[In the following essay, Fly contrasts the differing conceptions of human sight reflected in the works of Leonardo and Shakespeare. For Leonardo, he declares, “the primary function of the eyes” is “the scientific scrutiny of the phenomenal world,” while for Shakespeare it is “the acknowledgment and expression of essential human relationships.”]

He is a great observer, and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men.

(Julius Caesar I.ii.202-3)

My general subject in this essay is the role of vision as a mode of discovery in the work of two great Renaissance artists, Leonardo da Vinci and William Shakespeare. The particular kind of comparison I want to make, and the crucial distinction I hope to reveal, can best be set forth by placing a famous passage from Leonardo's Treatise on Painting beside an equally famous bit of dialogue from a Shakespearean play. The Leonardo quote comes at the end of a long celebration of human vision when he caps an emotional crescendo with the exclamation, “but what is there which is not accomplished by the eye?” (23).¹ The Shakespearean dialogue occurs at the emotional peak of his most powerful tragedy, King Lear, when the old king, exhausted by exposure and maddened by betrayal, suddenly meets Gloucester, brutally blinded and expelled from his home. Both old men are ripe with new knowledge of the cruel ways of the world, but Lear has broken through to a deeper apprehension:

Lear. No eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light; yet you see how this world goes.

Glouc. I see it feelingly.

Lear. What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears.

(IV.vi.143-49)²

Leonardo's “what is there which is not accomplished by the eye?” and Shakespeare's “a man may see how this world goes with no eyes” are representative expressions, I believe, of the basic assumptions of these two geniuses. Between Leonardo's rhetorical question and Shakespeare's paradoxical answer exists a profound difference that can only be partially explained by the dissimilarities in medium or the one hundred years that separate the two men. Beyond all differences in date, nationality, medium, and education there remains a fundamentally different understanding of how one engages with the world.

I

Leonardo would not appreciate being compared to a poet, even such a poet as Shakespeare. Much of Book One of his Treatise on Painting (Paragone: Of Poetry and Painting) glorifies painting at the expense of poetry. Painting gives a more comprehensive representation of the world, Leonardo argues, because “the painter will create an infinite number of things which words cannot even name, since there are no words appropriate to them” (14). Poets also suffer from another disadvantage in that their words can only be the shadow of reality whereas paintings can present the thing itself. “Poetry places things before the imagination in words,” Leonardo reasons, “while painting really places the object before the eye, and the eye accepts the likenesses as though they were real. Poetry offers things without this likeness and they do not make an impression by way of visual impact as does painting” (13). To Leonardo, then, poetry is inferior to painting on two essential counts: its finite vocabulary severely limits its representational scope, and its insubstantiality greatly lessens its sensual impact. Rhetorically addressing his inferior competitor, Leonardo summarizes these differences: “Painting in itself includes all forms of nature, but you, poet, have nothing but their names, which are not universal, as are their forms” (19). Exit poet, chagrined.

It may be objected that Leonardo's whole argument in the Paragone is mostly academic and rhetorical in nature and, therefore, should not be understood as a mean-spirited attempt to denigrate poetry but rather as his desire to elevate the dignity of painting. That explanation is difficult to accept, however, when one considers the basic premise of his case for the superiority of the painter. I am referring to the relationship Leonardo repeatedly constructs between the hierarchy of the senses and the hierarchy of the arts. This curious relationship, and the distinctions that follow from it, take the form of a simple syllogism: poetry appeals to the ear and painting to the eye; the eye is the noblest of the five senses; ergo, painting is superior to poetry. We know that sight is the most valued sense, Leonardo argues, because everyone prefers all other sensual deprivations to blindness:

If asked which he would rather select, to be in perpetual darkness or to be willing to lose his hearing, no man's judgment is so senseless that he would not at once reply he would sooner lose his hearing, together with the sense of smell, rather than to be blind. For whoever loses his sight loses the beauty of the world and all forms of created things, and the deaf man loses only the sound made by the motion of air under percussion, which is the least thing in the world.

(16)

That a man might “see how this world goes with no eyes” is simply inconceivable to Leonardo. Indeed, the absolute certainty with which he can dismiss the unique realm of human discourse as “the least thing in the world” is a peculiarity in his character of some importance. It certainly distinguishes him from Shakespeare.

