Renaissance Men
Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Strain between Scientific Observation and Religion
Before Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti, art was marked by disproportionate, stilted figures, artistically granular scenery, but more critically it had failed to succinctly express the burgeoning ethos of the Italian Renaissance–humanism. With eloquence and clarity, the figures consolidated this intellectual basis of the Italian Renaissance’s literature, rhetoric, poetry, and moral philosophy most notably with their art which would come to define the period.
Their life works — perhaps more than contemporaries — conveyed not only expression and intensity of the human mind and body but also the growth in tensions between science and religion. This development manifests with Da Vinci’s Vincian notebooks and life experiences, and Buonarroti’s lyrical poems, paintings, and inner turmoil.
It is no secret that Da Vinci was a paragon who derided his contemporaries for not reaching his associations on art with philosophy, or humanism with naturalistic science and observation. Da Vinci beginning with The Baptism of Christ in 1475 and then with works like The Virgin on the Rocks in 1485, humanized the subjects depicted and added depth to the human condition as displayed in art, and truly captured the ideology that moves history into the modern era. Selections from his notebooks suggest art is not merely historical paintings of Greek or Christian mythology, but is “intellectual.”
“[Art] brings philosophy and subtle speculation to the consideration of the nature of all forms.”[1] Da Vinci condemned people who resist human potential for superstitious reasons as “nothing more than a passage for food and augmentors of excrement and fillers of privies.”[2] And just as humanism is to some degree at odds with religious superstition and dogmatic devotion, Da Vinci advanced the notion of expression, achievement, and pursuit of liberty by observation of beauty which was partly at odds with the larger monolithic religious institutions of the time regardless of whether he knew it.
This nuance is interesting considering the support during the era of catholic officials like Pope Pius II, Pope Sixtus IV, Pope Leo X on humanism, and the church’s initial patronage of sciences. Yet the cause of sages like Da Vinci was in controversially stressing human beings over authority and the agency of the individual over an institution–antithetical to the religious institution’s desires to reduce man to mere sinful mortals.
Furthermore, scientific inquiry descending from natural observation threatened religious certainties, as during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, fear of heretics spreading messages that contradicted the Bible dominated the Catholic Church.
Da Vinci’s biographer Rosci notes, “[Leonardo] adopted an empirical approach to every thought, opinion, and action and accepted no truth unless verified or verifiable, whether related to natural phenomena, human behavior, or social activities.”[3] This was a notion prevalent in the reformation and subsequent attacks on the church through secular forms of humanism. His scientific inquiries are not only evident in paintings like Annunciation or studies like the Vitruvian man, but also in his inventive skill and discoveries.
He drew plans for lathes, pumps, war machines, helicopters, and also conceptualized concentrated solar power and a primitive theory of plate tectonics which convinced him the earth was older than scholasticism and the church agreed on. Scrutiny applied to the northern Italian Po River led him to conclude that it must have been flowing for 200,000 years to wash down the sediments forming its alluvial plain, Da Vinci wrote.
Moreover, his artistic dissection of human embryos radically altered the prevalent idea of the fetus as a perfectly formed miniature human being, purported by religious authorities and also classical authorities.
Likewise, the receding security of religious certainty with scientific and humanistic prowess flowing from the High Renaissance is found in the symbolism, poetry, life and detailed artwork of Michelangelo Buonarroti. He is an altogether notable figure in his own right, and considered perhaps the greatest artist to have ever lived, and more importantly along those philosophers at Lorenzo de Medici’s table emphasized humanism.
Just as Da Vinci’s figures of biblical importance were given palpable and expressive features, Buonarroti’s David is an early example of revered iconography contextualized and humanized from the artistic and intellectual perspective so markedly different from the medieval Gothic imagery. David scowls as not a character but a person, Pieta enlarges the emotion of the being rather than rigidly portray a famous scriptural motif. He wrote of that massive potential: “Even the best of artists can conceive no idea that a single block of marble will not contain.”[4]
In his Separation of Light from Darkness the artistic comments on the enduring opposition of scientific innovation and religion, imbedding the spinal cord and brain stem in God’s neck, and the optic nerves in his robe similar to something Da Vinci had done in 1487. Also neuroanatomists Suk and Tumargo among others suggest the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel done from 1508–1512 contrast religious symbols from the Christian Bible with scientific medical examinations of the human body, as if to suggest the stress and pull from religious institutions and scientific observations of which Buonarroti had made throughout his troubled life.[5]
Buonarroti was too a polymath, with a number of preoccupations, all of which were plagued by his internal self-introspection and depression–a primary tendency among the Renaissance humanists. Perhaps of those greatest a strains on his life came notoriously from his relationship with the Catholic Church and left self-portraits of himself being tortured throughout the commissioned frescoes for example as Saint Bartholomew’s body and Holofernes’ head. He referenced in one poem his life as struggling “across a stormy sea and in a fragile ship.”[6]
He himself struggled with the burden of living a life bound by dogmatic demands of a church and the intellectual pursuits of the mind and its art. As an architect, poet, engineer, and artist, his works led him to a more divergent spiritualism and away from the dominant religious institution as he found importance of bodily organs and their intelligence on scientific observation. Pope Paul IV interpreted his Last Judgment as blasphemy for asserting the capability of mankind to speak directly with a higher power and so his body was kept away from the Vatican grounds.
Oddly the hallmark of the Renaissance from contemporary study came rather late from the high Renaissance as the indispensable humanist voices of Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti poised the foundations behind the rebirth to reflect its ethos on a visual medium. And their lives and efforts like few others of the era conveyed not only expression and intensity of the mind and body but also intimate the tensions between science and religion, at a time when the monks Copernicus and Galileo were ridiculed for practicing scientific thoughtfulness.
Da Vinci and Buonarroti brandished “subtle considerations” as the former put it, which made the art of the Middle Ages obsolete and shaped the bridge of philosophy and art of the modern era, and paved for a tense dynamic between science and religion. Some have said that medieval thinkers philosophized on their knees. If so, these two Renaissance men were among influentials who may not have risen to full stature, but at least — with their humanism — approached upright position.
[1] Leonardo Da Vinci, cited in Julia Conaway Bondanella and Mark Musa, eds., The Italian Renaissance Reader (Meridian S), Reissue ed. (New York: Plume, 1987), 190.
[2] Leonardo Da Vinci, cited in Bondanella and Musa, eds., The Italian Renaissance Reader (New York: Plume, 1987), 193.
[3] Marco Rosci, The Hidden Leonardo (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co,U.S., 1977), 186.
[4] Michelangelo Buonarroti, cited in Bondanella and Musa, eds., The Italian Renaissance Reader (New York: Plume, 1987), 377.
[5] Ian Suk and Rafael J. Tamargo, “Concealed Neuroanatomy in Michelangelo’s Separation of Light From Darkness in the Sistine Chapel,” in Neurosurgery, Vol. 66, №5, pp. 851–861.
[6] Michelangelo Buonarroti, cited in Bondanella and Musa, eds., The Italian Renaissance Reader (New York: Plume, 1987), 379.
