Abstract
In a previous paper in this volume I related Leonardo da Vinci’s theory and practice of the comic narrative to his well-known drawing of the Five Grotesques Heads at Windsor. I showed that attempts to explain definitively the cause of its characters’ laughter are futile because we only have a portion of the whole; the drawing has been cut at the right. Faced with such an open condition, we must be satisfied with an open, generic reading. And so, what we find in the drawing are characters in increasing degrees of laughter, from slight smiles to guffaws, responding to a stimulus (lost) at the right. This ability to show stages of laughter and to engender laughter in the beholder was one of Leonardo’s goals.2
A slight increase of sophistication will soon start us talking about the pattern of music and the rhythm of painting.
Northrop Frye1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957 ), p. 73.
Leonardo praised a work that was so infectious that “even the dead laugh.” See Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1600), a Milanese artist from whom we can know certain of Leonardo’s theories otherwise lost [Trattato dell’arte della pittura, diviso in VII libri, nei quail se contiene tutta la teoria e la pratica di essa pittura, Milan 1584, in Scritti sulle arti, 2 vols., Roberto Paolo Ciardi (ed.), Florence 1973–1974, vol. II, p. 315].
Ernst Gombrich, “Leonardo da Vinci’s Method of Analysis and Permutation: The Grotesque Heads,” The Heritage of Apelles ( Ithaca: Cornell, 1976 ), pp. 57–75.
See Donald Blais, Eutrapelia: the Dynamics of Divine and Human Playfulness, MA thesis, University of St. Michael’s College, 1993 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1996, no. AAC MM8460).
In late medieval theory, the fantasia is the faculty that has the ability to recombine images or parts of images in new compounds. See Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci, the Marvellous Works of Nature and of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1981).
As cited by Emanuel Winternitz, “Leonardo and Music,” in Ladislao Reti (ed.), The Unknown Leonardo (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974), pp. 110–135, esp. p. 112. See also his Leonardo as a Musician ( New Haven-London: Yale, 1982 ).
Giorgio Vasari, Lives, II, translated by A. B. Hinds, London, 1927. The earliest biographer of Leonardo, the Anonimo Gaddiano, wrote that “he was an elegant speaker and an outstanding performer on the lira and he was the teacher of Atalante Migliorotti, whom he instructed on this instrument” (Florence, Codice Magliabecchiano 17).
Winternitz, op. cit., esp. 114.
For the Paragone, see Claire J. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Paragone’ (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), an exhaustive treatment of the multitudinal problems associated with this “book.” I follow her interpretation here. Disputes about the relative merits of the arts of painting, sculpture, music and literature, were widespread by the mid-sixteenth century, at about the time when what we call Leonardo’s Paragone was compiled from his notes. The forty-six “chapters” known as the Paragone form the opening section of the Codex Vaticanus Urbinas Latinus 1270, the most complete version of Leonardo’s treatise of painting. Arguments about this lost Trattato are intricate; suffice it to say here that Leonardo may have written such a treatise, portions of which he would rework at later dates. Writings quoted in this study are, for the most part, from Mss A and B.N. 2038 (Ashburnham I) which were originally part of the same manuscript written in 1492. See Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo da Vinci on Painting: A Lost Book (Libro A) (London, 1965 ); facsimiles are in Les Manuscrits de Léonard de Vinci. Manuscrit A (etc.), C. Ravaisson-Mollien (ed.), 6 vols. ( Paris, Quantin: 1881–1891 ).
Farago, op. cit., p. 317.
Three major critics have noted the harmonic space of the Last Supper: Thomas Brachert, “A Musical Canon of Proportion of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper,” The Art Bulletin, XIII/4, 1971, pp$1461–466; Kemp, op. cit., pp$1196–198; John Onians, “On How to Listen to High Renaissance Art, ” Art History, 7 /4, December 1984, pp. 411–437.
Ibid., p. 93.
