[In the following essay, van Maelsaeke highlights similarities between the philosophical thought of Leonardo and that of German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He notes, for example, that in terms of natural philosophy, both men advocated the use of the experimental method, and both viewed nature as a force with both good and evil qualities.]

Goethe's providential encounter with Leonardo's art was one of the leading experiences of his human and artistic rejuvenation in Italy (1786-88). From his reading of Leonardo's Trattato della Pittura in Rome (1788) Goethe may intuitively have inferred the similarity of both Leonardo's and his own views of the universe to those of Empedocles in whose cosmology the elements constantly interact under the influence of Love and Hate as respectively creative and destructive powers:

In turn they get the upper hand in the revolving cycle, and perish into one another and increase in the turn appointed by Fate. For they alone exist … sometimes uniting under the influence of Love into one ordered Whole, at other times again each moving apart through the hostile force of Hate, until growing together into the Whole, which is One, they are quelled.¹

While creative Love allows all things to be separated out of chaos in order to be transformed into the harmony of the cosmos, Hate is the centrifugal force which must be held responsible for the urge of both the macrocosm and the microcosm towards a new chaos.

Love and Hate are the respectively attractive and repulsive forces at work in the fresco of the ‘Last Supper’ which Leonardo was commissioned to paint for the Refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan (1495-97). Goethe saw Leonardo's ‘Last Supper’ in May 1788 when his return from Rome to Weimar led him to Milan. Although he had already become familiar with the classical serenity of Raphael's ‘School of Athens’ (Vatican, Rome), and the superhuman grandeur of Michael Angelo's ‘Last Judgment’ (Sistine Chapel, Rome), Goethe was struck by the unique character of Leonardo's artistic achievement, which he calls a ‘keystone’ in European art. Almost thirty years later Goethe's interest in Leonardo's personality was renewed and considerably strengthened by the publication of the first scientific study of Leonardo's ‘Last Supper’ by G. Bossi the secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan who was also to become the founder of the Brera Gallery in the capital of Lombardy. Goethe's renewed interest in Leonardo culminates in the essay ‘Giuseppi Bossi:Über Leonardo da Vinci's Abendmahl zu Mailand’ which Goethe published in his own Weimar periodical ‘Über Kunst und Altertum’ (1817). Goethe's discussion of Leonardo's ‘Last Supper’ is mainly based on Raphael Morghen's engraving after a drawing of 1800 by Theodoro Mateini. Goethe himself testifies to the unique character of Morghen's engraving as a reliable copy of Leonardo's ‘Last Supper’. Even a modern art critic like Goldscheider still stresses the fact that Morghen's engraving rightly enjoys a more than merely historical documentary value because it was made before the Napoleonic occupation of Milan when Leonardo's ‘Last Supper’ suffered its worst damage.²

Goethe gives the first literary interpretation of Leonardo's well-known fresco. He looks at it with the eyes of the dramatic poet and he intuitively sees in Christ's announcement of his betrayal the self-revealing moment in Christ's relationship with his disciples. Indeed, although we learn from two early composition sketches, now respectively in the Royal Library at Windsor and the Venice Academy, that, like his predecessors from Giotto to Ghirlandaio, Leonardo originally chose the moment of the Last Supper when according to the Gospel of John, Christ passes the cup to Judas, the fresco in the Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie represents the psychologically more interesting moment when according to Matthew and Mark Christ exclaims: ‘Verily I say unto you, one of you shall betray me’. The disciples are, as Goethe remarks, stirred by one single surprise; a wave of the most contradictory feelings like fear, indignation, wrath and grief, all of which are reflected in the gestures and expressions of the disciples, at once spread to the left and the right of the table in order to return to Christ himself as the protagonist of the drama. Goethe draws attention to the fact that the more expressive manners of Mediterranean countries enabled Leonardo to display an immense variety of emotions in the figures of the disciples. Their hands and arms are as eloquent as their faces. Goethe admires the economy in the distribution of dramatic roles which Leonardo harmonized with the dynamic rhythm of grouping.The disciples are split into two symmetrical groups of six on either side of Christ, each of the two groups being subdivided into two groups of three. He pays special attention to the group of three disiples on the right side of Christ representing Peter, Judas and John. The vehement Peter is not only ready to declare his innocence; he also wants John to ask Christ who is the traitor so that he may take revenge. Peter's hand forms the bridge between the heads of John and Judas who, in conformity with Leonardo's way of seeing the human world in terms of outlook on the antinomies, respectively embody Love and Hate. The resigned John as Christ's beloved disciple stands for the creative power of Love, while Judas, who is clutching the bag and whose looks are furtive and threatening, represents Hate. It is noteworthy that the originality of Leonardo's interpretation of the ‘Last Supper’ enabled him to depart from the clumsy convention of his predecessors like Ghirlandaio and Andrea del Castagno according to which Judas was to sit alone on the near side of the table. Leonardo takes Judas out of his usual isolation and places him as the antagonist of Christ between John and Peter. The dramatic unity of Leonardo's ‘Last Supper’ is as Goethe remarks greatly enhanced by the contrast between the agitation of the disciples and the serene calmness of Christ as the protagonist of the drama. Christ alone remains calm after the announcement of the betrayal; he sits framed in the light of the doorway with his hands spread out as if he were to express by this gesture his insight into the inevitability of his tragic fate. The head of Christ on the fresco itself is unfinished, but Goethe knew the preparatory drawing of Christ's head which at that time belonged to the art treasures of the Ambrosiana Library in Milan and which nowadays may still be admired in the Brera Gallery in the same city. Goethe had Bossi's copy of this drawing before him in Weimar when he wrote his review of Bossi's book on Leonardo. This copy of Leonardo's drawing enabled Goethe to appreciate the special attention Leonardo had reserved for the artistic representation of the head of Christ. Leonardo always looked for the justification of the supernatural in nature, and Goethe admires the way in which Leonardo managed to reconcile the nobility of the idea of Christ in his mind with the highest possible serenity expressed in a human face.

Both Leonardo and Goethe seem to have looked upon the biblical scene of the ‘Last Supper’ as a deeply human tragedy of Love and Hate: ‘Hate is more powerful than Love since Hate ruins and destroys Love.’³ Neither Leonardo nor Goethe interpret the ‘Last Supper’ in the light of the Christian doctrine of salvation according to which the ‘Last Supper’ must be seen as the prologue to Christ's Passion or the mystical inauguration of the Eucharist. From Leonardo's own testimony we know that he deliberately rejects a supernatural interpretation of the world as incompatible with his belief in experience as ‘the mother of all certainty’:

If we doubt the certainty of everything which passes through the senses, how much more ought we to doubt things contrary to these senses, such as the existence of God or of the soul or similar things over which there is always dispute and contention?

(Se noi dubitiamo di ciascuna cose, che passa per li sensi, quanto maggiormente dobbiamo noi dubitare delle cose ribelli a essi sensi, come dell'essenza di Dio e dell'anima e simili, per la quali sempre si disputa e contende?)⁴

Leonardo explicitly rejects the dogmatic God of abstract theological speculations. His God is Nature ‘for all visible things are produced by Nature’ (‘perchè tutte le cose evidenti sono state partorite dalla natura’)⁵; he is Necessity governing the interdependence of Love and Hate in the cosmos. Vasari rightly states that Leonardo was so preoccupied with the scientific observation of natural phenomena that he did not adhere to any kind of dogmatic religion, ‘believing that it was perhaps better to be a philosopher than a Christian’.⁶ Like Dostoyevsky, Leonardo seems to have seen Christ's death on the cross in the light of the tragedy of the great man who becomes the victim of his own struggle for a better and juster world. Leonardo explicitly censures the vulgarisation of Christ's suffering and death by the sale of crucifixes because he finds it incompatible with his own respect for Christ's noble personality: ‘Alas! Whom do I see? The Saviour crucified again! I see Christ again sold and crucified and his Saints suffering martyrdom.’ (‘Omè! che vedo il Salvatore di novo crocifisso. I'vedo di novo venduto e crocifisso Christo e martirizzare i sui santi.’)⁷

The similarity of Leonardo's and Goethe's approach to the personality of Christ is obvious. Indeed, in his last novel Wilhelm Meister's Travels Goethe describes an art gallery in a Utopian state (‘Pädagogische Provinz’) in which the tragic end of Christ on the cross is intentionally separated from his life and teaching. Like Leonardo, Goethe condemns the vulgarisation of Christ's suffering and death through crucifixes:

We regard it as a damnable audacity to expose the scaffold of the martyr and the Holy One who suffered thereon to the eye of the sun, which hid its face when a wicked world pressed the spectacle upon it, to play with these secret things, to trifle with and adorn them, and not to rest till what is most worthy appears common and in bad taste.