The preeminence of sight in a hierarchy of senses is a venerable concept which can be traced through Aristotle's Metaphysics to a number of Renaissance theorists.³ In Leon Battista Alberti's influential treatise on architecture, for instance, Leonardo could have read that “There is nothing more powerful, nothing more rapid, nothing more worthy than the eye. What more can be said? The eye is such that among the members of the body it is first, the chief one, it is king and, as it were, God.”⁴ Alberti's coronation and deification of the eye became a commonplace in the Renaissance. Even so, his question “what more can be said?” is fully answered only by Leonardo, who far outdoes his contemporaries in his exaltation of sight. As many have remarked, Book One of the Treatise on Painting could more accurately be titled “In Praise of the Eye,” since it is this organ's presumed total sufficiency as an instrument of knowledge about the world that causes Leonardo to privilege painters over all other artists. In such passages as the following we come close to the essence of Leonardo's engagement with the world:

The eye, by which the beauty of the world is reflected for those who behold it, is of such great excellence, that he who consents to lose it deprives himself of the representations of all the works of nature. Because it views these works by means of the eye, the soul is content in the human prison of the body; by means of the eyes the soul represents to itself all the manifestations of nature. But he who loses his eyes leaves the soul in a dark prison, in which all hope is lost of again seeing the sun which is the light of the world.

(6-7)

Once again, it is Leonardo's extremism that is significant here. His unqualified hyperbole collapses the hierarchy of the senses, leaving the sense of sight as the soul's only contact with the external world. Such exclusivity makes possible his outbursts of unrestrained admiration for this glorious and liberating faculty: “O, most excellent above all other things created by God, what praises are there to express your nobility? What peoples, what tongues, can describe your scope? … What is there which is not accomplished by the eye?” (23).

It should be clear that, for Leonardo, this question is rhetorical, since he has no doubt that all knowledge comes to us via the eye. Indeed, such a conviction underlies his entire artistic and scientific endeavor. To my knowledge, no one has put more clearly the purely visual basis of Leonardo's enterprise than Ernst Cassirer:

To traverse the realm of visible forms completely, to grasp each of these forms in its clear and certain contours; and to keep them in their full definiteness before both the internal and external eye; these are the highest aims recognized by Leonardo's science. Thus, the limit of vision is also, of necessity, the limit of conception. Both as an artist and as scientist, he is always concerned with the “world of the eye.” It is certainly true that Leonardo's ideal of science aims at nothing but perfection of seeing.⁵

Cassirer's direct, confident phrasing is refreshing and quite a propos. He knows, of course, that no more complex individual has ever existed than Leonardo. But when one considers the fundamental “aims” of his program, the mystery vanishes and Cassirer and other Leonardo scholars can speak with certainty and unanimity. E. H. Gombrich has no doubt that “Leonardo was the greatest of visual explorers.”⁶ “Leonardo looked at nature directly,” Jacob Bronowski adds, “not through the mind but through the eye.”⁷ Kenneth Clark strikes the same note of confidence: “Certain things in Leonardo's art are clear and definable, his passionate curiosity into the secrets of nature, and the inhumanly sharp eye with which he penetrated them.”⁸ Echoing through all these modern assertions is Goethe's famous judgment. “Leonardo's grasp of nature was directly visual,” he said, “and because his thinking was grounded in the phenomenon itself, he hit upon the truth without detours.”⁹

Most everyone, too, has noted and commented upon the supernatural quickness and accuracy of Leonardo's “inhumanly sharp eye.” Not only in his great masterpieces but in his studies of birds in flight, in his numerous tracings of swirling water, in his astonishing diagrams of anatomical structure, and in his detailed sketches of plant and animal life, there is overwhelming proof that his was no ordinary vision. “His was a wonderful eye,” Bronowski remarks, “sharp and abrupt as a camera, which could stop a bird in flight and fix the muscled movement of its wing.”¹⁰ Contemporary scholars are often amazed to discover that certain of his observations are so precisely delineated that they can stand comparison with results obtained by the most subtle modern instruments. There seems no doubt that Clark is right in his suggestion that “the nerves of his eye and brain, like those of certain famous athletes, were really supernormal,” and that consequently he could see and draw movements imperceptible to the ordinary eye.¹¹ We may wonder whether it was Leonardo's extraordinary eye that led him to privilege visual knowledge so exclusively, or whether it was his insatiable curiosity for detailed factual information that focussed and sharpened his vision. In any case, both the hunger and the dependency on sight are beyond dispute.

