Leonardo's Eye

James Ackerman, my professor and lifelong mentor opens his study titled “Leonardo’s Eye” (Journal of the Warburg and Coutault Institute, Vol. 41, 1978), with the quotation from Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato, par. 24: 

The eye whereby the beauty of the world is reflected by beholders is of such excellence that whoso consents to its loss deprives himself of the representation of all the works of nature.  Because we can see these things owing to our eyes the soul is content to stay imprisoned in the human body; for through eyes all the various things of nature are represented to the soul.  Who loses his eyes leaves his soul in a dark prison without hope of ever again seeing the sun, light of all the world; and how many there are to whom the darkness of night is hateful though it is of but short duration; what would they do if such darkness were to be their companion for life? 

This celebration of the eye and the sense of sight has always been my credo, and I had this wonderful Leonardo quote posted on my office door for students to read and think about.  In the modern world education is disproportionately slanted toward verbal discipline along with scientific thinking, and the training of the eye is accordingly sorely neglected from the grade school through the college.  Ability to write and write well is identified with capacity to think solidly and clearly, and tests in education are almost exclusively in the mastery of the verbal skill, aside from the quantifying sciences.   

If learning to see is woefully neglected in our education, it is also somehow wrongly assumed that seeing is a natural act which does not require training.  You’ve got eyes to see, and they see.  So, many suspect that learning to see is a tautology.  Intelligence, for this reason, is thought to be verbal or scientific, and visual intelligence is not adequately understood.  In the common expression “more art than science,” the implication is that science promises precision and therefore reliable truth, while art is intuitive and therefore haphazard, a matter of hit or miss. 

In Europe before the Gutenberg revolution that brought printed words to a larger segment of the population, literacy was restricted to a small minority of the population.  Generally illiterate, people for the most part had to rely on their sense of sight to understand the world in which they lived and negotiate with it.  This is still true today in less literate cultures around the globe; in those cultures it is the use of the eye that is given primacy and is heavily relied on.  I know how this is; as an immigrant student, even though I was well enough prepared with the language, there were plenty of occasions when I had to read a message by its semiotic signs — visual cues — rather than the words uttered.  This is what we experience when we travel in a foreign land where we don’t know enough of the language spoken there.  Sight seeing is, indeed, seeing sights and scenes for meaning — not just the body language of the interlocutors we try to converse with but all the details of the person as well as the space around the person extending to the townscape and all the objects in it, more than the ‘natives’ and the visitors equipped with the language.  We look more and we see more and we understand more.