One never gets tired of looking at “The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne”, Leonardo’s superb masterpiece in the Louvre.

Formally, the painting depicts Saint Anne, her daughter the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. Christ is shown embracing a sacrificial lamb symbolizing the mission he took on to liberate mankind from the original sin.

When the painting was finished is not known. In general, it is thought that Leonardo da Vinci (1454-1519) started working on it in 1503 when he lived in Florence at the age of 49. The French King Frances I, who bought the panel in 1518, didn’t steal the panel, just its author who brought it with him to France to finish it.

The viewer is immediately overwhelmed by a powerful and nearly disturbing sense of motion, supreme love and beauty. The scene itself, if it shows figures from the Holy scriptures (Anne, the Virgin Mary, Christ), rather than illustrating a given liturgical sequence, manifestly springs from a well of profound philosophical reflections.

I will try to convince you here there exists a “long arch” of thinking and coherence between persons and minds that never met or spoke to each other, but whose intuitions and mindsets where congruent and oriented in the same directions. Leonardo’s masterpiece appears (in my view), as a sort of “missing link” between Nicolaus Cusanus’ vision of God and nature and Vladimir Vernadsky’s concept of the Noosphere, eventually via Alexander von Humboldt’s idea of the “Cosmos”. That might look wild and even silly at first glance, but please allow me to elaborate.

Harmonic One

What unites the four towering intellectuals named Cusanus, Leonardo, Alexander von Humboldt and Vernadski? All four were convinced that the universe is a single harmonic one.

Nicolaus Cusanus (1402-1464) argued that God is the “Absolute Maximum” and the “Absolute Minimum,” transcending all distinctions and opposites. God is the ultimate unity or oneness (unio) that brings all distinctions together. He saw the creation as a mirror or “contraction” of divine unity. This concept implies that in the structure of the universe, opposites and contraries are, at their core, unified, reflecting the divine, singular nature of God. But in the infinite nature of God, all contradictions are reconciled. Cusanus used the terms complicatio (enfolding) and explicatio (unfolding) to explain that all things are folded into God (the source) and unfolded in the world. The world, or cosmos, and geological time, is the unfolding of God’s unity.

Leonardo da Vinci (1454-1519), famously stated, “Realize that everything connects to everything else”. For him, growth meant bridging different fields like art, anatomy, and engineering into a single, unified understanding. He told his fellowmen that they must learn to see the patterns that bind nature, art, science, and the human soul together. Observation allowed Leonardo to discover the hidden causes rather than the effects and imagine and test creative hypotheses. For example he postulated that the human body could be a miniature version (microcosm) of the Earth (macrocosm). He observed, for instance, that the branching patterns of blood vessels in humans mirror the tributaries flowing into rivers, just as the movements of the body mimic the tides of the earth. For him, the Earth was a living organism with “flesh” (soil), “bones” (rock strata), and “blood” (veins of water). He studied the flight of birds and the movements of water, convinced that both obeyed to waves of fluids. Art was a science, and science was art—both were tools to understand the fundamental laws of the world. For him, painters must possess the entire cosmos within their mind and hands to truly reflect nature’s beauty, harmony and complexity. For Leonardo, motion was the essence of growth. He studied the “spiraling” patterns in everything from flowers, curling hair to swirling water eddies to understand how life force moves through different forms. He viewed stagnation as a form of decay, writing that “iron rusts from disuse” and “inaction saps the vigor of the mind.”

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) tried to understand how diverse natural phenomena, despite their apparent independence, form a harmonious, unified system. Just as Cusanus and Leonardo, he argued that a scientific understanding of nature’s processes increases our appreciation of its beauty. He saw the Earth as an “Earth system,” where climate, flora, fauna, and human life are interdependent. Humboldt believed in studying the, “inner linkage” between the general and the particular, allowing him to see how different regions and climates were interconnected. In his final, multi-volume work Cosmos (1845-1858), he described nature as a « breath of life » and an « organic whole » and sought to describe the entire universe—both physical and celestial—as a “beautifully ordered and harmonious system”.

Vladimir Vernadski (1863-1945) viewed life as eternal and integral to the cosmos, not just Earth. He proposed that living matter is a “cosmic phenomenon” that originated elsewhere or has always existed, shaping the chemical environment of planets. He defined the “biosphere” as a “life-saturated envelope” of the Earth, where living organisms and inert matter are in constant, inseparable, and dynamic interaction. As a next step in evolution, Vernadski described the transition from the biosphere to the “noosphere,” where human rational activity, science, and technology become the primary geological force shaping the planet. He believed that the future of humanity depends on recognizing this unity, suggesting that human thought is a natural extension of geological and cosmic processes.

What do we see?

It is with this “long arch” in mind, that the viewer can discover the “shadow” of Vernadski in Leonardo’s Saint Anne and the Virgin. Because, what does the viewer see?