(Wir halten es für eine verdammungswürdige Frechheit, jenes Martergerüst und den daran leidenden Heiligen dem Anblick der Sonne auszusetzen, die ihr Angesicht verbarg, als eine ruchlose Welt ihr dies Schauspiel aufdrang, mit diesen tiefen Geheimnissen, in welchen die göttliche Tiefe des Leidens verborgen liegt, zu spielen, zu tändeln, zu verzieren und nicht eher zu ruhen, bis das Würdigste gemein und abgeschmackt erscheint.)⁸

Although Goethe sees Christ's death on the cross as a prototype of noble suffering, the portion of the art gallery dealing with the life of Christ ends with and culminates in the departure of Christ from his disciples (‘Last Supper’). Like Leonardo, Goethe sees Christ mainly as the wise man, the philosopher and the individualist who becomes the victim of a world governed by two passions as contradictory as Love and Hate:

In life He appears as a true philosopher … as a wise man in the highest sense … From youth onwards, He amazes those around Him; one portion of them He wins to Himself, stirs up the other against Him, and shows to all who are concerned, with a certain loftiness in teaching and life, what they have to expect from the world. And so His way of living is for the noble part of mankind still more instructive and fruitful than His death, for to the former trials everyone is called, to the latter only few; and now passing over everything which follows from this consideration, consider the touching scene of the ‘Last Supper’! Here the wise One, as always, leaves behind His own entirely deserted, and while He is careful for those who are good, He at the same time nurtures a traitor who is to ruin both Himself and the better ones.

(Im Leben erscheint er als ein wahrer Philosoph, als ein Weiser im höchsten Sinne … Auf diese Weise setzt er von Jugend auf seine Umgebung in Erstaunen, gewinnt einen Teil derselben für sich, regt den andern gegen sich auf und zeigt allen denen es um eine gewisse Höhe im Lehren und Leben zu tun ist, was sie von der Welt zu erwarten haben. Und so ist sein Wandel für den edlen Teil der Menschheit noch belehrender und fruchtbarer als sein Tod: denn zu jenen Prüfungen ist jeder, zu diesem sind nur wenige berufen; und damit wir alles übergehen, was aus dieser Betrachtung folgt, so betrachtet die rührende Szene des Abendmahls. Hier lässt der Weise, wie immer, die Seinigen ganz eigentlich verwaist zurück, und indem er für die Guten besorgt ist, füttert er zugleich mit ihnen einen Verräter, der ihn und die Besseren zu Grunde richten wird.)⁹

Besides the ‘Last Supper’, which he saw, then, as the artistic representation of Love betrayed, Goethe was deeply impressed by Leonardo's ‘Battle of Anghiari’, in which he perceived the visualization of triumphing Hate. From contemporary biographers we learn that Leonardo was commissioned to paint the fresco of the ‘Battle of Anghiari’ for the decoration of the Sala del Gran Consiglio in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Leonardo was supposed to paint the fresco in competition with Michel Angelo. While Leonardo was to paint the victory of the Florentines over the Milanese at the ‘Battle of Anghiari’, Michel Angelo was expected to represent a group of bathing soldiers surprised at the ‘Battle of Cascina’. Neither Leonardo's nor Michel Angelo's fresco was ever finished, but we know from Benvenuto Cellini's ‘Autobiography’ that the two cartoons which formed the two composition sketches for the frescoes aroused the admiration of all. ‘So long as they remained intact, they were the school of the world.’¹⁰ No complete testimony remains of Leonardo's cartoon except the description of the dramatic scene in Vasari's biography:

One soldier, putting his horse to the gallop, has turned round and, grasping the staff of the standard, is endeavouring by main force to wrench it from the hands of four others, while two are defending it, trying to cut the staff with their swords; an old soldier in a red cap has a hand on the staff, as he cries out, and holds a scimitar in the other and threatens to cut off both hands of the two, who are grinding their teeth and making every effort to defend their banner. On the ground, between the legs of the horses, are two foreshortened figures who are fighting together, while a soldier lying prone has another over him who is raising his arm as high as he can to run his dagger with his utmost strength into his adversary's throat; the latter, whose legs and arms are helpless, does what he can, to escape death.¹¹

The original dimensions of Leonardo's cartoon must have been enormous. R. Monti supposes that Leonardo took parts of it with him to France, and that only the central part which was copied by Raphael and Michel Angelo remained in Florence, where it deteriorated and in 1565 was covered over by Vasari's frescoes.

Goethe's discussion of the ‘Battle of Anghiari’, which is found in his essay accompanying his sympathetic translation of Benevenuto Cellini's Autobiography, is founded upon Gustavus Edelinck's engraving made after the drawing of the ‘Battle around the Standard’ (Dutch Royal Collection, The Hague) which Rubens made in France from a section of the cartoon brought there by Leonardo himself. Edelinck's marvellous engraving shows, as Goethe remarks, how the art of engraving can be used to preserve the immortal works of great artists the originals of which have disappeared as a result or tragic historical circumstances.¹² Goethe praises the dramatic force of the ‘Battle around the Standard’ while he stresses Leonardo's unequalled skill in displaying the anger and the vindictiveness of men and horses. The horses are placed upon a par with men, and the warriors, fiery with bestial impulses, are characteristic of Leonardo's view of man in which human and animal properties constantly interchange. (‘… alle Figuren, Menschen und Tiere waren von gleicher Tätigkeit und Wut belebt, sodass sie ein Ganzes von der grössten Natürlichkeit und der hochsten Meisterschaft darstellten.’)¹³ Goethe's admiration of Leonardo's ‘Battle of Anghiari’ shows how far Goethe, as a result of his affinity, was able to penetrate into the interdependence of Love and Hate as the respectively creative and destructive forces in Leonardo's interpretation of the cosmos.

Leonardo's insight into the interdependence of Love and Hate in the cosmos runs parallel to his dialectical view of nature and the human world which is abundantly documented in his notebooks and in his treatise on painting. From Goethe's own testimony we know that he was deeply impressed by Leonardo's descriptions of both constructive and destructive natural phenomena as he found them in G. Manzi's edition of Leonardo's Trattato della Pittura (Rome 1817).¹⁴ On the other hand Goethe had already become familiar with Leonardo's outlook on nature through Venturi's Essai sur les ouvrages physico-mathématiques de Léonard de Vinci (1797) which he probably had learnt to know through his likeminded contemporary, the scientist-traveller Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt may indeed have drawn Goethe's attention to Venturi's essay which illustrates the wide range of Leonardo's scientific research in fields so various as geology, anatomy, botany, optics, hydraulics and meteorology. Venturi's essay revealed for the first time, and almost 300 years after Leonardo's death, the importance of Leonardo's role as the anticipator of scientific and technical progress in modern ages.