Not surprisingly, Leonardo's ambition as a painter is to realize the most exact possible imitation of nature—and here, too, he far surpasses his contemporaries. “That painting is most to be praised,” he writes in the Treatise, “which agrees most exactly with the thing imitated” (98). His much-imitated technical innovations—the soft modelling of forms, the chiaroscuro and sfumato effects of light and shade, the use of color and blurring of line in the creation of perspective, even the outward depiction of inner feeling—all arise in answer to his desire to give his paintings the fullest possible illusion of life. And in the great portraits—the Ginevra Benci, the Cecilia Gallerani, and above all the Mona Lisa—he may have come as close as a mortal can come to this ideal. We do know that the awesome effect his masterpieces had on his contemporaries arose primarily from his seemingly magical imitation of nature. “If one wanted to see how faithfully art can imitate nature,” Vasari wrote of the Mona Lisa, “one could readily perceive it from this head; for here Leonardo subtly reproduced every living detail.”¹² The highest compliment Vasari can pay is to stress how lifelike the portrait is, and he does this in embarrassing specificity: “On looking closely at the pit of her throat one could swear that the pulses were beating.” Indeed, the mass of commentary on the Mona Lisa offers little more than variations on Vasari's theme of miraculous re-creation. Thus, a French theorist in the seventeenth century finds that “there was so much grace and so much sweetness in the eyes and the features of the face that it seems alive.”¹³ And everyone recalls, I imagine, Walter Pater's description of the portrait as “beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.”¹⁴ Pater's lyricism may carry him well beyond Vasari's clumsy enthusiasm, but the focus of his praise remains the same.

The Mona Lisa, the most celebrated work of pictorial realism in the history of the visual arts, painted by the greatest of the visual explorers, may be taken as Leonardo's proof that painting is superior to poetry and that the eye is the noblest of the five senses. It triumphantly answers his question “what is there which is not accomplished by the eye?” Later in this essay I want to look more critically at this accomplishment and to suggest another possible answer to this question. But for now we can leave Leonardo in his glory and turn to Shakespeare to see how this great poet both shares and qualifies Leonardo's appreciation for and reliance on visual knowledge of the world.

II

Shakespeare left us no “treatises” setting forth his thoughts on the relative merits of poets and painters as agents of knowledge about reality, but it is clear that he felt closely implicated in the mimetic program of the visual arts. After all, it's his Hamlet (that Mona Lisa of the dramatic arts) who enunciates the proposition that “the purpose of playing … is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own features, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (III.ii.19-23). And in the marvelous mirror of Shakespeare's art we find images of human nature so carefully observed and so precisely delineated that they seem to live independently of the scripts that contain them: Shylock, Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra—one could swear, a Vasari would say, that the pulses were beating. Indeed, the history of commentary on Shakespeare is not unlike that on Leonardo in its fascination with lifelike representations. “This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare,” Samuel Johnson definitively proclaims, “that his drama is the mirror of life … for there is a vigilance of observation and accuracy of distinction here which books and precepts cannot confer.”¹⁵ We could be hearing Vasari or Goethe speaking in praise of Leonardo's art.

Johnson concentrates attention primarily on Shakespeare's representations of human nature, but that same “vigilance of observation and accuracy of distinction” is equally present in Shakespeare's depictions of the animal and physical worlds. For example, consider the dramatist's almost Leonardosque fascination with the subtle contrast of light and darkness in the words he gives the Ghost in Act One of Hamlet as hints of the approaching dawn compel him to leave his son:

                                                            Fare thee well at once.
The glowworm shows the matin to be near
And gins to pale his uneffectual fire.
Adieu, adieu, adieu.

(I.v.88-91)

The fading spark of the firefly against the receding night sky allows Shakespeare to capture that imperceptible moment of transition when darkness with its ghostly visitors and supernatural powers, gives way to light. An even more startling effect occurs when Shakespeare fixes his eye on that opposite moment when evening light flickers out into an ominously encroaching darkness. For instance, here is what Macbeth sees as he watches the blackness fall that will cover, he hopes, his arranged murder of Banquo:

                                                            Light thickens, and the crow
Makes wing to th'rooky wood.
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
Whiles night's black agents to their preys to rouse.

