| The guide ushering tourists into the former monks' dining hall that houses Leonardo da Vinci's faded masterpiece "The Last Supper" tried in vain to interest her audience in art history, technique and aesthetics. However, most were interested in her thoughts concerning the artwork and the book, (soon to be movie) 'The Da Vinci Code'. According to the fictional book, "The Last Supper," as well as the Mona Lisa and other works by Leonardo, are brimming over with clues which the book's heroes use to unravel the truth about the Grail and its elite guardians.
Da Vinci as a philosopher ahead of his time:
The creator of "The Last Supper" and "Mona Lisa" showed himself as a thinker, having realised the necessity of theoretical justification of artistic practice very early: “Those who are in love with practice without knowledge are like the sailor who gets into a ship without rudder or compass … practice must always be founded on sound theory”.
Demanding a thorough knowledge of the objects being depicted by the artist, Leonardo da Vinci kept a record of his observations in the notepad that he always carried around. This resulted in a peculiar intimate diary, which has no analogues in the whole world literature. Drawings and sketches have short commentaries and notes on the questions of prospective, architecture, music, natural science, military engineering and such; all this is accompanied by aphorism philosophical speculations, allegories, jokes, tales. Together the notes of the 120 books give enough materials for a voluminous encyclopedia. However he did not seek his thoughts to become public and even used cryptography, which still has not been fully decrypted.
Recognizing that the only criterion of truth is experience, opposing the method of observation and induction to abstract speculation, Leonardo da Vinci not only in words by in deeds strikes the fatal blow to the medieval scholasticism, with its predilection for abstract logical formulas and deduction. For Leonardo da Vinci's to speak well means to think correctly, that is, to think independently, like ancient people who did not recognize any authorities. This leads Leonardo da Vinci to the denial of not only scholasticism, the echo of the medieval feudal culture, but also of humanity, the product of still immature bourgeois thought, frozen in a superstitious admiration for authority of the ancient people. Denying the book knowledge, claiming that the main objective of science (and art) is cognition of objects, Leonardo da Vinci, anticipates the attacks of Montaigne on bookish scholars and opens one hundred years before Galilee and Bacon the era of new science.
To me is seems that those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born out of experience, mother of all certainty, first hand experience which in its origins, or means, or end has passed through one of the fifth sense.
There is no human experience that can be termed true science unless it can be mathematically demonstrated. And if you say that the sciences which begin and end in the mind are true, this cannot be conceded, but must be denied for many reasons, and firstly because in such mental discourses experience is eliminated, and without experience there can be no certainty. |
