color had however a short saturation time on the retina. If you look at the area you do not see the scene, but if you fix it for a minute or so the covering color saturates and disappears so the underlying scene pops up visually. I was literally drawn into this infinite sequence of vortexes into vortexes as new images would appear by going smaller. After a number of years I'm still in, with perhaps 10000 photos, mostly macro, and a powerful image processing system to look into them.
Leonardo had an eagle eye and could go beyond the skills of the best Florence miniaturists of the time, who incidentally were his friends and neighbors. I would say his limit was in the range of a tenth of millimeter. He could use diamond tips, but it is time consuming. He must have used multiples and some photographic tool. The micros are millions and even if he did sleep little and worked frantically the task is monumental. In these cryptos ( they were well hidden as nobody seems to have seen them in 500 years) he mostly tells his very sad personal stories, especially the innumerable rapes he suffered from five wild guys when he was a little child in Vinci. Perceptive psychoanalysts like Stites and Essler, who tried to penetrate the enigma, found clear signs of violence, presumably sexual, and the necessity of rehearsing the facts in order to keep at bay the neurosis descending from them. They had not seen the micros, but the diagnosis was perfectly centered.
Leonardo knew all the tricks and pitfalls of vision and did use them to cheat the viewer so that many cryptos are macroscopic. He also did put some of them in special evidence so that a painting of him can be spotted from a distance. I call them 'flags' and needless to say I'm using them to spot Leonardo works. Yes, because as Vasari said, Leonardo did like expensive life, with servants, horses and travel, not to speak of his labs, but the trickle of income from his magnificent and publicized works was certainly too meager. I started searching for these pot boilers in rage because all museums did refuse the high definition photos of their Leonardos I needed for my research. In revenge I could now accuse the directors of these various museum of negligence and professional blindness as they could not even see a Leonardo hanging on their walls.
For the moment being I kept for my friends the results of my numerous excavations that completely capsize the luminous, glorious and sweetened image of Leonardo, with the only exception of a paper on the skin illnesses in the Adoration of the Magi at the Uffizi. The infinite rapes everybody knew but nobody coming to rescue, brought an infinite rage in Leonardo against a world splendid on the surface, as he depicts in his work, but rotten inside, as he depicts again in the shades. But the viewer never dares to penetrate the armor of beauty Leonardo puts at the first level and stops there, dazzled. In the case of the Magi every detail shows rotten flesh and with my friend Emiliano Panconesi, then Primario at the Dermatological clinic of the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nova, right the one were Leonardo did a lot of work and teaching, we wrote a paper then published in the Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology. The top of the top, so that no art critic could feel the temptation to reverse the diagnostic.
Apart from personal events and generic fancies Leonardo uses the cryptos to express discoveries that would have costed his head if published. Leonardo had an intense attraction for optics. As Prof Angioleri has shown by putting together bits and pieces of information astutely scattered between different notebooks, he did construct microscopes, long views and telescopes of excellent characteristics. What could he do with a 30 meters focal length parabolic mirror except watching the stars? But there is no hint of celestial observations in the writings of Leonardo. By pure chance in examining some macro photos I had made at an Adoration I discovered in Vienna, I found first Jupiter and its moons, precisely represented as seen from above the ecliptic, to the beard of Galileo, and that the dark blue mantle of the Madonna contains a very deep sky map with nebulae, Dust Clouds and all the rest.
My plan now is to take my discovered Leonardo pieces and write an essay for each of them. The results may be officially accepted in 50 years, and I am a little short of time to wait so long, so the short term decision is to post them in this site. Just wait and see.