(III.ii.50-3)

Here the eye is carried forward into the gathering darkness by the slow drowsy flight of the crow, whose disappearance into the “rooky wood” marks the extinction of the field of vision itself with its moral controls. The last vestiges of light actually seem to thicken and curdle in futile defense against the enveloping gloom.¹⁶ All students of Shakespeare know how much he loves to situate his actions on these precisely observed thresholds of experience. We are convinced by the “vigilance of observation” that he could not have taken these glowworms and crows from any handbooks on imagery—he had to have seen them directly. In such instances Shakespeare reveals a capacity for visual particularity matched only by Leonardo; and like Leonardo, that particularity results from his curiosity and responsiveness to the phenomenal world around him.

Shakespeare also shares with the great Italian painters a keen interest in problems of perspective. The lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream, looking back at the bewildering experiences they have passed through in Athens' woods, declare, “These things seem small and undistinguishable, / Like far-off mountains turned into clouds” (IV.i.186-7). And when Imogen in Cymbeline hears a report of her banished husband's gradual disappearance from view as he sailed away from England, she describes how she would have watched his departure:

I would have broke mine eyestrings, cracked them but
To look upon him till the diminution
Of Space had pointed him sharp as my needle;
Nay, followed him till he had melted from
The smallness of a gnat to air, and then
Have turned mine eyes and wept.

(I.iii.17-22)

One might almost think these lovers had been preparing for their roles by reading Leonardo's instructions on perspective. But certainly the most fully developed instance of Shakespeare's fascination with “the diminution of space” occurs in King Lear—a play about diminution in all its forms. I have in mind that moment in Act Four when Edgar positions his blinded father at what he pretends is the top of Dover Cliff and then describes the precipitious view:

Come on, sir; here's the place. Stand still. How fearful
And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beatles. Halfway down
Hangs one that gathers sampire—dreadful trade;
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
The fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark
Diminished to her cock; her cock a buoy
Almost too small for sight … I'll look no more,
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.

(IV.vi.11-24)

In addition to the clarity of vision and the sense of precise and distanced physical detail, notice how Edgar's word-painting firmly controls a perspective in which crows in “the midway air” shrink to beatles, the sampire-gatherer “halfway down” foreshortens to a head, and the fishermen “upon the beach” diminish to mice. The gaze sweeps downward from cliff edge to precariously hanging sampire-gatherer to beach to tall anchoring bark and its minute cock to the shapeless expanse of the sea beyond the vanishing point of the buoy, creating in the viewer an overpowering sensation of vertigo. Edgar's ruse is fraught with moral complexities, but his perspectival organization of imagined space is a tour de force worthy of Leonardo.

Given Shakespeare's interest in visual particularity and problems of perspective, it's not surprising to find many references to painters in his plays. In every instance, the assumption is that the goal of painters is to create lifelike images, and the best are those who come closest to this ideal. We find no mention of Leonardo, of course; but in Act Five of The Winter's Tale we do hear of “that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape” (V.ii.91-4). When Leontes sees what he thinks is an example of Romano's work—a painted statue of his dead wife—he is astonished by its lifelikeness. “What was he that did it,” he exclaims:

                                                            See, my lord,
Would you not deem it breathed? and that those veins
Did verily bear blood? …
The fixture of her eye has motion in't,
As we are mocked with art.

(V.iii.64-8)

This miraculous artwork is actually Leontes' wife, returned to him after sixteen years of supposed death. But that rare master of lifelike paintings makes nameless contributions to several other Shakespearean plays, always creating in his viewers the same amazed response. In The Merchant of Venice, for example, when Bassanio discovers Portia's portrait in the lead casket, he remarks, “Fair Portia's counterfeit! What demigod / Hath come so near creation?” (III.ii. 115-6). And in the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew the befuddled Christopher Sly is tempted to lecherousness by the sight of realistic Ovidian paintings. “Dost thou love pictures?,” his tempters ask:

We'll show thee Io as she was a maid
And how she was beguiled and surprised,
As lively painted as the deed was done.
Or Daphne roaming through a thorny wood,
Scratching her legs that one shall swear she bleeds.

