Click here for Full Issue of Fidelio Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 1997 COMMENTARY Leonardo from LaRouche’s Standpoint: The Principle of Least Action or five hundred years, the writings tion with the Museum’s Oct. 26, the geological accuracy of the rock for- Fand discoveries of Leonardo da 1996–Jan. 1, 1997 exhibition of Leonar- mations in the Louvre painting is, she Vinci have been dispersed and put do’s Codex Leicester. says, “astounding . a geological tour de through “the shredder,” his paintings It seems that for five hundred years, force,” the rocks in the London version mutilated and lost, by an oligarchy when people looked at the paintings, are “synthetic, stilted, grotesque charac- determined to stamp out every vestige of they looked at the Virgins; now, some- terizations.” Further, in the Louvre ver- his method of creative discovery. At body has looked at the rocks. Pizzorus- sion, the vegetation is appropriate to the least two-thirds, perhaps more than so’s findings are quite startling. Whereas setting and is found among only those three-fourths, of his legacy has vanished. rocks where such plants could actually Yet, every so often, someone discovers a grow, whereas in the London painting, new truth about the great scientist- the plants are arranged arbitrarily and artist, which stuns the Aristotelians. “resemble cultivated annuals need- In 1965, there was the fabulous ing considerably more light than rediscovery, in the Biblioteca would be available in the grot- Nacional in Spain, of what are to.”1 [SEE Diagram, pp. 88-89] now called the Madrid Pizzorusso notes Leo- Codices—two notebooks nardo’s sensitivity to the filled with drawings and portrayal of landscapes, and investigations of technology, his objection to those hydrodynamics, military artists, such as Botticelli, science, and many other who painted “very bad domains of knowledge. The landscapes,” as mere back- Codex had languished on drops for human figures. the library shelf, lost to the Wrote Leonardo, a “painter world for 135 years, because is not well-rounded who of confusion in the library’s does not have an equally filing system. keen interest in all things Now, a new discovery: within the compass of Geologist Ann Pizzorusso, painting.” in a lecture at the American Why is Pizzorusso’s Museum of Natural History finding so interesting? Why in November of last year, did Leonardo think the presented convincing proof landscapes were worth so concerning an ongoing sus- much bother? This gets to picion amongst art histori- the core issue of da Vinci’s ans that, of the two versions importance as a scientist. of Leonardo’s “The Virgin Five centuries of misin- of the Rocks,” the London terpretation have attempted one was not painted by to brand Leonardo an Leonardo (the two versions “empiricist.” Martin Kemp, are at the Louvre in Paris, in his essay in the catalogue and the National Gallery in of the Codex Leicester exhi- London). Or rather, at least bition, concedes only that not all of it was painted by Leonardo’s “empiricism” Leonardo. Pizzorusso’s pre- was “tempered by the role sentation was part of a lec- © RMN, Louvre he assigned to deductive ture series held in conjunc- Leonardo da Vinci, “Virgin of the Rocks” (Louvre version), 1483-86. reasoning.”2 Ivor Hart, in 87 © 1997 Schiller Institute, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited. his book on Leonardo, goes so far as to unbridgeable gulf between the two.”5 as to how this description might relate describe Nicolaus of Cusa, the founder It is that “hereditary principle of syn- to the actual physical processes at of Renaissance science who profoundly thetic physical geometry” that holds the work. (Of course, it couldn’t!) influenced Leonardo, as a forerunner of key to Leonardo’s so-called landscapes, But, for Leonardo, mathematics— Francis Bacon!3 According to such an and the depiction of the geological for- i.e., geometry—must describe real idiotic view, Leonardo painted rocks mations in the Virgin’s grotto. processes in space-time. It is therefore, accurately because of his “realism.” In a The breakthrough in the science of necessarily, a description of change, of word: “He painted them that way, perspective made during the Renais- continuing transformation. Starting because that’s the way they looked.” Or, sance by Leonardo and other artists, with the division of a spherical shell by as Aristotle had it: The purpose of art is for the first time located geometry means of the Golden Section (or what to imitate nature. firmly in the study of real physical Leonardo and Pacioli called “the Divine In this brief article, I shall indicate processes. From their investigations of Proportion”), to generate the five Pla- why this is not the case, drawing upon optics and of how human beings per- tonic solids, Leonardo would proceed to the in-depth treatment of the epistemo- ceive the world around them, they investigate the specific geometries logical issues provided in many works developed an understanding of the expressed by both living and non-living by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.4 laws of perspective that went far processes. He studied what happens to a beyond the linear, Euclidean geometry shape, such as a triangle, when it is Leonardo’s Conception of of their predecessors.6 deformed by wind, water, or other phys- Physical Geometry Compare the Earth-centered geo- ical process. He probed the geometry of Contrary to the empiricists, Leonardo metrical universe of hoaxster Claudius wave formation, founding the science of approached the natural world from the Ptolemy, for example, who described hydrodynamics. His astronomical and standpoint of the Platonic method of the universe as a complex interaction optical drawings, such as those in the hypothesis: looking beyond the Many— of circles upon circles, to account Codex Leicester, were an attempt to the predicated phenomena of the natur- mathematically for the observed paths understand how light actually behaves. al world—to conceptualize the One— of the celestial bodies. While Ptolemy’s This quest led him to two revolutionary the higher-order idea that generates and geometrical construct succeeded, up to conceptions: (1) that light is propagated encompasses that diversity. Studying the a point, in describing the motions of at a finite rate, not instantaneously (two geometry of natural forms (whether the sun, moon, and planets, it was hundred years before Ole Rømer proved rocks, water, air, or living bodies), in never even intended to be a descrip- this); and (2) that light is propagated by collaboration with mathematician Luca tion of reality. The concatenated sets transverse wave motion, not by “rays” of Pacioli, he sought to understand the way of epicycles, equants, and deferents tiny particles (two hundred years before in which the physical geometry of space- imposed by Ptolemy were never Christiaan Huyghens and Johann time bounds the patterns of natural assumed to have any physical reality, Bernouilli elaborated this).7 The two growth and development. and no explanation was ever offered, ideas are related, since if light travels in LaRouche has described the episte- mological current in history of which Leonardo was a part: “[T]he literature of modern physical science is divided Diagram of the Louvre Virgin of the Rocks into two camps. The first camp, which founded modern physical science in “From top to bottom: Rounded (spherically weathered) mounds of horizontally terms of reference to Plato and Archi- layered (bedded) sandstone form the top of the grotto. The column of rock above medes (287-212 B.C.), is the school of the Virgin’s head is diabase, an igneous rock deposited on the sandstone as a Nicolaus of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, molten liquid. As it cooled, the diabase formed a layer of rock (a sill) and shrank in Johannes Kepler, G.W.F. Leibniz, Gas- volume. The contraction caused the rock to crack perpendicular to the sandstone, pard Monge (1746-1818), Carl Gauss, forming columnar joints (fractures). The columnar joints in the painting are not and Bernhard Riemann, based upon the perfectly vertical, but inclined slightly. This implies that the sandstone dips a few ‘hereditary principle’ of synthetic physi- degrees away from the observer, which is borne out by close study of the layers. cal geometry. The second camp, which Directly above the Virgin’s head is a horizontal line (basal contact) that separates invaded the province of physical science the diabase sill from the weathered sandstone below. The texture and rounded from the outside, during the Seven- weathering pattern of the sandstone below the basal contact are the same as they teenth century, about two hundred are at the top of the grotto. In the foreground, the sandstone is layered, or bedded, years later, is based upon the ‘hereditary with the utmost accuracy. In the background, rocky towers, or pinnacles, rise from principle’ of the deductive theorem-lat- a blue-gray mist. These towers are remnants of erosional processes that strip away tice. Although the literature of the two the overlying softer rock and leave the more weather resistant, harder rock intact.” camps often appears to coincide, on (Copyright © Ann Pizzorusso, reprinted with permission) closer scrutiny of both, there is an 88 waves, it cannot propagate instanta- applied physics by Leonardo and Paci- Leicester catalogue, Leonardo believed neously. Without the idea of the finite oli, through Kepler’s establishment of a that every phenomenon was constrained rate of propagation of light, there can be comprehensive mathematical physics, to act in accordance with the laws of no scientific comprehension of optics— and on to the work of Leibniz, Gauss, nature, and that every form was designed only Newtonian magic.