Paragone, ch. 32 in Farago, op. cit., p. 247.
Ibid., p. 245.
Ibid., p. 247.
Ibid., ch. 29, p. 241.
Ibid.
Ibid., ch. 22, pp. 245–247.
Ibid., ch. 30, p. 243. Leonardo naturally refers to the rules of perspective, but he also thought that all the visual world the artist paints should reflect the order of nature: even color, which in his day reflected the legacy of Aristotle’s organization. See Martin Kemp, The Science of Art (New Haven: Yale, 1990), p. 267.
Ibid., ch. 32, p. 249.
Lillian Schwartz, “Leonardo’s Mona Lisa,” Art & Antiques, January 1987, pp. 50–55, 80.
See Martin Kemp, “ ‘Ogni dipintore dipinge se’: a Neoplatonic Echo in Leonardo’s Art Theory,” in Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance, ed. Cecil Clough (New York, 1976 ), pp. 311–323.
Jean Paul Richter, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (New York: Dover, 1970), § 586.
The effusiveness of the initial lines add to the sense: “The heavens often rain down the richest gifts on human beings, naturally, but sometimes with lavish abundance bestow upon a single individual beauty, grace and ability, so that, whatever he does, every action is so divine that he distances all other men and clearly displays how his genius is the gift of God and not an acquirement of human art.” Vasari, op. cit.
Correspondence of 26 and 28 April 1498. Isabella wanted to compare Leonardo’s style with that of Giovanni Bellini. See Luca Beltrami, La vita e le opere in Leonardo da Vinci (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1919), nos. 88–89. The portrait is identified with the Lady with the Ermine (Krakow).
Frank Zöllner has discussed Leonardo’s anthropometrics in his “L’uomo vitruviano di Leonardo da Vinci,” Raccolta Vinciana XXVI, 1995, pp. 329–358.
See Martin Kemp, “ ‘Il concetto dell anima’ in Leonardo’s Early Skull Studies,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXXIV, 1971, pp. 115–134.
Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci, the Marvellous Work of Nature and of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1981), pp. 113–114.
This passage was probably written c. 1489–1490 when Mattias’ illegitimate son Johannes was engaged to Bianca Maria Sforza. See Farago, op. cit., p. 356, who notes that Leonardo probably developed the theme of the relation between musical and painterly proportionality before Pacioli came to Milan only in 1496.
Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Ash. I, 5 v and plans in B. 35 r and 57 v, as cited by Kemp, Leonardo, op. cit., pp. 111–112.
Farago, op. cit.
See Michael W. Kwakkelstein, “ ‘Teste di vecchi in buon numero,’ ” Raccolta Vinciana XXV, 1993, pp. 39–62.
Gian Paolo Lomazzo speaks of a libriciuolo of more than 50 laughing peasants by Leonardo in the possession of Aurelio Luini, Trattato dell’arte della pittura, diviso in VII libri, nei quail si contiene tutta la teoria e la pratica di essa pittura (Milan, 1584) in Scritti sulle arti, ed. Roberto Paolo Ciardi, 2 vols. (Florence: Marchi & Bertolli, 1973–1974), vol. II, p. 315.
See Gombrich, op. cit., who considered Leonardo’s participation in the arrangements some of “the most interesting problems [in Leonardo research] awaiting solution” (p. 66). Scholarly studies of Leonardo’s grotesques have burgeoned in the last years. See the following: Flavio Caroli, Leonardo Studi di fisiognomica, Milan, 1990. (This useful catalogue does not include most of the important copies of Leonardo’s drawings. These copies can provide information about the state of the originals.) Michael Kwakkelstein, Leonardo da Vinci as Physiognomist: Theory and Drawing Practice, Leiden 1994, divides the grotesques into categories, one of which is the comic. Many of the arguments for a blanket physiognomic reading for the grotesques are challenged in my forthcoming “Making the Dead Laugh,” Academia Leonardi Vinci. I deal with the problem of copies in “The Spencer Collection of Grotesques and Caricatures after Leonardo,” Arte Lombarda 1993/2–4, pp. 44–54, and in my Catalogue of the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci and his Circle in America, ed. Carlo Pedretti ( Florence: Giunti, 1993 ).