(Ind.ii.47-56)

But such references to the mimetic skill of the painter reaches its fullest development in Timon of Athens where the play opens with a discussion between a poet and a painter about the relative merits of their crafts. The poet is quite impressed with a portrait of Timon that the painter has done:

                                                            Admirable. How this grace
Speaks his own standing! What mental power
This eye shoots forth! How big imagination
Moves in this lip! To th'dumbness of the gesture
One might interpret.

(I.i.30-4)

“It is a pretty mocking of the life,” the proud painter confesses. But all the painters in Shakespeare's plays, from first to last, elicit from their audiences this same admiration for verisimilitude in portraiture. That they express their appreciation in terms that recall Vasari's praise of the Mona Lisa suggests the degree to which Shakespeare and Leonardo share basic assumptions about the role of vision in artmaking.

III

Why, then, does Shakespeare not also share Leonardo's conviction of the supremacy of sight in a hierarchy of senses? Why can't he, too, find the eye a fully sufficient and reliable instrument through which to know and possibly master the world? To Leonardo's question “what is there which is not accomplished by the eye?,” why does Shakespeare answer that “a man may see how this world goes with no eyes?” To raise these questions is to confront sharp differences in the world-views of these two men, and it is these differences I now want to explore in more detail.

One certainly cannot accuse Shakespeare of lacking appreciation for the eye. It is referred to in Troilus and Cressida as “the most pure spirit of sense” (III.iii. 106) and in King Lear as “the most precious square of sense” (I.i.74). In Love's Labor's Lost we are told that “a lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind” (IV.iii.329) and in Richard II we hear of how the King's “eye, / As bright as is the eagle's, lightens forth / Controlling majesty” (III.iii.68-70). “If you will, cut out my tongue,” Arthur tells his tormentor in King John, “So I may keep mine eyes. O, spare mine eyes” (IV.i.101-3). As Arthur's dilemma shows, when Shakespeare wants to dramatize the most extreme degree of human depravity he tends to think of an assault on the eyes. Surely nothing is more shudderingly awful in Shakespeare than that moment in King Lear when Cornwall snarls “out, vile jelly” as he crushes Gloucester's eyeball. “The extrusion of Gloucester's eyes,” Johnson states uncategorically, “is an act too horrid to be endured in dramatic exhibition.”¹⁷ If this is true it is so because Shakespeare associates the visual faculty with the moral faculty, so that Cornwall's attack on the old man's eyes strikes us as a direct attack on the very principle of morality itself. Perhaps nowhere in the plays is this conjunction of vision and morality more clear than in Macbeth, where evil is simply impossible without first blinding the eye. Invocations of darkness must precede all acts of violence, as in this chant by Macbeth just before his planned murder of Banquo:

                                                                                Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale.

(III.ii.46-50)

In effect, Macbeth must become his own Cornwall and engage in self-mutilation in order to attack his victims. Staring at his bloody hands after his murder of King Duncan, he exclaims, “What hands are here? / Ha! they pluck out mine eyes” (II.ii.58-9). His bloody hands must remain invisible to his tender eyes if Macbeth is to succeed in annihilating the great bond that maintains his essential humanity.

This emphasis on the moral dimension of sight is what distinguishes Shakespeare's celebration of the eye from Leonardo's. For Shakespeare, the primary function of the eyes is not the scientific scrutiny of the phenomenal world, but rather the acknowledgement and expression of essential human relationships. Thus, the most characteristic use of the eyes in the tragedies is to weep for the misfortunes of others. In his most lucid moment Macbeth imagines that “the sightless couriers of the air, / Shall blow the horrid deed [of Duncan's murder] in every eye / That tears shall drown the wind” (I.vii.23-5). “I know thee well enough,” Lear says to blind Gloucester during their fourth act meeting, “If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes” (IV.vi.173-4). After his murder of Desdemona, Othello, his mind clear for the first time, describes himself as “one whose subdued eyes, … / Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees / Their medicinable gum” (V.ii.348-51). In Hamlet and Measure for Measure even the supposedly pitiless gods—those “burning eyes of heaven”—are imagined as weeping as they observe the tragic human scene. Clear-sightedness itself is never enough in Shakespearean tragedy; it must also be informed by feeling and compassion. Perception comes through sorrow, and often those who see most clearly are those, like Cordelia and Miranda, whose eyes are blurred with tears.