1. The background of the painting features sharp, prehistoric-looking crags inspired by Leonardo’s studies of the Dolomites and the Alps. This barren, rocky terrain, nearly lunar, has been described by historians as “fantastical” or “metaphysical”. As we know from his notebooks, Leonardo was interested in painting “invisible” movements, not only those of the souls, but also universal phenomena such as “time”, especially “geological” time. How did mountains arise, etc.? Others, correctly argue that the « dead » or lunar landscape of the background, what Vernadsky would call the “Lithosphere” serves to highlight the other elements of the composition.
2. On the right, one could see the tree (the “biosphere”) as representing a step in an evolutionary process of the development of the cosmos.
3. Beneath the tree, the lamb (in religious terms a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice to free mankind) also represents a higher form of conscience of that same “biosphere”
4. Then appears Jesus, who, represented in his human incarnation, that of a child, represents only a sort of naive conscience, merely the potential for his further development.
5. The Virgin Mary, is represented in a paradoxical position which is a perfect example of what the late Lyndon LaRouche identified as “mid-motion-change”, meaning an ambiguous instant of indecision between two or more contrary movements. Her majestic, loving and protecting gesture and embrace of Jesus coincides with her vivid desire to induce the boy all the freedom of movement he needs to fulfill his sacred mission.
6. Saint Anne, on top, as a sort of self-conscious form of agapic love, looks down and smiles seeing the majestic gesture and love for Christ of her daughter Mary. She is happy to be the self-conscious “noospheric” soul of a divine and living Cosmos, where the creator permanently creates ever higher forms of creation and of consciousness of its own creative nature. The rings of lunar mountain chains resemble and resonate visually with the harmonic rings formed by arms and clothes in a cascade of aesthetic spiral action.

Even authors polluted by nasty modernist and Freudian misinterpretations such as Viviane Forrester¹ who wrongly pretend we are mislead by an overwhelming sentiment of mildness of Mary, nevertheless acknowledge intuitively there is something very special in this work, a sort of unity Forrester brands, not finding a better name, “organic”. When we discover these figures, she writes:

“one clearly sees they are living organisms in the midst of a landscape, a living organism. Organic inside Organic.” (p. 12)

That organic moment, she observes, appears here to the viewer as a “frozen moment” of a “transitory movement”.

Their “next respiration, the one that will follow, seems more important, vital, more suspended than any intrigue, any narrative. And their [the figures] tangible presence, fragile, matches that of the mountains, who respire as well.” (p. 13)

The making of a genius

By over-emphasizing that Leonardo was a “self-taught” genius, research on the intellectual influences he underwent was somehow neglected.

The first chance he had, was to be an apprentice of Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488), whose Florence workshop was modeled on that of his tutor, the Florentine erudite sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) where pupils studied astronomy, poetry, architecture, sculpture, painting, bronze-casting, metal-works, chemistry, anatomy and read the Classics.

Then, in Milan, as a court painter, Leonardo was “adopted” by the young Cecilia Gallerani (1473 – 1536), the favorite (but not the last) mistress of the Duke Ludovico Sforza, known as Lodovico Il Moro, Duke of Milan.

She was born into a large family from Siena. Her father’s name was Fazio Gallerani. He was not a member of the nobility, but he occupied several important posts at the Milanese court, including the position of ambassador to the Republic of Florence and Republic of Lucca. Cecilia was educated alongside her six brothers in Latin and literature.

She is best known as the subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Lady with an Ermine (c. 1489), already a painting where movement prevails over static representation. It is said that while posing for the painting, she invited Leonardo to be part of the literary circle she hosted at her residence in the Palazzo Carmagnola, where she engaged in intellectual debates with philosophers, poets, and musicians. Gallerani herself presided over these discussions.

Composing music, poetry and delivering orations in both Latin and Italian at the age of 16, renowned for her wit and scholarship, she was considered one of the most cultured women of the Italian Renaissance.

While nearly all of her works were lost, she is remembered as a “great light of the Italian language” due to her mastery of literature and verse. The court poet Bernardo Bellincioni (1452-1492) highly praised her literary talents, even comparing her to the famous Ancient Greek poetess Sappho which allegedly inspired Plato.

The Court of Milan and its patrons also attracted and protected other artists and scientists, among which the architect Donato Bramante, the mathematician and friend of Leonardo, Luca Pacioli, the duchess Beatrice d’Este, the poet Bernardo Bellincioni and the humanist educator Francesco Filelfo.

Did Cecilia Gallerani introduce Leonardo to the ideas of Cusanus? We don’t know, but she certainly had both the knowledge and ability to do so.

Some 20 years after Leonardo’s death, the French King Francis, who had brought Leonardo do France in 1517, was told by the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini:

« There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher. »

The world needs new Leonardo’s. Are you ready to go there?

As one scholar concludes: Leonardo’s “epistemological unity allows one to be elevated to a higher perspective. It not only increases our propensity for genuine empathy and understanding (much needed in today’s pluralistic society), but also for a kind of social and intellectual freedom. It is a method of acquiring a more holistic understanding of the human condition; or in short, of getting a real education.”

1. Au Louvre avec Viviane Forrester, La Vierge et l’Enfant avec sainte Anne, Léonard de Vinci, dossier établi par Cécile Scailliérez, Service Culturel du Louvre, Symogy, Editions d’Art, Paris, 2000. ↩︎