[NetBehaviour] A bonus extra about something that happened a very long time ago

[Max Herman]

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Web log 18
The Mindful Mona Lisa: Portrait of Experience
By Max Herman
Saturday, 09/12/2020
https://leonardo.info/blog/2020/09/12/the-mindful-mona-lisa-portrait-of-experience



As a lifelong pioneer across the arts and sciences, Leonardo took both risks and precautions when he traversed certain boundaries.

Understandably his fame and innovation gained him many detractors.  In his own defense against such adversaries he wrote:

“Do they know that my subjects are based on experience rather than the words of others? And experience has been the maestra of those who wrote well. And so, as maestra, I will acknowledge her and, in every case, I will give her as evidence."

Esperienza to Leonardo meant a union of scientific evidence and artistic creation, which through their development over time represented the very essence of the human soul.  He wrote that depictions of people should reveal “the purpose in their minds;” could the Mona Lisa be such a portrait of the philosophical ideal he personified as a woman and pledged always to honor?

Leonardo produced numerous allegorical images, some clearly labeled with the principles they illustrate and others not.  Since scientific inquiry and artistic freedom were sometimes persecuted in Leonardo’s time he would have had good reason not to label an allegory of Experience, leaving it a mystery or subtly weaving it into a work valued for other qualities.

His drawing A Woman in a Landscape has an allegorical feel, but is not labeled.  It is sometimes interpreted as a depiction of Matilda from Dante’s Purgatorio, who introduces the poet to that realm of the afterlife and helps to guide him out of it.  Yet there is no clear agreement and the subject remains a mystery.

I see in this drawing two important details: a small cascade of water in the left foreground (indicating a stream flowing from left to right then into the center of the background) and the outline of a single-arched bridge over the stream.  The image, drawn shortly after the completion of the Mona Lisa, thus shares potentially all of its elements with it: a winding stream or river, rocks and mountains, a distant lake or sea, flowing hair and dress, a direct gaze from a smiling solitary figure, pointing gestures, and a bridge symbolizing an important connection.

Dante, universally revered in Leonardo’s day, wrote “These two places [the eyes and smile] may be called, by way of a charming metaphor, the balconies of the lady who dwells in the edifice of the body, which is to say the soul, because here, though in veiled manner, she often reveals herself.”  The Mona Lisa's elusive and changing expression suits the dynamic and flowing nature of experience.

Leonardo produced multiple allegories of Envy, of which he wrote "Envy wounds with false accusations, that is with detraction, a thing which scares virtue," and that "Victory and truth are odious to her."  (Leonardo sometimes used “victory” as a pun on his own name “vinci.”)  It is therefore understandable why Leonardo would invest considerable time, talent, and energy into a defense of "sound experience -- the common mother of all the sciences and arts" against the destructive power of Envy.

Widely accepted symbolic interpretations in the Mona Lisa, such as of her garment and hair as images of water flow, set ample precedent for the philosophical allegory of Esperienza to unify the work on all levels, complement its aesthetic beauty and power, and sustain Leonardo’s most cherished values beyond his own time.

Next week: allostasis and metamorphoses

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Essay 18:  11/16/2020

As I seek upon my quest to resolve this book in such a way that the reader feels a sense of something worthwhile I arrived this morning, again after having arrived there yesterday evening, at the concept of home.

Home is one definition of the nature of meditation, and it has been suggested by such meditative authorities as Thich Naht Hahn [...].

Home is kind of what one is experiencing when sitting zazen or experiencing breath awareness.  You feel at peace and in place.  This is the point.  Now, the Sterling book on allostasis, the sterling one, makes clear that in order to find energy and nutrients for our stomachs, our shared stomach even, we humans had to roam.  We traveled much further and faster even on foot than the Neanderthal.  This makes sense, that our yen for mapping would be accompanied by a yen for motion.  If you notice one location you naturally seek another, and then to map the space between not just visually but bodily – what are the sensations of traversing the space, the ground.  Is there water to drink?  Is there food?  I don’t want to glamorize migration for its own sake, rather to allude to Sterling’s very sound science that we have this urge to ramble.

It could well be this urge that can lead us astray, and not trivially, as to Troy.  Odysseus was known as just a responsible farmer and householder type until his superiors got it in their heads, as they could not possibly have avoided given their natures and the nature around them, to go upon a visit to the land of stolen wives.  Odysseus was swept up in the mix, and had to learn to adapt in order to get back home.  All he ever really wanted, with a few exceptions, was to get back home.  Therefore we can say that the very first two magni opei of the Mediterranean were the going to Troy and the getting back home.

The going, one could say, was an unavoidable case of hybris caused by the entanglement of past events and their consequences, a knot of compulsions that had the Achaeans in its grip.  Later the return was simple Necessita.  The return changed Odysseus, the person left over after all the other deaths, the person on clean up.  He was the spirit of the aftermath one might suggest....


[Excerpt from Commedia Leonardi Vici, MS available in PDF form on request]


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Sterling article: "Allostasis: a model of predictive regulation," https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21684297/


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