Conversely, Shakespeare is always critical of the sort of person described by Gloucester “that will not see / Because he does not feel” (IV.i.68-9). Perhaps our best analysis of the personality that prides itself on its powers of unfeeling observation comes in Julius Caesar's famous characterization of Cassius. “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,” Caesar tells Antony:

                                                                                He reads much,
He is a great observer, and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men.

(I.ii.201-3)

Shakespeare allows Cassius to suffer the same misfortune that usually overtakes his “great observers.” Near the end of the play he makes a devastating visual mistake and commits suicide after confessing “My sight was ever thick” (V.iii.21). The most hopeless souls in the Shakespearean universe are those who think they have purged their sight of emotional coloring and can look dispassionately on the human scene: Richard of Gloucester, Shylock, Jacques, Iago, Goneril and Regan, Lady Macbeth. These characters survey the immediate world with “a lean and hungry look” and although they are shrewd observers of human behavior, they always miss the spirit that valorizes it—like Cassius, they “misconstrue everything.” “Give me the daggers,” Lady Macbeth tells her fearful husband, “The sleeping and the dead / Are but as pictures. 'Tis the eye of childhood / That fears a painted devil” (II.ii.52-4). Yet this morally liberated observer is reduced to a pathetic sleep-walker before the play is over: “You see her eyes are open,” her Doctor says. “Ay, but their sense are shut” (V.i.22-3), a Gentlewoman answers. Lady Macbeth's initial tone of confident observation is shared by Shakespeare's most heartless villains. “I have looked upon the world for four times seven years,” Iago brags, “and since I could distinguish betwixt a benefit and an injury, I never found man that knew how to love himself” (I.iii.311-4). “You see how full of changes [our father's] age is,” Goneril tells Regan, “The observation we have made of it hath not been little” (I.i.288-90). Such people measure the depth of their potential inhumanity by their capacity to make these clear-eyed and rational observations. This is so everywhere in Shakespeare.¹⁸

Despite his tremendous powers of observation and representation, Shakespeare is highly critical throughout his work of those who rely too exclusively upon the evidence of sight. He finally cannot endorse the concept of the hierarchy of the senses or accept the superiority of the eye. His engagement in the world around him is simply too sensually complex to be contained within such reductive categories. He does not deny that the eye is a most precious organ; but he knows that sight is a distancing sense that requires a degree of disengagement and withdrawal—a sacrifice for which the observer is partially compensated by both a clearer image of the world and the promise of greater control over it.¹⁹ For Leonardo, if not for Shakespeare, such compensation is sufficient. In this regard, as in many others, Leonardo is more akin to Francis Bacon than to Shakespeare. Bacon's program to bring nature under man's control, like Leonardo's, depends entirely on an interplay of visual accuracy and scientific objectivity. “It all depends,” Bacon writes in The Great Instauration, “on keeping the eye steadily fixed upon the facts of nature and so receiving their images simply as they are. For God forbid that we should give out a dream of our imagination for a pattern of the world.”²⁰ Shakespeare's engagement with the world is more dynamic than this, more reciprocal, and, for this reason, far more erotic. His dramas do not arise out of a Faustian desire for knowledge and mastery of the world, but from a desire for a full and fruitful participation in it. Indeed, he is not afraid to “give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world,” since he knows that “dream” is an integral part of that pattern. His creative stance, finally, is like that of his lovers who seek consummation—and love, as Helena explains in A Midsummer Night's Dream, “Looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind” (I.i.233-4).

IV

I want to conclude by returning for a final look at Leonardo, and in order to underscore the essential difference between him and Shakespeare I will risk displeasure by focussing on some of the less endearing aspects of his character. In particular, I want to direct attention to that quality in his life and work which can be subsumed within that famous aphorism he wrote in the Codice Atlantica: “Intellectual passion drives out sensuality” (66).²¹ To few people is this cliché of scholarship more applicable than to Leonardo; and this is so, I suggest, because his “intellectual passion” finds its fulfillment almost exclusively in the eye. The word “love” appears very rarely in his writings, and when it does it never refers to the love of one person for another.²² Even the act of sexual intercourse is repugnant to him. “The act of procreation,” he writes in an oft-quoted passage, “and the members employed therein are so repulsive that if it were not for the beauty of the faces, and the adornment of the actors, and the pent-up impulses, nature would lose the human species” (97). For me, the operative word in this passage occurs in the phrase “the adornment of the actors,” where the term “actors” emphasizes Leonardo's position as a spectator observing a particularly ludicrous scene from the human comedy. Such a detached stance encourages a rather harsh view of human behavior, and one may think in this regard of his famous sketches of grotesque heads and of his frequent misanthropic comments on the appetitive nature of his fellow man: “Some there are who are nothing else than a passage for food and augmentors of excrement and fillers of privies” (80).