Indeed, Leonardo's versatility in art goes, as Goethe remarks, hand in hand with the universality of his genius as a scientist. Leonardo portrays himself as the man who, unsatisfied with the mastery of art, seeks to discern the secrets of nature:

Drawn on by my eager desire, anxious to behond the great abundance of the various and strange forms created by nature … I came to the mouth of a huge cavern before which for a time I remained stupefied, my back bent to an arch, my left hand clutching my knee, while with the right I made shade for my lowered and contracted eyebrows. Suddenly there awakened within me two emotions, fear and desire, fear of the dark threatening cavern, desire to see whether there might be any marvellous thing therein.

(… subito salse in me due cose: paura e desidero: paura per la minaccviante e scura spilonca, desidero per verdere se là entro fusse alcuna miracolosa cosa.)¹⁵

While Leonardo's fear of the awe-inspiring in the menacing cavern reminds us of Pascal's fear of the eternal silence of infinite space, his eager desire to inquire into the laws of nature is the main starting point of his passionate search for truth. Leonardo was much in advance of his age. He had the courage to call himself a ‘disciple of experience’ at a time when his contemporaries still preferred to be disciples of Plato or Aristotle. Leonardo anticipates both Francis Bacon and Campanella when he connects his own originality as a scientific investigator and natural philosopher with his whole-hearted belief in experience as the only true foundation of science:

Since experience has been the mistress of whoever has written well, I take her as my mistress and to her in all points make my appeal.

(Or non sanno questi che le mie cose sou più da esser tratte dalla sperienzia, che d'altrui parola; la quale fu maestra di chi bene scrisse, e così per maestra la piglio e quella in tutti i casi allegherò.)¹⁶

Goethe shares Leonardo's belief in the experimental method which clearly dominates his own scientific observations of both constructive and destructive natural phenomena. Indeed, Goethe's outlook on nature is as fully based on an awareness of antinomies as Leonardo's is. He sees nature as a force which is both creative and destructive, beyond good and evil:

What we see in nature is force, force that consumes, nothing present, everything transient, thousands of seeds trodden to death every moment, thousands born, great and significant, infinitely varied, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, all existing side by side with the same right.

(Was wir von Natur sehen, ist Kraft, die Kraft verschlingt, nichts gegenwärtig, alles vorübergehend, tausend Keime zertreten jeden Augenblick, tausend geboren, gross und bedeutend, mannigfaltig ins Unandliche; schön und hässlich, gut und bös, alles mit gleichem Recht nebeneinander existierend.)¹⁷

From their geological investigations Leonardo and Goethe know water and fire to be constructive and destructive modifiers of the earth's face. While water carves landscapes into hills and valleys and while it floods the land and forms sedementary strata, fire bursts through the earthcrust and raises up mountains.

On the other hand Leonardo's and Goethe's investigations into the interdependence of life and death in the organic world pave the way for the Darwinian interpretation of nature in the light of the ‘struggle for existence’. Indeed, Leonardo answers the question why nature allows one animal to make its life by the death of another in a way that clearly anticipates Darwin's view of ‘natural selection’.

Nature is capricious and takes such a pleasure in creating that she is more ready and swift in creating than time is in destroying and therefore she has ordered that the animals make their life by the death of others; and as this does not satisfy her desire, she sends forth frequently certain noisome and pestilential vapours and continual plagues upon the vast accumulations and herds of animals, and especially upon human beings who increase very rapidly because other animals do not feed upon them.

(La natura essendo vaga e pigliando piacere del create e fare continuve vite e forme, perchè cognosce che sono accrescimento della sua terreste materia, è volonterosa e più presta col suo creare che'l tempo col suo consumare e però ha ordinato che molti animali sieno cibo l'uno de l'altro, e non sodisfacendo questo a simile desiderio, i spesso manda fuora certi avvelenati e pestilenti vapori e continua peste sopra le gran moltiplicazioni e congregazione d'animali, e massime sopra gli omini che fanno grande accrescimento, perchè altri animali non si cibano di loro, …)¹⁸

Like Leonardo, Goethe sees nature as an unsearchable, capricious and self-contradictory being that wants to limit its creativity through the dialectical interdependence of life and death: ‘Life is her most beautiful invention and death her trick for getting more life’. (‘Leben ist ihre schönste Erfindung, und der Tod ist ihr Kunstgriff, viel Leben zu haben.’)¹⁹ Like Leonardo, Goethe recognizes that to attack and to prey upon others is for the majority of the animals their charter of existence. Nature is, as Goethe puts it in Werther, ‘an eternally devouring, eternally ruminating monster’ (‘ein ewig verschlingendes, ewig wiederkäuendes Ungeheuer.)²⁰ It is, as the Earth Spirit in Faust says, at once ‘the cradle and the tomb’ (‘Geburt und Grab’). Nature is prodigal in variety though niggard in innovation, and the mutual destruction in the world of plants and animals gives evidence of nature's insatiable zest-for-life. Goethe pauses with astonishment before nature's ‘productiveness’ which, as he says in his conversation with Eckermann of February 20, 1831, makes the world swarm with creatures to such a degree that even war, pestilence, fire and water cannot prevail against them.

Leonardo and Goethe are equally far from a beautifying and moralizing anthropocentric interpretation of nature, as was characteristic of the idealistic outlook on the world of the Florentine humanists or the moralizing philosophers of the Enlightenment. Both Leonardo and Goethe want to show that the laws governing the interdependence of creation and destruction in the macrocosm are also responsible for the interrelatedness of life and death in the human world. Paradoxically, life implies longing for death. The image of the moth rushing to the light as to its own death symbolizes the urge of both the macrocosm and the microcosm towards their own destruction:

Behold now the hope and desire of going back to his own country or returning to primal chaos, like that of the moth to the light, of the man who with perpetual longing always looks forward with joy to each new spring and each new summer, and to the new months and the new years, deeming that the things he longs for are too slow in coming; and who does not perceive that he is longing for his own destruction!

(Or vedi, la speranza e 'l desidero del ripatriarsi e ritornare nel primo caos fa a similitudine della farfalla al lume, dell'uomo, che con continui desideri sempre con festa aspetta la nuova primavera, sempre la nuova state, sempre e nuovi mesi, e nuovi anni, parendogli che le desiderate cose, venendo, sieno troppo tarde, e non s'avvede che desidera la sua disfazione.)²¹

However, Leonardo and Goethe equally believe the macrocosm and the microcosm to be governed by the law of metamorphosis. Leonardo uses the image of the candle to illustrate his cosmic insight into the dialectical unity of life and death in the organic world:

The body of anything whatever takes nourishment, constantly dies and is constantly renewed; … just as the flame of the candle is fed by the nourishment afforded by the wax of this candle, and to this flame a rapid supply continually restores from below as much as is consumed in dying above.

