In the Light
of Leonardo da Vinci
orn in 1452, Leonardo lived in Milan from
1482 to 1499 and from 1506 to 1513. He died
in France five hundred years ago leaving the
world his paintings, his drawings, his scientific
and technical notes.In his manuscripts, the
notes regarding light are amazing.
For Leonardo, light behaves like the wind on a
wheat field, it bends the ears of wheat without
changing their position. He was the first to sense
the undulatory nature of light. And, observing
the waves, this was how Leonardo explained the
beauty of the sea in the sunlight: “The
innumerable semblances that form the
innumerable waves of the sea reflect the sun’s
rays that cross these waves, are responsible for
the continual and widespread splendour of the
surface of the sea” (Codex Arundel, f. 94 v).
Does light travel fast? For Leonardo, “the sun,
as soon as it appears in the East, immediately
moves with its rays to the West”, and the course
of the rays is shorter in nature, as he “always
appreciated the taste of simplicity and the ease
of Nature that does not do what cannot be
done, it does not utilize many things when
it can do so with few, and skilfully carries out
what we find difficult to figure out.”
Why is the sky light blue? Leonardo knows why.
The light blue colour comes from the atmosphere,
it depends, now we know, on the scattering
of light on particles in the atmosphere; Leonardo
reasons as if he already knew Lord Rayleigh’s
theory on the scattering of light, which was first
described three hundred years later.
“I say that the blueness we see in the
atmosphere is not intrinsic colour, but is caused
by warm vapour evaporated in minute and
insensible atoms on which the solar rays fall,
rendering them luminous against the infinite
darkness of the fiery sphere which lies beyond
and includes it” (Leicester Codex, also known
as the Hammer Codex).
LUCE pays homage to Leonardo
da Vinci on the occasion
of the celebrations for the 500th
anniversary of his death.
A short and precious story of light
as the protagonist of the studies
and observations underlying
the creations of the famous
Florentine master.
The author, Empio Malara,
curated the exhibition and the
book entitled Leonardo e le vie
d’acqua (Leonardo and the
waterways, 1984) and the volume
Leonardo, Vanvitelli e Bellotto
a Vaprio d’Adda (Leonardo,
Vanvitelli and Bellotto in Vaprio
d’Adda, 2005)
14
LUCE 328 / EPIFANIE DI LUCE
Leonardo is aware of the nobility of vision, due
to the faculty of the intellect: “The eye, through
which the beauty of the universe is reflected
by those who contemplate it, is so excellent
that whosoever may lose it cannot see the
representation of all the works of nature…
leaving the soul in a dark prison, where
all hope of seeing the sun, the light of the
whole world, is lost.”
In order to study light, he used a glass prism,
realizing that white is not a colour, but “has the
power of receiving all the other colours.”
Carlo Pedretti writes that Leonardo’s
observations regarding the topic of light
and optical physics and “his never ending
calculations, have not been interpreted
completely to date.” However, the greatest
expert on Leonardo points out that “his
marvellous drawings remain, characterized
by impeccable graphic purity.”
In fact, the drawings of the series from
darkness to light, the figures dancing in the
open throughout the passage from dark clouds
to bright sunlight, are graphically significant
as scientific observations.
Augusto Marinoni rightly states that painting,
in Leonardo, is science, as it is a mental state
before being a practical process. A concept that
was clearly expressed by Leonardo on painting,
“which brings philosophy and subtle speculation
to the consideration of the nature of all forms
– seas and plains, trees, animals, plants
and flowers – which are surrounded by shade
and light.”
“Take note as you portray things,” Leonardo
suggested with reference to the chiaroscuro
technique, “that among the shadows are
shadows of imperceptible darkness and shape…
What can be seen between light and shadow,
will prove to be more relevant than what is in
the light or in the shadows”.
This is a brilliant concept that finds its
application in Leonardo’s wonderful
masterpieces, first of all the “transitory
movement” (between a previous action and a
subsequent action), which is perfectly described
in a pictorial form, as Fabio Lopez noted, in the
Last Supper of S. Maria delle Grazie in Milan.
Among the infinite number of projects by
Leonardo, there are also the “night lights”,
lamps with more or less elaborate lenses, and
also a very beautiful table lamp whose intensity
can be adjusted, designed in Windsor sheet n.
12675v. Many lights are mentioned in the Atlantic
Codex (f. 368v-a) and in Codex Arundel (f. 283v),
which can all be dated between 1505 and 1507.
These show the object with the same
“perspective view” adopted for architectural
drawings, never subordinating functionality to
decoration, Carlo Pedretti states.
Leonardo on light has still to be discovered, five
hundred years after he was buried in Amboise
on May 2 nd , 1519.
9 – To be continued. For “Epiphanies of light”, to
date, the following short stories by Empio
Malara have been published in LUCE:
“Alessandro Manzoni, a creator of light” (n.317,
September 2016); “Herman Melville. Light that
invites us on a journey” (n.321, September 2017);
“Light and dark in the portrait of James Joyce
as a young man” (n.322, December 2017);
“Flashes and lights in Hemingway’s A Farewell
to Arms” (n.323, March 2018); “The artificial sun
in the novel The magic mountain by Thomas
Mann” (n.324, June 2018); “The irreverent and
irrational light in some texts by Carlo Emilio
Gadda” (n.325, September 2018). “Philip Roth’s
revealing lights in American Pastoral” (n.326,
December 2018); “Marcel Proust’s lighted
windows in the novel Swann’s Way” (n.327,
March 2019).
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