We find in Leonardo's character an undeniable strain of emotional remoteness and general solitariness. “Above all, he writes, “the observer should keep his mind as clear as the surface of a mirror” (48), and “the painter or designer ought to be solitary.” “If you are all alone,” he explains, “you belong entirely to yourself. But if you are with even one companion, you belong only half to yourself, and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight” (49). Leonardo seems to have found this advice easy to follow, for although he spent his entire lifetime among the most fascinating figures of the Italian Renaissance—Verrocchio, Bramante, Machiavelli, Rafael, Michelangelo, Caesare Borgia, Pope Julius II—one searches in vain through his manuscripts for any hint of his feelings for them. Biographers have also pointed out the rather disturbing ease with which he could switch his loyalty from Medici to Sforza to Borgia to Louis XII to Pope Julius II to Francis I—but I suspect loyalty was never really a part of his relationship with these patrons. Indeed, he must have observed their political and military activities with the same curiosity and fundamental detachment he brought to the study of hydraulics or human sexuality. Vasari tells a fascinating anecdote about Leonardo which nicely illustrates his sense of himself in relation to the crowded world around him:

Leonardo used to get the intestines of a bull scraped completely free of their fat, cleaned and made so fine that they could be compressed into the palm of one hand; then he would fix one end of them to a pair of bellows lying in another room, and when they were inflated they filled the room in which they were and forced anyone standing there to retreat into a corner. Thus he could expand this translucent and airy stuff to fill a large space after occupying a little, and he compared it to genius.²³

Leonardo's genius expresses itself by crowding out the immediacy of the human world, creating for it a special place of observation but leaving him in lonely isolation. Another anecdote, this one by Giovanni Paulo Lomazzo, gives us an even more startling picture of Leonardo. “They also say,” Lomazzo reports, “that he took great delight in going to see the gestures of the condemned being led to punishment, in order to observe those raised eyebrows and those expressions of the eyes and of life.”²⁴ For the solitary observer who keeps his mind as clear as the surface of a mirror, such emotional remoteness is possible.

The breadth, the originality, the quality of Leonardo's achievements in art and science are, of course, truly remarkable. He deserves his reputation as the “universal man” par excellence of the Renaissance. But the knowledge and pleasure he gives us, wonderful as they are, must compensate for what he withheld from the world. This strange and complex man, this “Hamlet of art history” as Clark calls him,²⁵ was unencumbered by the usual burden of human and cultural obligations. The degree of intellectual freedom Leonardo cultivated has been summarized in its most extreme form by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers. “He was committed to neither family, home, nor country,

He was a cosmopolitan, who lived where he was paid to live, without allegiance or loyalty. … He took no interest in human institutions, in law, politics, or history, and identified himself with no country; problems of ethics and religion interested him no more than those of politics. … He did not take a hand in the affairs of the world. He had no inclination to seek a position of power. Ambition, jealousy, desire for success seems to have been alien to him. He cared nothing for public life. … Despite his many acquaintances and admirers, he was solitary all his life, but we have no indication that he suffered from his solitude. His self-reliance was unshakable. … He was impervious to human desire and passion, and the consolations of faith.²⁶

There is some overstatement in this characterization, of course; but Jaspers captures the essence of Leonardo's singular personality. In his pursuit of knowledge he relied completely on himself—on his powers of observation and representation—and he was content to live without communication of the kind which enables a man to locate himself in relation to others. Leonardo was capable of sustaining throughout his life a kind of radical disengagement which may appear troubling in its absoluteness. Later in his life, as the accumulated weight and variety of his scientific observations passed out of his control, he seems to have withdrawn further into a melancholy and mysterious solitude. From this final position of detachment, in a series of shocking drawings, he contemplated the cataclysmic annihilation of the world he had so carefully observed.