(Il corpo di qualunque cosa la qual si nutrica, al continuo muore e al continuo rinasce … a similitudine del lume della candela col nutrimento datoli dall'omore d'essa candela, il quale lume anchora lui al continuo con velocissimo socorso restaura di sotto, quanto di sopra se ne consuma morendo.)²²

Like Leonardo, Goethe returns to the image of the moth, rushing to its own destruction in the consuming and purifying fire, in order to illustrate the urge of both the macrocosm and the microcosm to constant metamorphosis: ‘I would praise the living thing that longs for death by fire’ (‘Das Lebendige will ich preisen, das nach Flammentod sich sehnet’).²³ Not only plants and animals but also man, the individual as well as the species, is subject to the laws of organic evolution: ‘Everything is constantly transformed in life, plants, animals and man himself too.’ (‘Alles ist Metamorphose im Leben, bei den Pflanzen und bei den Tieren, bis zum Menschen, und bei ihm auch’.)²⁴ The laws of organic evolution run parallel to those of spiritual evolution and, like Leonardo, Goethe discovers the secret of the art of living in a constant renewal of human personality: ‘And until you possess it, this commandment “Die and become”, you will be but a dismal guest on the dark earth.’ (‘Und solang du das nicht hast, dieses Stirb und Werde, bist du nur ein trüber Gast auf der dunklen Erde.’)²⁵

Leonardo's and Goethe's views of man are as antinomical as their views of nature in general. Leonardo and Goethe are equally impressed by the discrepancy between man's grandeur and dignity on the one hand and human insignificance and wickedness on the other hand. Leonardo who as the immediate precursor of Vesalius was fearless in his anatomical research at a moment when ecclesiastical and magical taboos still intimidated his contemporaries, repeatedly stresses the perfection of the human body ‘in which nothing is superfluous and nothing is lacking’. Leonardo's praise of the perfection of the human body goes hand in hand with his apology for dissection:

Oh speculator concerning this machine of ours, let it not distress you that you impart knowledge of it through another's death, but rejoice that our Maker has ordained the intellect to such excellence of perception.

(O speculatore di questa nostra macchina, non ti contristare perchè col altrui morte tu ne dia notizia, ma rallegrati che il nostro Altore abbia fermo lo intelletto a tale eccellenzia di strumento.)²⁶

Contrary to the Orphics and the Neoplatonists who saw the human body mainly as the prison in which the soul is separated from the realm of Ideas, Leonardo infers the nobility of the human soul from the perfection of the human body. Although he ironically asserts that he leaves the definition of the soul to the friars, ‘those fathers of the people who know all secrets by inspiration’ (‘padri de popoli, li quali per ispirazione san tutti li segreti’),²⁷ he identifies the soul with the eternal life-spirit. From his notes on anatomy we can infer how deeply Leonardo was imbued with a respectful feeling of the infinite value of life:

And thou, man, who by these my labours dost look upon the marvellous works of nature, if thou judgest it to be an atrocious act to destroy the same, reflect that it is an infinitely atrocious act to take away the life of man … since in truth he who values it not does deserve it. For we part from the body with extreme reluctance, and I indeed believe that its grief and lamentation are not without cause.

(E tu, omo, che consideri in questa mia fatica l'opere mirabile della natura, se giudicherai esser cosa nefanda il destruggerla, or pensa essere cosa nefandissima il torre la vita all'omo … che, veramente, chi non la stima non la merita-, poichè cosi mal volentieri si parte dal corpo, e ben credo che 'l suo pianto e dolore no sia sanza cagione.)²⁸

Like Leonardo, Goethe is deeply impressed by human grandeur as it manifests itself in the perfection of the human body. Although the chance discovery in 1784 of the presence in man of the intermaxillary bone had proved to Goethe the rightness of the thesis that biologically man and the mammals are one race, he repeatedly asserts that nature had to produce a long line of varying beings each deficient in certain human essentials in order to arrive at man as nature's highest creature. Although the animals are physiologically as perfect as man and perfectly fitted to their mode of life, man distinguishes himself from the rest of the organic world by his mental faculties. Man alone is aware of his being the peak of the organic world. Goethe bids man rejoice in the eternal law of metamorphosis governing Nature's creativity: ‘Rejoice, supreme product of Nature, in your ability to re-think her supreme thought, the highest to which in her creativeness she has risen.’ (‘Freue dich, höchstes Geschöpf der Natur, du fühlest dich fähig, Ihr den hochsten Gedanken zu dem sie schaffend sich aufschwang, nachzudenken.’)²⁹ Goethe agrees with Leonardo that man is subordinated to an amoral world order in which nature acts according to its own unalterable laws and in which good and evil are enigmatically intertwined; however, due to the creativity of his mind man can turn every moment of his life into eternity by thought and deed: ‘Only man can do the impossible: he distinguishes, chooses and judges; he can give permanence to the moment.’ (‘Nur allein der Mensch vermag das Unmögliche: er unterscheidet, wählet, und richtet; er kann dem Augenblick Dauer verleihen.’)³⁰

Leonardo's admiration of the creative power of the human mind as it manifests itself in artists (Giotto, Masaccio), scientists (Archimedes) and statesmen (Ludovico Moro) runs parallel to Goethe's praise of the ‘productiveness’ of genius in artists (Phidias, Raphael and Mozart), scientists (Alexander von Humboldt) and statesmen (Napoleon). Like Leonardo Goethe is aware of the discrepancy between the greatness of the exceptional personality and the insignificance of man in general:

I cannot but think that the daemons, to tease and to make sport with men, have placed among them single figures so alluring that everyone strives after them, and so great that nobody reaches them.

(So kann ich mich des Gedankens nicht erwehren, dass die Dämonen, um die Menschheit zu necken und zum besten zu haben, mitunter einzelne Figuren hinstellen, die so anlockend sind, dass jeder nach ihnen strebt, und so gross, dass niemand sie erreicht.)³¹

It is proof of Goethe's antinomical approach to human greatness that he witnesses with a strange impassivity the correlation of triumph and defeat in the lives of great personalities:

Man must be ruined again! Every extraordinary man has a certain mission to accomplish. If he has fulfilled it he is no longer needed upon earth in the same form and Providence uses him for something else; but as everything here below happens in a natural way, the demons keep tripping him up till he falls at last.

(Der Mensch muss wieder ruiniert werden! Jeder ausserordentliche Mensch hat eine gewisse Sendung, die er zu vollführen berufen ist. Hat er sie vollbracht, so ist er auf Erden in dieser Gestalt nicht weiter vonnöten, und die Vorsehung verwendei ihn wieder zu etwas anderem. Da aber hienieden alles auf natürlichem Wege geschieht, so stellen ihm die Dämonen ein Bein nach dem andern bis er zuletzt unterliegt.)³²

Like Goethe, Leonardo does justice to the triumph and tragedy of great men who not seldom become the victims of their arrogant and insignificant contemporaries:

If any be found virtuous and good, drive them not away from you but do them honour lest they flee from you and take refuge in hermitages and caves or other solitary places in order to escape from your deceits. If any such be found, pay him reverence, for as these are as gods upon the earth, they deserve statues, images and honours.

(E se alcuno se ne trova vertuoso e bono non lo scacciate da voi, fateli onore, a cio che non abbia a fuggirsi da voi e ridursi nelli ermi o spelonche o altri lochi soletari per fuggirsi dalle vostre insidie, e se alcum di questi tali si trava, fateli onore, perché questi sono i nostri iddei terresti, questi meritan da noi le statue, simulacri e li onori.)³³

In both Leonardo's and Goethe's view of man, the praise of human grandeur goes hand in hand with a pitiless exposure of human insignificance and wickedness. Leonardo, who is deeply aware of the relativity of human achievements, deliberately breaks away from Ptolemy's and Brunetto Latini's geocentrism and anticipates Galileo Galilei's heliocentric theory. Before Galileo, Leonardo censures the arrogance of man who dares to regard himself as the mode and measure of all things in the universe. He even condemns famous philosophers like Epicurus and Socrates because they extolled the worship of man above that of the sun:

I could wish that I had such power of language as should avail me to censure those who would fain extol the worship of man above that of the sun, for I do not perceive in the whole universe a body greater and more powerful than this, and its light illuminates all the celestical bodies which are distributed throughout the universe … and indeed, those who have wished to worship men as Gods such as Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and others, have made a very grave error seeing that even if man were as large as our earth, he would seem like one of the least of the stars, which appears but a speck in the universe; and seeing also that these men are mortal and subject to decay and corruption in their tombs.