See Jane Roberts, “The Early History of the Collecting of Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci,” Leonardo & Venice ( Venice: Bompiani, 1992 ), pp. 155–178.
See, e.g. Ambrosiana F. 274 inf. 54, Luisa Cogliati Arano in Leonardo all’Ambrosiana ( Milan: Electa, 1982 ), pp. 120–121.
Aristotle, Poetics, Book V (translated by S. H. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, New York: Dover, 1955). B. W. Meijer thinks that most of the surviving types of Leonardo’s grotesques are either studies from life or free, imaginative exercises (“From Leonardo to Breugel: Comic Art in the Sixteenth Century Europe,” Word and Image 4, 1988, pp. 405–409, esp. 407). He showed that the genre of comic painting with popular scenes of the lower level existed on a monumental scale from the late fourteenth century onwards: it is thematically related to the ridicule and characterization of the comic theater (“Esempi del comico figurative nel rinasciment lombardo, ” Arte Lombarda 17, 1971, pp. 259–266 ).
Wylie Sypher, Comedy (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956), p. xiv.
Michael Jeffé, The Devonshire Collection of Italian Drawings. Venetian and North Italian Schools ( London: Phaidon, 1994 ), pp. 167–174.
Kemp, Leonardo, op. cit., p. 267.
Ernst Gombrich calls it a “frantic avoiding action, almost desperate struggles to get away from the compulsion of once more repeating the features of the `nut-cracker head’ ” (op. cit., p. 68). Michael Kwakkelstein entitles his first study “Leonardo da Vinci’s grotesque heads and the breaking of the physiognomic mould,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54, 1991, pp. 127–136. My point is that in order to break this mold Leonardo uses logic.
Such intricate cataloguing is necessary for the subtleties of most portraiture, but `of grotesque faces I need say nothing, because they are kept in mind without difficulty.“ Richter, op. cit., § 572. See Gombrich, op. cit., for illustration.
Kemp, Leonardo, p. 160.
Robertellus, Franciscus. In librum Aristotelis de arte poetica explicationes (Florence, 1548), as cited in Marvin Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964 ), p. 23.
Leonardo On Painting, ed. Martin Kemp, selected and translated by Kemp and Margaret Walker ( New Haven-London: Yale, 1989 ), p. 313.
Martin Kemp, “Leonardo da Vinci: Science and the Poetic Impulse,” Journal of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts 133, 1985, pp. 196–214, esp. 206–208 for the passages quoted in this paragraph.
Ibid., see also Kemp, Leonardo, op. cit., pp. 293–295, wherein Kemp points out that even in Leonardo’s late anatomies “What Leonardo personally achieved was to unite their [medieval mathematician] revered mathematics with his uniquely complex vision of organic structure.”
Gombrich, op. cit.,“.. curious paradox of these types [is that] passing them in review one cannot get rid of the feeling plus ça change, plus c’est le même chose.”
See Louisa Cogliati Arano, Disegni di Leonardo e della sua cerchia alle Gallerie dell’Addacemia, Venice ( Milan: Electa, 1980 ).
Michael Baxandall has shown that people in the fifteenth century were adept at reducing all sorts of information to a form of geometric proportion, and that the painter’s study of the proportions of the human body was “usually a quite primitive affair in its mathematics, compared with what the merchants were used to” [Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (London: Oxford, 1972), p. 99].
The greatly varied patterns of Islamic tiles are generated from a circle. The seeming variety of fractals is generated from a single source.