Shakespeare and Leonardo embody two world-views between which, finally, there is not much contact. “Some men are wanderers all through their lives,” Jaspers writes: “Seemingly detached from other men, wishing only to see the world and reproduce what they have seen, they perceive with their whole being what others learn to see through them. The fact that they do our work for us and allow us to look on to the best of our ability gives them the privilege of standing aside while other men act and struggle and change the world of human affairs.”²⁷ Such a man was Leonardo. Some men situate themselves in one place, and through a process of identification with the dense immediacy of life about them, achieve a depth of understanding we accept as the measure of authentic living. Like Gloucester, they “see the world feelingly.” The fact that they speak from the very center of human interaction and struggle gives them the privilege of disregarding the observed world of precise measurement. Such a man was Shakespeare. We are fortunate to share the special wisdom of both.

Notes

1. All quotations from Leonardo's Treatise on Painting are taken from Treatise on Painting, ed. and trans. Philip A. McMahon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 2 vols.

2. All quotations from the plays are taken from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969).

3. “All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses, for even apart from their usefulness, they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. … We prefer seeing to everything else.” The Works of Aristotle, ed. J. A. Smith, W. D. Ross, et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928-1931), I.I.980a. An excellent discussion of general attitudes towards sight in the Renaissance and Leonardo's response to them can be found in V. P. Zubov, Leonardo da Vinci, trans. David H. Kraus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). See the chapter “The Eye, Sovereign of the Senses,” pp. 124-68.

4. The Architecture of Leon Battista Alberti in Ten Books, trans. James Leoni (London: Thomas Edlin, 1726), bk. 2, pp. 19-20. Quoted by Zubov, p. 125.

5. The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. M. Domandi (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 157.

6. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 83.

7. The Western Intellectual Tradition: From Leonardo to Hegel (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 12.

8. Leonardo da Vinci, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 159.

9. Quoted by Cassirer in The Individual and the Cosmos, p. 158. For parallels between Leonardo and Goethe see Zubov, pp. 161-63.

10. Bronowski, p. 12.

11. Clark, p. 121.

12. Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 266.

13. Andre Felibien, as reported by Roy McMullen in Mona Lisa: The Picture and The Myth (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977), p. 158.

14. The Renaissance (New York: Mentor Books, 1959), p. 90. Pater's remarks on the Mona Lisa first appeared in an article in the Forthrightly Review for 1869.

15. Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Walter Raleigh (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 23.

16. For a fuller analysis of this passage see William Empson, 7 Types of Ambiguity, 2d. ed. (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), pp. 18-20.

17. Johnson, p. 196.

18. If the most hopeless souls in Shakespeare are those loveless individuals who step back in order to see more clearly, the happiest are those who step forward to accept the gift of love in spite of the evidence of the eyes. Berowne in Love's Labor's Lost sees that Rosaline is “a whitely wanton with a velvet brow, / With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes” (III.i.185-6), but he eagerly accepts her in marriage. Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing declares that if ever he fall in love “pick out mine eyes with a ballad-maker's pen and hang me up at the door of a brothel house for the sign of blind Cupid (I.i.223-5), but he succumbs instantly to the suggestion of Beatrice's love. And Sebastian in Twelfth Night, although mystified when Olivia, a total stranger to him, offers herself in marriage, nevertheless accepts saying “I am ready to distrust mine eyes / And wrangle with my reason” (IV.iii.13-4). From The Comedy of Errors to The Winter's Tale a precondition to happiness in Shakespearean comedy is a willingness to distrust the eyes in exchange for a greater more mysterious form of wisdom.

19. See the excellent essay, “The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses,” in Hans Jonas' The Phenomenology of Life (New York: Delta Books, 1966), pp. 135-56.

20. Francis Bacon: A Selection of His Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft (Indianapolis: The Odyssey Press, 1965), p. 323.

21. All quotations from Leonardo's notebooks are taken from The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, arr. and trans. Edward MacCurdy (New York: George Braziller, 1958), 2 vols.

22. In MacCurdy's “Index” the word “love” has only five entries. See p. 1223.

23. Vasari, p. 269.

24. Trattato dell'arte della pictura (1584).

25. Clark, p. 159.

26. Three Essays: Leonardo, Descartes, Max Weber, tran. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1964), pp. 51-2.

27. Jaspers, p. 57.