(Ma io vorrei avere vocaboli che mi servissino a biasimare quelli che vollon laldare più lo adorare li omini che tal sole, non vedendo nell'universo corpo di maggiore magnitudine e virtu di quello. E'l suo lume allumina tutti li corpi celesti che per l'universo si compartano … e certo costoro che han voluto adorare omini per iddei, come Giove, Saturno, Marte e simili, han fatto grandissimo errore, vedendo che ancora che l'omo fussi grande quanto il nostro mondo che parrebbe simile a una minima stella, la qual pare un punto nell'universo, e ancora vedendo essi omini mortali e putridi e corruttibili nelle lor sepolture.)³⁴

Like Leonardo, Goethe condemns man's anthropomorphic conception of religion. Although he looks upon all four Gospels as thoroughly genuine because he finds in them the reflection of the greatness which emanates from Christ's personality, he contrasts his own cosmic religiousness which culminates in his worship of the sun with the dogmatic worship of human beings as ‘messengers of God’:

If I am asked whether it is in my nature to revere the Sun, I say—certainly! For he is likewise a manifestation of the highest Being, and indeed the most powerful that we children of earth are allowed to behold. I adore in him the light and the productive power of God; by which we all live, move and have our being—we, and all the plants and animals with us. But if I am asked whether I am inclined to bow before a thumb-bone of the Apostle Peter or Paul, I say—spare me, and stand off with your absurdities.

(Fragt man mich, ob es in meiner Natur sei, die Sonne zu verehren so sage ich: durchaus! Denn sie ist gleichfalls eine offenbarung des Höchsten und zwar di mächtigste die uns Erdenkinder wahrzunehmen vergönnt ist. Ich anbete in ihr das Licht und die zeugende Kraft Gottes, wodurch allein wir leben, weben und sind und alle Pflanzen und Tiere mit uns. Fragt man mich aber: ob ich geneigt sei, mich vor einem Daumenknochen des Apostels Petri oder Pauli zu bücken? so sage ich: verschont mich und bleibt mir mit eueren Absurditäten vom Leibe!)³⁵

Both Leonardo and Goethe seem to have been fascinated by the strange enigma of human existence. Leonardo's own belief in the creative power of the mind which enables man to rival and to compete with nature as an artist, is counterbalanced by his still stronger belief in the omnipotence of Time as the eternal destroyer of all things: ‘O Time, swift despoiler of created things! How many Kings, how many peoples hast thou brought low!’ (‘O tempo, veloce pledatore delle cleate cose, quanti re, quanti popoli hai tu disfatti.’)³⁶ Like Leonardo, Goethe is struck by the arrogance of man who makes himself master of the vegetable and animal world and who, while he claims other creatures as his fitting diet, thanks God for his paternal care and regards himself as the final cause of creation. Man is, as Goethe puts it, not born to solve the problems of the universe and should restrain himself within the limits of the comprehensible:

Altogether, man is a darkened being; he knows not whence he comes, nor whither he goes; he knows little of the world, and least of himself. I do not know myself, and God forbid I should.

(Ubrigens ist der Mensch ein dunkles Wesen, er weiss nicht, woher er kommt noch wohin er geht er weiss wenig von der Welt und am wenigsten von sich selber. Ich kenne mich auch nicht, und Gott soll mich auch davor behüten.)³⁷

The demonstration of human insignificance goes hand in hand with the attacks on human wickedness. Leonardo stresses the contrast between the perfection of the human body and the coarseness of mind which he believes separates the majority of mankind from human greatness:

Methinks that coarse men of bad habits and little power of reason do not deserve so fine an instrument or so great a variety of mechanism as those endowed with ideas and with great reasoning power, but merely a sack wherein their food is received, and from whence it passes away.

(Non mi pare che li omini grossi e di tristi costumi e di poco discorso meritino si bello strumento, né tante varieta di macchinamenti, quanto li omini speculativi e di gran discorsi, ma sole un sacco, dove si riceva il cibo e donde esso esca …)³⁸

Leonardo never tires of condemning the cruelty of those who ‘have nothing in common with the human race except speech and shape, and in all else are far below the level of the beasts’ (‘… niente mi pare che essi participino di spezie umana altro che la voce e la figura, e tutto il resto è assai manco che bestia’.)³⁹ While the cruelty of animals is part of nature's design for richness and multiplicity as well as for the need to limit her own creativity, human cruelty is monstrous. Man knows what suffering is, and in inflicting it, becomes a monster. Leonardo agrees with Macchiavelli that man and brutes are often alike not in having but in lacking reason. In his fables, Leonardo depicts the infinite variation of mutual destruction in the world of animals, wherein the stronger overpowers the weaker. The spider who wants to capture the fly in its secret web is cruelly slain above it by the wasp. The mouse is besieged by the weasel and both are devoured by the cat. The eagle who wishes to mock the owl gets its wings smeared with bird lime and is captured by man and killed. But are things different in the human world? Man who in his arrogance often mistakes cunning for the intellect is no less a brute when, in a world ordered by the unchangeable laws of Necessity, he plays the role of a subverter and devastator:

All the animals languish, filling the air with lamentations. The woods fall in ruin. The mountains are torn open, in order to carry away the metals which are produced there. But how can I speak of anything more wicked than the actions of those who raise hymns of praise to heaven for those who with greater zeal have injured their country and the human race.

(Tutti li animali languiscano, empiendo l'aria di lamentazione, le selve ruinano, le montagne aperte per rapire li generati metalli, ma che potro io dire cosa piu scellerata di quelli che levano le lalde al cielo di quelli che con piu ardore han nociuto alla patria e alle spezie umana.)⁴⁰

Goethe's attacks on human wickedness are not less violent than Leonardo's. After his chance discovery of the intermaxillary bone had enabled him to demonstrate man's affinity with the world of the animals, Goethe sees man not simply as the peak of the organic world. He agrees with Leonardo that man, for all his mental and social qualities, bears (and not only in his bodily frame) the stamp of his lowly origin. Man even uses, as Mephisto puts it in Faust, the creative power of his mind to behave worse than the animals: ‘He calls it reason, and only needs it to be more bestial than any animal.’ (‘Er nent's Vernunft und brauchts allein, nur tierischer als jedes Tier zu sein.’)⁴¹ In a conversation with Eckermann of July 1827, Goethe asserts that princes and kings are often so tormented by disagreeable men that they regard animals that are more disagreeable as a means of balancing disappointing impressions of the human world: ‘Princes are right to drive away one repulsive thing with something still more repulsive’. (‘Die Fürsten haben recht etwas Widerwärtiges mit etwas noch Widerwärtigerem zu vertreiben.’)⁴² Goethe's observations of human wickedness are summarized in an extremely pessimistic view of man in his last novel, Wilhelm Meister's Travels, in which social institutions are seen as primarily ‘works of necessity’:

Man has only too much cause for defending himself before man. Of those who wish evil, there are certainly many; of those who do evil, not a few; and in order to live as is fitting, it is not sufficient to be always benevolent.

(Der Mensch hat nur allzusehr Ursache, sich vor dem Menschen zu schützen. Der Missvollenden gibt es gar viele, der Misstätigen nicht wenige, und um zu leben wie sich's gehört ist nicht genug immer wohlzutun.)⁴³

The insight into the perfectibility and corruptibility of man accounts for both Leonardo's and Goethe's ambivalent attitudes towards man's exploration of the world. Both Leonardo and Goethe were living in Ages of Discovery.

Leonardo was a contemporary of Christopher Columbus, who discovered the New World in 1492, and of the Portuguese navigator Vasco de Gama, who opened a new route from Europe to the East round Africa (1497-98). Leonardo was personally acquainted with Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine of great birth and education, who gave his name to the New World and whose four voyages across the South Atlantic led to the exploration of the whole Eastern coast of South America (the bay of Rio de Janeiro as well as the mouths of the Amazon, the Orinoco and the La Plata). We know from Vasari's biographical testimony that Leonardo made a charcoal drawing of Amerigo Vespucci as an old man, and the portrait of the great Florentine navigator by an unknown painter (Florence, Uffizi) might well, as Goldcheider suggests, be a copy after Leonardo's drawing. Leonardo was aware of the importance of this Age of Discovery as the beginning of a new era in the history of mankind, in which East and West met for the first time without intermediary.