Lillian Schwartz, “The Art Historian’s Computer,” Scientific American, April 1994, pp. 106–111, esp. 110–111. For the drawings, see my Drawings in America, op. cit.
See my, Leonardo Drawings in America, no. 10.
No. 274 Inf. 14, 102 × 80 mm. See Louisa Cogliati Arano, Ambrosiana, op. cit., p. 99.
See Kenneth Clark and Carlo Pedretti, The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection... at Winds or Castle, 3 vols. ( London: Phaidon, 1968 ).
Farago, op. cit., pp. 217–219.
Formerly Chatsworth, now in the Woodner Family Collection, New York. See my Leonardo in America, op. cit., no. 11.
Judd David Hubert notes that “laughter may arise with the sudden awareness that we have lost touch with reality” [Moliere and the Comedy of the Intellect (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), p. 269]. The full statement in Kant is: “In everything that is to excite a lively convulsive laughter there must be something absurd (in which the understanding, herefore, can find no satisfaction). Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (London: Macmillan, 1892), Part I, Div. 1, 54.
Henri Bergson, Laughter, an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. C. Brereton and F. Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1991 ), p. 10.
The ludicrous always results in a saving in the expenditure of psychic energy not only is the joke expressed with brevity, but amusement is taken to be the most econom- ical response to the joke. In “innocent” jokes — jokes for their own sake — the techniques of the joke itself are a source of pleasure. Cf. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey [New York: Norton, 1963; first edition Der Witz und sein Bezehung zum Unbewussten (Leipzig and Vienna: Deuticke, 1905)], pp. 118–119.
Ernst Cassirer, Essay on Man ( New Haven: Yale ), 1944, p. 315.
Quoted b George Meredith, An Essa on Comedy in Sypher, op. cit., p. 4.
Bergson, op. cit., p. 25. He is of course speaking of the vast automation of the twentieth century and of the effect of movement in film.
Following Pedretti, Libro A, op. cit., Michael Kwakkelstein posits that Leonardo wrote a book on the expression of emotion, “moti mentali,” identifying it with a book on movement mentioned by Luca Pacioli in 1498 (“The Lost Book on ‘moti mentali,’’ ” Achademia Leonardi Vinci VI, 1993, p. 66). Pedretti had suggested the date 1500–1505. Determining a chronology of the grotesques would be helpful.
Bergson, op. cit., p. 5.
Farago, op. cit., ch. 21, p. 219.
Lomazzo, op. cit., p. 315.
These arguments were made in my previous essay in this volume.
Sypher, op. cit., p. xiii.
V. Madius and Bartolomeaeus Lombardus, In Aristotelis librum de poetica communes explanatione (Venice, 1550), Essay “De ridiculis” pp. 301–327, as cited by Herrick, op. cit., p. 23.
Farago, op. cit., ch. 13, p. 195.
See Farago, op. cit., pp. 76–77.
Ibid., p. 249.
See Walter L. Strauss, The Complete Drawings of Albrecht Dürer, vol. 5, Human Proportions (New York: Abraris, 1974), p. 2498, drawings of 1513.
Bergson, op. cit., p. 75.
That painter who has knowledge of the chords, muscles and tendons will know well in moving a limb which chord is the cause of its motion, and which muscle in swelling is the cause of the contraction of this chord,…. By these means he will become a varied and comprehensive demonstrator of the various muscles according to their various effects in the figure.“ BN 2038, 27 R; see Kemp/Walker, Leonardo on Painting, op. cit., p. 130.
Gombrich, op. cit., p. 58.
Kemp identifies Leonardo with Visconti’s “a painter.” (“Leonardo da Vinci: Science and the Poetic Impulse,” Journal of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts 133, 1985, pp. 196–214, esp. 199.)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Trutty-Coohill, P. (1998). Comic Rhythms in Leonardo da Vinci. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Enjoyment. Analecta Husserliana, vol 56. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1425-9_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1425-9_14
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4889-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-1425-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive