[NetBehaviour] Outward Figures: Faustus, La Gioconda, Time's Gravity, and Us

[Max Herman]

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The recent call for ideas about how to use ad hoc means, possibly unpermitted ones, to survive or protect certain cherished values when formerly stable systems like the climate and the rule of law are collapsing reminded me of the Mona Lisa.

After all, just a few days or weeks ago someone protesting in favor of green, socially equitable food production threw pumpkin soup -- one of my favorite kinds -- onto the glass housing of the famous unexplained oil painting.  What does the painting mean?  No one knows, but everyone has heard of it and considers it maybe worth considering, so it becomes a soup-target: an emblem of art detached from real life, embalmed in a viewing coffin, fiddling while Rome burns with an almost vampire ambivalence, slaking a merciless thirst from its immortal frame, generating views and revenues.

But what if nothing could be further from the truth?

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After all, in Leonardo da Vinci's day, place, and professional milieu you could have your head chopped off for suggesting the earth revolved around the sun, for having a paramour of the wrong gender, or for disagreeing with any number of official doctrines.  That was their bread and butter; but ironically it had started getting a bit stale and rancid and was frankly at times inedible.  Yes science and art could, in certain circumstances, be disrespectful to the old ways, but economies and militaries could no longer keep up without them.  So artists and scientists, despite being caught in the old web of do's and don'ts, were given a bit more freedom a lot of the time, almost, you could say, on an ad hoc basis.

What if Leonardo's painting is the soup?  I asked a famous author recently if they knew of any connections between the word "experience" (or its other versions experientia, esperienza, experiencia, et cetera) and Epicureanism in the early modern time of which we speak.  (They recommended Montaigne's last essay, from 1590, titled "Of Experience," and unexpectedly, Marlowe's Faustus.)  "Experience" back then meant experiment, as in lab science, as well as artistic experience or acquired knowledge, in addition to just experience plain and simple.  Eventually it became a code word of sorts for the practice of art and science free from punishment by church and state after Epicurean ideas, and the most famous poem advocating for them "Of the Nature of Things" by Lucretius, were banned in Florence in 1517.  (Just two years later, Leonardo died after fleeing to France to protect his works from being as they say "hung out to dry.")  What would protest look like in that atmosphere?  One reasonable option would be to portray the basics of Epicurean science – actual science, that is, and actual art – using a code word or image like "experience" in some way that was subtle, sneaky, and nondescript enough not to provoke the censor yet appealing enough at a safe, lowly level to remain in circulation.  If indeed it was intended for such a design, given the portrait's history it can only be judged as truly universal and more or less perfectly constructed.

This figuration, like a shot of immunity, would of course require a later refiguration when the time was right and the real pandemic hit; or as Leonardo clued us in, "it is easier to resist evil at the beginning than at the end."  He had all the essential skills of a systems and network intellect, in science and art as well as engineering and politics, as shown by Fritjof Capra (author of The Tao of Physics and Learning from Leonardo), and he was pro-environment as argued by Nina Witoszek and many others.  Leonardo designed fortresses, projectiles, and trojan horses for real armies under duress; so might he not, seized by an Oppenheimerean sense of obligation, also have designed some for the disciples of peace?

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Certainly we know there is a strain of modernity radiating from domination, consumption, and extraction which has often ruled the roost since Early Modernity.  This is illustrated well enough by Machiavelli, for whom ends justify means and might makes right (which wasn't actually a new idea, going back to say Nero).  Leonardo described this line or current in "Of the Cruelty of Humanity," circa 1504, in which he foresees the devastation of nature by humans for sale and eating and to gain money for war – much like the phase we are in today sometimes.  Leonardo once painted a mural glorifying a victorious war in a government building for a paycheck and to remain in the good graces of the powerful; what if the small and indecipherable portrait, which he carried with him all his life for safekeeping, was a pumpkin soup for that same military mural and other assorted defense contracts?

Marlowe's Faustus has a speech almost word for word the same as "Of the Cruelty of Man," though written a bit later in 1604, and in that magisterial play on the ethical misuse of science and art we see the word "experience" twice.  (It only started being used in English circa 1380, as in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, being that tale's first word, tellingly after Chaucer visited Italy and befriended Botticelli and Petrarch who well understood Dante's use of "esperienza" in the way we are discussing in Paradiso I & II in 1320.)  Experience has two meanings in Marlowe's Faustus: the first is, how you get forbidden knowledge (of alchemy, magic, illusion, omniscient surveillance, energy-on-demand, and rapid transportation), i.e. the most common Renaissance use of "experience" in Pamela Smith's sense of "artisanal epistemology" percolated outward from the alchemical, textile, and metallurgic professions.  The second use of "experience" in Faustus is to describe that moment when you feel where the shoes pinches after you've committed irreversible destructive acts.  (See excerpts below.)  Cervantes' usage in Don Quixote differs in tone – "Experience is the mother of all Science" – but was written the same year as Marlowe's, and Bacon's Novum Organum uses "experience" over thirty times.  Given all this chatter a roughly contemporaneous painted version of the idea makes eminently plausible sense.

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Be that as it may, to see this message we have to recognize who it is talking to us, silently of course, through the Mona Lisa, La Gioconda, La Joconde, that is, Untitled #1.  It is a quiet realization, or recognition, like looking in the mirror in a way we tend to avoid but sense at some point that we no longer can.  Body language, facial expression, and hand gesture matter much, as do structural setting, background, and costume.  There might be a word too, but not a spoken one, that we must arrive at "on our own" as is often the case in conversation, using our own imagination, our own deciphering, sense perceptions, puzzle-assembling, and figurative intuition.  The portrait shows us no person until we see the figure emerge as if our own in a distant but approaching mirror.