The trees of the vast forests of Taurus and of Sinaï, of the Apennines and of Atlas, shall be seen speeding by means of the air from East to West, and from North to South, and transporting by means of the air a great quantity of men … there will be great winds through which the Eastern things will become Western and those of the South, mingled together in great measure by the course of the winds, will follow these through distant lands.

(Vedrassi li alberi delle gran selve di Taurus e di Sinai, Apennino e Talas scorrere per l'aria da oriente a occidente, da aquilone a meridie, e portarne per l'aria gran moltitudine d'omini … sarà gran venti per li quali le cose orientali si faranno occidentali e quelle di mezzodì, in gran parte miste col corso de' venti, seguirannolo per lunghi paesi.)⁴⁴

From this prophecy we can infer that Leonardo welcomed the internationalization of the world as a result of man's exploration of new continents; he also clearly foresaw the bulk of emigration which was to follow the discovery of the Eldorado and the opening of new horizons in the light of a cosmopolitan view of the world:

Many shall leave their own dwellings, and shall carry with them all their goods and go to dwell in other lands. Men from the most remote countries shall speak one to another and shall reply. Men shall speak with and touch and embrace each other, while standing each in different hemispheres, and understand each other's language.

(Molti abbandoneranno le propie abitazioni, e porteran con seco tutti e sua valsenti, e andranno abitare in altri paesi. Parleransi li omini di remotissimi paesi l'uno all'altro e risponderansi. Parleransi et toccheransie e abbracceransi li omini, stanti dall'uno all'altro emisperio, e 'ntenderansi i loro linguaggi.)⁴⁵

However, Leonardo was too realistic an observer of the world not to see the tragic aspects of explorations. The praise of man's adventurous longing for the exploration of new continents is counter-balanced by reflection on the disasters which are the outcome of man's ambitious craving:

There shall be huge bodies devoid of life, carrying great numbers of men with fierce speed to the destruction of their lives. How many deaths! what partings between friends and relatives shall there be! How many who shall nevermore behold their own lands or their native country, and shall die unsepulchred, and their bones be scattered in diverse parts of the world.

(O quanti voti, o quanti morti, o quanta separazion d'amici e di parenti, o quanti fien quelli che non rivedranno piu le lor provincie, né le lor patrie, e che morran sanza sepoltura colle lore ossa sparse in diversi siti del mondo.)⁴⁶

Leonardo's familiarity with the human lust for riches and power, combined with his knowledge of human cruelty, enabled him to censure in an almost apocalyptic vision the inhuman consequences of man's conquest of the New World in search of precious metals:

There shall come forth out of dark and gloomy caves that which shall cause the whole human race to undergo great afflictions, perils, and death … It shall bring to pass an endless number of crimes; it shall prompt and incite wretched men to assassinate, to steal and to enslave; it shall hold its own followers in suspicion; it shall deprive free cities of their rank; it shall take away life itself from many; it shall make men torment each other with many kinds of subterfuge, deceits and treacheries.

(Uscirà delle oscure e tenebrose spelonche chi metterà tutta l'umana spezie in grandi affanni, pericoli e morte; … Questo commetterà infiniti tradimenti, questo aumenterà e persuaderà li omini tristi alli assassinamenti e latrocini e le servitu, questo terrà in sospetto i sua partigiani, questo torrà lo stato alle città libere, questo torrà la vita a molti, questo travaglierà li omini infra lor co'molte flalde, inganni e tradiment.)⁴⁷

Like Leonardo, Goethe witnessed during his lifetime an important series of explorations of new continents. He was not only a friend of Forster, who accompanied Captain James Cook on one of his voyages around the world. He was also a contemporary of Mungo Park, one of the earliest explorers of Africa, who made two remarkable journeys of discovery in tracking the source of the Niger in whose waters he was drowned. But above all, he was interested in Alexander von Humboldt's contribution to the exploration of Spanish America. Humboldt continued what Vespucci and Cabral had begun in Leonardo's age of adventure. From 1799 till 1804 Humboldt undertook his historic voyage to South and Central America, in the company of the French scientist Aimé Bonpland and under the patronage of the Spanish Prime Minister Mariano de Urquijo. The navigation of the Apure and Orinoco rivers enabled Humboldt to confirm the existence of a link between the drainage of the Orinoco and that of the Amazon. The exploration of the Magdalene river (Columbia) and of the Andes Mountains between Bogota (Columbia) and Quito (Ecuador), as well as of the Upper Amazon (Peru), was followed by the ascent of the Chimborazo (Ecuador), which led to new scientific data in fields so various as geology, botany and climatology. Humboldt's observations of the voyage from Peru to Acapulco (Mexico) form an important contribution to the study of oceanography, while the journey through Mexico enabled Humboldt to make practical suggestions for a more efficient exploration of the richest mining country in Central America. Humboldt planned what was only realized in our age, after Mexico had liberated itself from Spanish colonial mercantile administration to become one of the most prosperous countries of Spanish America.

Goethe admired in the scientist-traveller Humboldt that remarkable inter-relatedness of bodily strength and mental vigour which he praised in Leonardo's personality. In his conversation with Eckermann of December 1826, he does justice to Humboldt's universal genius:

What a man he is! Long as I have known him, he ever surprises me anew. He has not his equal in knowledge and living wisdom. He has a many-sidedness such as I have found nowhere else. On whatever point you approach him, he is at home and lavishes upon us his intellectual treasures. He is like a fountain with many pipes under which you need only hold a vessel; refreshing and inexhaustible streams are ever flowing.

(Was ist das für ein Mann! Ich kenne ihn so lange, und doch bin ich von neuem über ihn in Erstaunen. Man kann sagen, er hat an Kenntnissen und lebendigen Wissen nicht seinesgleichen. Und eine Vielseitigkeit, wie sie mir gleichfalls noch nicht vorgekommen ist! Wohin man rührt, er ist überall zu Hause und überschütet uns mit geistigen Schätzen. Er gleicht einem Brunnen mit vielen Röhren, wo man überall nur Gafässe unterzuhalten braucht und wo es uns immer erquicklich und unerschöpflich entgegenströmt.)⁴⁸

Goethe read Alexander van Humboldt's works on Spanish America in 1827, and became particularly interested in Humboldt's projects for the Panama Canal which could only be definitely realized in 1914. In his conversation with Eckermann of February 1827, Goethe's interest in the Panama Canal is combined with a prophetic vision of the political and economic role the United States would play in modern history as well as with a prophecy of intercontinental trade between East and West:

All this is reserved for the future, and for an enterprising spirit. So much, however, is certain, that, if they succeed in cutting such a canal that ships of any burden and size can be navigated through it from the Mexican Gulf to the Pacific Ocean, innumerable benefits would result for the whole human race. But I should wonder if the United States were to let slip an opportunity of getting such a work into their own hands. It may be foreseen that this young state, with its decided leaning towards the West, will, in thirty or forty years, have occupied and peopled the large tract of land beyond the Rocky Mountains. It may furthermore be foreseen that along the whole cost of the Pacific Ocean, where nature has already formed the most capacious and secure harbours, important commercial towns will gradually arise, for the furthering of a great intercourse between China and the East Indies and the United States.

