Renaissance Sketch:

The Half-Facetious Case against Leonardo

by Philip Thompson (1933-1993)

 

Out of his bed at the crack of dawn, the Florentine citizen rushes to the nearest piazza to get the art news.

Question: What did Michelangelo make yesterday?

Answer: Michelangelo make Moses!

Question: What did Leonardo make yesterday?

Answer: Leonardo make parsley!

 

Note

Michelangelo creates Moses while Leonardo imitates parsley. Michelangelo works in the medieval tradition of inspired invention, while Leonardo invents an art that skillfully imitates nature; Leonardo also invents an art for which Moses and parsley are equally important images; finally, Leonardo creates the mind for which parsley becomes an image immeasurably more significant than the image of Moses simply because it is an ever-contemporary fact of nature. 

Like all medieval art, Michelangelo's art--architecture, sculpture, fresco--is conceived as the form of the city; his theme is the divine calling of the city and his works are the translation of that calling into the city's actual body. For Leonardo painting is the occasional rejoicing in its own virtuosity of a genius better used in private and Faustian study; his notebook drawings serve the cause of a scientific penetration of nature for the sake of technical mastery. As a workman, his place is with any unregenerate secular city engaged in war and Saturnalian excess (fortifications, weapons, fireworks).

 

 

[Check out the collection of Philip Thompson's poems and prose, called Dusk and Dawn, at www.OneMindGoodPress.com.]