What an easter egg it is too, that leaps out at us from this half-millennium of webs spun from words, pictures, songs, wars, castles, wrong turns, and suffering!  Not an atom of that time has been untouched by this mirror's gaze, nor have any of us escaped it if the truth be told, experience being the "water" so to speak that Leonardo accurately called "the vehicle of all life."  What a jack-in-the-box, yielding up its surprise only after five solid centuries of turning cranks in art and science, church and state, history, politics, philosophy, right and wrong, and above all error!

Experience it if you will, or if you won't; you have and don't have a choice.  The readiness is all!  🙂

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https://www.gutenberg.org/files/779/779-h/779-h.htm (The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus)

https://artflsrv03.uchicago.edu/philologic4/montessaisvilley/navigate/1/5/14/ (Montaigne's "De L'Experience" in French)

https://www.wordsandquotes.com/text/the-cruelty-of-man-leonardo-da-vinci

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci

https://history.columbia.edu/person/pamela-h-smith/

https://www.quantamagazine.org/swirling-forces-crushing-pressures-measured-in-the-proton-20240314/

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/45988/pg45988-images.html  Novum Organum link

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These metaphysics of magicians,
     And necromantic books are heavenly;
     Lines, circles, scenes, letters, and characters;
     Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.
     O, what a world of profit and delight,
     Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,
     Is promis’d to the studious artizan!
     All things that move between the quiet poles
     Shall be at my command:  emperors and kings
     Are but obeyed in their several provinces,
     Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds;
     But his dominion that exceeds in this,
     Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man;
     A sound magician is a mighty god:
     Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity.

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FAUSTUS. How am I glutted with conceit of this!
     Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,
     Resolve me of all ambiguities,
     Perform what desperate enterprise I will?
     I’ll have them fly to India for gold,
     Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
     And search all corners of the new-found world
     For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;
     I’ll have them read me strange philosophy,
     And tell the secrets of all foreign kings;
     I’ll have them wall all Germany with brass,
     And make swift Rhine circle fair Wertenberg;
     I’ll have them fill the public schools with silk,
     Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad;
     I’ll levy soldiers with the coin they bring,
     And chase the Prince of Parma from our land,
     And reign sole king of all the provinces;
     Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of war,
     Than was the fiery keel at Antwerp’s bridge,
     I’ll make my servile spirits to invent.

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 VALDES. Faustus, these books, thy wit, and our experience,
     Shall make all nations to canonize us.
     As Indian Moors obey their Spanish lords,
     So shall the spirits of every element
     Be always serviceable to us three;

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 CORNELIUS. The miracles that magic will perform
     Will make thee vow to study nothing else.
     He that is grounded in astrology,
     Enrich’d with tongues, well seen in minerals,
     Hath all the principles magic doth require:
     Then doubt not, Faustus, but to be renowm’d,
     And more frequented for this mystery
     Than heretofore the Delphian oracle.
     The spirits tell me they can dry the sea,
     And fetch the treasure of all foreign wrecks,
     Ay, all the wealth that our forefathers hid
     Within the massy entrails of the earth:
     Then tell me, Faustus, what shall we three want?

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MEPHIST. Now, Faustus, ask what thou wilt.

     FAUSTUS. First will I question with thee about hell.
     Tell me, where is the place that men call hell?

     MEPHIST. Under the heavens.

     FAUSTUS. Ay, but whereabout?

     MEPHIST. Within the bowels of these elements,
     Where we are tortur’d and remain for ever:
     Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib’d
     In one self place; for where we are is hell,
     And where hell is, there must we ever be:
     And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,
     And every creature shall be purified,
     All places shall be hell that are not heaven.

     FAUSTUS. Come, I think hell’s a fable.

     MEPHIST. Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.

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Animals will be seen on the earth who will always be fighting against each other with the greatest loss and frequent deaths on each side. And there will be no end to their malignity; by their strong limbs we shall see a great portion of the trees of the vast forests laid low throughout the universe; and, when they are filled with food the satisfaction of their desires will be to deal death and grief and labour and wars and fury to every living thing; and from their immoderate pride they will desire to rise towards heaven, but the too great weight of their limbs will keep them down. Nothing will remain on earth, or under the earth or in the waters which will not be persecuted, disturbed and spoiled, and those of one country removed into another. And their bodies will become the sepulture and means of transit of all they have killed. O Earth! why dost thou not open and engulf them in the fissures of thy vast abyss and caverns, and no longer display in the sight of heaven such a cruel and horrible monster.

"Of the Cruelty of Man," Leonardo da Vinci

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The Jefferson Lab group continued to analyze the Druck term. They released an estimate of the shear forces — internal forces pushing parallel to the proton’s surface — as part of a review published in December. The physicists found that close to its core, the proton experiences a twisting force that gets neutralized by a twisting in the other direction nearer the surface. These measurements also underscore the particle’s stability. The twists had been expected based on theoretical work from Schweitzer and Polyakov. “Nonetheless, witnessing it emerging from the experiment for the first time is truly astounding,” Elouadrhiri said.

Quanta Magazine, 3/14/2024

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Bacon's Novum Organum (1620):

"So in our opinion posterity will judge of us, that we have achieved no great matters, but only set less account upon what is considered important; for the meantime (as we have before observed) our only hope is in the regeneration of the sciences, by regularly raising them on the foundation of experience and building them anew, which I think none can venture to affirm to have been already done or even thought of."

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