LEONARDO, TRANSPARENT THINKER

Leonardo was a transparent thinker. He was not a transparent drawer. But his process supports all of the tenants of Transparent Drawing.

Why? Well, there seem to be two Leonardos. The first is the one who produced the most iconic pieces of Representational Spacetime ever produced. We looked at one of them at the page The Last Supper.

But he also had, as has been said many times by others, a scientific bent. In his scientific guise, he, quite simply, wanted to know how things work. And it is principally his drawings which provide testament to knowledge. His sketchbooks are icons of Western knowledge. Although the word transparent is not applied to his drawings at all, he was, at heart, a transparent drawer.

A few examples to justify my claim:
-He famously dissected mammals. He cut thru heads. He removed skin. He removed muscle layers to see what was under them. His primary drive was for knowledge of how something worked as a holistic form.

-His drawings of machines show exactly how they will work. Any sort of offsetting, or ratcheting, tightening, extending, etc., were shown on the drawings with sufficient clarity to knowledge how they work. Most of these machines could be built from one or two of these drawings.

-He did not use lines in paintings. Lines do not exist in nature. Forms do, but they are not defined by lines.

The point that cannot be stressed enough, is that he operated simultaneously as a scientist and an artist. Whatever he put down on a flat plane was based on his self taught path to knowledge of form. He could not have been as great as he was at representation without the working knowledge under the surface. So here we have the penultimate icon of the Renaissance, and he moved with unhindered fluidity between our current cultural poles of art and science.

Why have we separated the arts from the sciences? Why do we make a cultural line in the sand between those who are ‘good’ at science and those who are ‘good’ at art. For over 500 years, Leonardo’s model of how best to do all of this has been right in front of us. Yet we ignore this holistic, integrated mindset.

My drawing at the top of the page is a Form Projection based on Leonardo’s anatomical study drawing of the leg of a man and the leg of a dog. My drawing just above is a Drawing From Drawing, in which I move somewhat towards a resolved and working form.

It was fun to make an attempt to knowledge like Leonardo. And it was easy because of the similarity of the mindsets:
-rarely was there a plan or elevation
-while his drawings are dimensional, they are not slavishly isographic
-he drew to knowledge how things work

2019 marks 500 years since his death. And there is a worldwide celebration, with conferences, exhibitions, etc.