(Dies ist nun alles der Zukunft und einem grossen Unternehmungs geiste vorbehalten. So viel ist aber gewiss, gelänge ein Durchstich derart, dass man mit Schiffen von jeder Ladung und jeder Grösse durch solchen Kanal aus dem Mexikanischen Meerbusen in den Stillen Ozean fahren könnte, so würden daraus für die ganze zivilisierte und nicht zivilisierte Menschheit ganz unberechenbare Resultate hervorgehen. Wundern sollte es mich aber, wenn die Vereinigten Staten es sich sollten entgehen lassen, ein solches Werk in ihre Hände zu bekommen. Es ist vorauszusehen, dass dieser jugendliche Staat, bei seiner entschiedenen Tendenz nach Westen in dreissig bis vierzig Jahren auch die grossen Landstrecken jenseits der Felsengebirge in Besitz genommen und bevölkert haben wird. Es ist ferner vorauszusehen, dass an dieser ganzen Küste des Stillen Ozeans, wo die Natur bereits die geräumigsten und sichersten Häfen gebildet hat, nach und nach sehr bedeutende Handelsstädte entstehen werden, zur Vermittelung eines grossen Verkehrs zwischen China nebst Ostindien und den Vereinigten Staaten.)⁴⁹

However, like Leonardo, Goethe had the courage to look at both sides of reality in the New World. He could make himself familiar with the less edifying chapters of the exploration of new continents by European countries in Humboldt's Essai politique sur l'Ile de Cuba (1826), in which the author deliberately opposes slavery in a growing plantation colony like Cuba. Goethe cannot but have admired the genuine humanity of his famous contemporary, who in this essay on Cuba gives practical hints for the gradual abolition of slavery, and who through his influence on the young Simon Bolivar obtained the reputation of a promoter of the liberation of Spanish America from European colonization. Moreover, in his conversation with Eckermann of September 1829, Goethe sharply criticises the hypocrisy of European countries over the African slave trade. The solemn use of humane maxims at the Congress of Vienna served, as Goethe points out, more to disguise political opportunism than to favour true humanity:

They have founded large colonies of negroes in America, which are very productive, and yearly return a large profit in blacks. From these they can supply the demand in North America, and, since they thus carry on a highly profitable trade, an importation from without would be against their commercial interest. So, they preach with a practical view against the inhuman African slave-trade.

(In Amerika haben sie selbst grosse Negerkolonien angelegt, die sehr produktiv sind und jährlich eine grossen Ertrag an Schwarzen liefern. Mit diesen versehen sie die nordamerikanischen Bedürfnisse, und indem sie auf solcher Weise einen höchst einträglichen Handel treiben, wäre die Einfuhr von aussen ihrem merkantilischen Interessen sehr im Wege, und sie predigen daher, nicht ohne Objekt, gegen den inhumanen Handel.)⁵⁰

Leonardo's and Goethe's familiarity with both the dignity and the wickedness of man also accounts for their ambivalent attitude towards scientific and technical progress.

Leonardo's own technological inventiveness, based on scientific investigations into organic and mechanical laws, enabled him partly to anticipate, partly to foretell, modern technical progress.

Leonardo was the first engineer who realized that human flight could be accomplished by a mechanical imitation of nature; his experimental study of the flight of birds, combined with an almost unique inventiveness, induced him not only to construct the prototypes of a plane, a helicopter and a parachute but also to foretell the development of aeronautics in our century:

… the great bird will take its first flight filling the whole world with amazement and filling all records with its fame, and it will bring eternal glory to the nest where it was born.

(Piglierà il primo volo il grande uccello, empiendo l'universo di stupore, empiendo di sua fama tutte le scriture, e gloria eterna al nido dove nacque.)⁵¹

Leonardo invented machinery for water-mills and aqueducts; he designed plans for connecting rivers and draining marshes; he drew up projects for clearing harbours and piercing mountains. As a military engineer in the service of Ludovico Moro and Caesar Borgia, he anticipated modern instruments of warfare. In his letter of self-recommendation to his Milanese patron Ludovico Moro, he stresses the fact that he could contrive ‘machines of marvellous efficacy and not in common use’. Indeed in the field of military engineering Leonardo must be credited with the invention of several engines for both offence and defence. He drew the project for an ‘armoured car’ which can be recognized as the prototype of the modern tank; he foretold the use of the bombing aeroplane and of poison gas; while in the field of naval warfare he originated the mechanism of the diving apparatus and the submarine. However, it speaks for the strange dichotomy in Leonardo's personality between the man of action and the man of thought that he tried to reconcile his theoretical and practical activities as a military engineer with his extremely pessimistic view of man as the devastator of the world. As a man of action, Leonardo sees offensive and defensive warfare in the light of the necessity to safeguard all that life holds most dear: ‘When besieged by ambitious tyrants, I find the means of offence and defence in order to preserve the chief gift of nature, which is liberty.’ (‘Per mantenere il dono principal di natura, cioè libertà, trovo modo da offendere e difendere, in stando assediati da li ambiziosi tiranni.’)⁵²

However, the man of thought immediately pre-imagines the disastrous use of such technical inventions as the submarine and the diving apparatus in the service of man's cruelty. In his notes on hydraulics and naval warfare, Leonardo explicitly states that he refuses to make public the method which he has discovered for remaining a long time under water because he knows the amoral character of man who would use his inventions for massacres in the sea.

… and this I do not publish or divulge on account of the evil nature of man, who would practice assassinations at the bottom of the seas, by breaking the ships in their lowest parts and sinking them together with the crews who are in them; and although I will furnish particulars of others, they are such as are not dangerous, for above the surface of the water emerges the mouth of the tube by which they draw in breath, supported upon wine-skins or pieces of cork.

(… e questo non publico o divolgo, per le male nature delli omini, li quali userebbono li assassinamenti ne' fondi de' mari col rompere i navili in fondo e sommergerli insieme colli omini che vi son dentro. E benchè io insegni delli altri, quelli non son di pericolo, perchè di sopra all'acqua apparisce la bocca della canna onde àlitano, posta sopra otri e sughero.)⁵³

Leonardo asserts that man's inventiveness as a ‘divine thing’ makes him differ from the animals only in what is merely ‘accidental’. Being ‘nature's chiefest instrument’ (‘massimo strumento della natura’) man is able to create numerous new implements with the aid of nature, where nature herself finishes producing her species, but ‘as these are not necessary to those who govern themselves rightly as do the animals, it is not in their disposition to seek after them’ (‘le quali, non essendo necessarie a chi ben si corregge come fan le animali, a essi animali non è disposizion cercarne’).⁵⁴ It speaks for Leonardo's highly ambivalent approach to technical progress that, in spite of his own prodigious inventiveness, he finally decides against a ruthless divulgation of devices which could lead to the self-destruction of mankind at the hands of those ‘who in order to gratify one of their appetites would destroy God and the whole universe’ (‘che per saddisfare a un suo appetito ruinerebbono Iddio con tutto l'universo’).⁵⁵

Goethe looked upon scientific and technical progress in much the same way as Leonardo. Although he was not an inventor himself, he witnessed during his lifetime an impressive series of scientific and technological discoveries:

I had this advantage, that my life fell in a time richer than any other in great natural discoveries … I feel like one who walks towards the dawn, and when the sun rises is astonished at its brilliancy!

(… so kam mir zugute, dass mein Leben in einer Zeit fiel, die an grossen Entdeckungen in der Natur reicher war als irgend eine andere. … Es ist mir wie einem, der der Morgenröte entgegengeht und über den Glanz der Sonne erstaunt, wenn diese hervorleuchtet!)⁵⁶

Goethe took a lively interest in the technical revolution brought about by the development of modern means of communication and transport. He was the contemporary of the brothers Montgolfier, of Fulton and Stephenson. The flight of the ‘Montgolfière’ as the first free manned balloon took place in November 1783 over Paris and was the first great achievement in the history of human flight. In 1807 Fulton's steamboat travelled for the first time from New York to Albany through the Hudson Bay, while in 1819 modern intercontinental traffic was inaugurated when the first steamboat travelled from America to Europe. Finally, in 1829 the contest of the Liverpool and Manchester railway was won by Stephenson's first steam locomotive (‘Rocket’), so that the first public railway could be opened on September 15th, 1830. Goethe kept in his house a model of the Liverpool-Manchester railway and foresaw the important role the railways would play in the surging industrial revolution. The technical revolution coincides with the industrial revolution. Indeed, by 1800 Watt's steam engines were being installed in mines, metal plants, textile factories and breweries; while Crompton's, Cartwright's and Jacquard's inventions gradually replaced handspinners with machinery in the textile industry. It is an indication of Goethe's alertness to the spirit of the age that he was immediately aware not only of the advantages but also of the dangers of industrialization. In Wilhelm Meister's Travels he prophesies the decline of the industrialized world and the return to a new barbarism as a result of man's becoming a victim of his own technological inventiveness:

The prevailing business of machines torments and causes me anxiety; it revolves like a storm, slowly, slowly; but it has taken its direction, it will come and destroy us. … And who would like to visualize such horrors? Imagine this happy country, this well-dressed crowd, and imagine how all that will gradually sink into ruin, die away; the desert, made alive and inhabited for centuries, will fall back again into its ancient solitude.

(Das überhandnehmende Maschinenwesen quält und ängstigt mich. Es wälzt sich heran wie ein Gewitter, langsam, langsam; aber es hat seine Richtung genommen, es wird kommen und treffen. Wer möchte sich solche Schrecknisse gern vergegenwärtigen. Man denke sich dieses frohe Land, diese geputzte Menge; und man denke, wie das nach und nach zusammensinken, absterben, wie die Ode, durch Jahrhunderte belebt und bevölkert, wieder in ihre uralte Einsamkeit zurückfallen werde.)⁵⁷

Goethe also clearly foretells the social consequences like chronic unemployment and emigration on a large scale which were to be the unavoidable outcome of the industrial revolution:

I know very well that in the neighbourhood they are considering the possibility of erecting machines and drawing to themselves the livelihood of the multitude. I cannot take it amiss if anyone puts his own interests first; but it seemed to me contemptible that I should rob these good people and at last see them wandering poor and helpless, and wander they must sooner or later.

(Ich weiss recht gut dass man in der Nähe mit dem Gedanken umgeht, selbst Maschinen zu errichten und die Nährung der Menge an sich zu reissen. Ich Käme mir verächtlich vor, sollte ich diese guten Menschen plündern und sie zuletzt arm und hilflos wandern sehen; und wandern müssen sie, früher oder später.)⁵⁸

Goethe looks upon the industrial revolution as a more important event than the French revolution of 1789. In Wilhelm Meister's Travels he is mainly concerned with the necessity to harmonize the aims of the individual with the rapidly changing economic and social conditions of his age. He agrees with a social reformer like Saint Simon that the age of mechanization calls for a new social order in which each man should be placed according to practical abilities and rewarded according to merit. He also sides with Saint Simon when he asserts that the whole of society must strive towards amelioration of the physical and moral existence of the poorest class and that society ought to be organized in the way best fitted for attaining this end. Moreover in Faust II Goethe's belief in the internationalization of the world through the technological and social revolution culminates in his prophetic vision of man's triumph over the elements of nature through the communal spirit.⁵⁹ However, it speaks for the Leonardesque character of Goethe's approach to progress that the Faustian vision of a new paradise on earth is counterbalanced by the Mephistophelian belief that whatever man achieves can ultimately be undone by the operation of inexorable natural laws.⁶⁰

Both Goethe and Leonardo know the conditions of human life to be governed by the law of opposites: ‘Supreme happiness will,’ as Leonardo puts it, ‘be the greatest cause of misery, and the perfection of wisdom the occasion of folly’ (‘La somma felicità sarà somma cagione della infelicità, e la perfezion della sapienza cagione della stoltizia’).⁶¹ Like Leonardo, Goethe finds the paradoxical sense of life in the strange contradictions which are the very essence of human existence. Like Faust, he is looking for a life full of ‘painful enjoyment and loving hatred’. With Mephisto, however, he agrees that everything that exists is worthy of death. (‘Denn alles was entsteht ist wert, dass es zugrunde geht.’) Finally he agrees with Leonardo that life demands no other justification than that it has to be lived intensely for the sake of life itself:

Let life be as it will, yet it is good.
(Wie es auch sei, das Leben es ist gut.)

Notes

1. Empedocles Fragment 26 (Diels. Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1957).

2. Goldscheider. Leonardo (Phaidon, 1967) p. 173.

3. Leonardo. Treatise on Painting (Transl. MacMahon).

4. Leonardo. Op. cit.

5. Leonardo. Op. cit.

6. Goldscheider. Op. cit. p. 13.

7. Leonardo. Scritti Letterari (Rizzoli, 1952) (Transl. MacCurdy).

8. Goethe. Werke. (Artemis, 1961) p. 179, Vol. 8 (Transl. R. O. Moon).

9. Goethe. Op. cit. p. 178, Vol. 8.

10. B. Cellini. Autobiography.

11. Goldscheider. Op. cit. p. 21.

12. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. 15, p. 870.

13. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. 15, p. 868.

14. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. 13, p. 778.

15. Leonardo. Notebooks. (MacCurdy, London 1956). Vol. II, p. 472.

16. Leonardo. Op. cit. Vol. I, p. 58.

17. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. 13, p. 29 (Translation E. Mason).

18. Leonardo. Notebooks. Vol. I, p. 72.

19. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. 16, p. 923.

20. Goethe. Werther. Vol. IV.

21. Leonardo. Notebooks. Vol. I, pp 72-73.

22. Leonardo. Op. cit. Vol. I, pp. 135-36.

23. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. III, p. 299.

24. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. XXII, pp. 800-804.

25. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. III, p. 299.

26. Leonardo. Notebooks. Vol. I, p. 161.

27. Leonardo. Op. cit. p. 78.

28. Leonardo. Op. cit. p. 78.

29. Goethe. Werke. Vol. I, p. 519.

30. Goethe. Op cit. Vol. I, p. 324.

31. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. XXIV, p. 373.

32. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. XXIV, p. 682.

33. Leonardo. Notebooks. Vol. I, p. 82.

34. Leonardo. Op cit. Vol. I, p. 263.

35. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. XXIV, p. 771.

36. Leonardo. Notebooks. Vol. II, p. 473.

37. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. XXIV, p. 359.

38. Leonardo. Notebooks. Vol. I, pp. 128-29.

39. Leonardo. Op. cit. Vol. I, p. 129.

40. Leonardo. Notebooks. Vol. II, p. 470.

41. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. V, p. 150.

42. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. XXIV, p. 258.

43. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. VIII, p. 54.

44. Leonardo. Notebooks. Vol. II, pp. 457-58; 452.

45. Leonardo. Op. cit. Vol. II, pp. 456, 458.

46. Leonardo. Op. cit. Vol. II, p. 458.

47. Leonardo. Op. cit. Vol. II, p. 455.

48. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. 24, p. 185.

49. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. XXIV, pp. 599-600.

50. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. XXIV, p. 371.

51. Leonardo. Notebooks. Vol. I, p. 391.

52. Leonardo. Op. cit. Vol. II, p. 167.

53. Leonardo. Op. cit. Vol. II, p. 109.

54. Leonardo. Op. cit. Vol. I, p. 116.

55. Leonardo. Op. cit. Vol. I, p. 80.

56. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. XXIV, p. 238.

57. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. VIII, p. 460.

58. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. VIII, p. 461.

59. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. V, pp. 508-09.

60. Goethe. Op. cit. Vol. V, p. 508.

61. Leonardo. Notebooks. Vol. I, p. 59.