In march 1821, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, concluded his poem « A defense of Poetry » with a visionary concept:
« Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. »

We examine here, from that standpoint, Leonardo da Vinci‘s masterwork The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne.

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.

Remarkably, Leonardo didn’t make this painting for a Prince, not for a Duke, not for a Cardinal, nor for a Pope, but for himself, and as such, as a legacy for humanity.

Vincent Delieuvin, the French historian of the Louvre who cross-checked all the available documentation and hypothesis, arrives at the interesting but paradoxical conclusion that with this painting Leonardo wanted to give tribute to the return of the Florentine Republic:

« Since the Florentines rose up against Gautier de Brienne, Duke of Athens, on July 26, 1343, the feast day of Saint Anne, the city had devoted particular worship to the mother of the Virgin Mary, who was considered the protector of the Republic.

After the Medici were exiled in 1494, the honors bestowed upon the saint increased once again. Leonardo’s work fits perfectly into this context of the restoration of republican government, in which the artist participated with the execution of The Battle of Anghiari in 1503. »¹

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 History” 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.

A Single Harmonic One

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

The German cardinal Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464), a thinker and major figure in the great ecumenical councils and the Italian and European Renaissance, begins his treatise On Learned Ignorance (1440) with a symbol. God is the “absolute maximum” and perfect unity (unio); in this unity, all distances, all divisions, all contradictions are transformed and merge into union. The universe is the contracted image of this absolute maximum and this absolute unity; it is not the absolute maximum, but, as in a mirror, the “contracted” maximum, for it does not comprise all things, but only all things outside of God, all created things. The thinker uses the terms complicatio (envelopment) and explicatio (unfolding) to explain that all things are enveloped in God (the source) and unfolded in the world. The world, the cosmos, and geological time are the unfolding of God’s unity.

Leonardo da Vinci (1454-1519), following in the footsteps of Cues, emphatically stated: “Understand that everything is connected to everything else.” For him, progress meant unifying different fields such as art, anatomy, and engineering into a comprehensive and coherent understanding. The artist-engineer invited his contemporaries to learn to perceive the links that unite nature, art, science, and the human soul. Observation allowed Leonardo to discover invisible causes rather than visible effects, and to imagine and test creative hypotheses. In particular, he postulated that the human body could be a miniature version (microcosm) of the Earth (macrocosm), observing that the branching of blood vessels in humans mirrors the tributaries of rivers, just as the movements of the body mimic the tides. In his view, the Earth is a living organism with “flesh” (the soil), ‘bones’ (rock strata), and “blood” (water veins). He studied the flight of birds and the movement of water, convinced that both obeyed the same fluid physics. Art is science, and science is art; both are tools for understanding the fundamental laws of the world. For Leonardo da Vinci, painters must possess the entire cosmos in their minds and hands in order to truly reflect the beauty, harmony, and complexity of nature. For the artist, movement is the very essence of a living, expanding universe. He studied the spiral patterns found in everything from flowers to curls of hair to whirlpools in water in order to understand how the life force generates different forms. Finally, he considered stagnation to be a form of decline, writing that “iron rusts from lack of use” and “inaction saps the vigor of the mind.”

The German naturalist and revolutionary Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) also sought to understand how various natural phenomena, despite their apparent independence, form a harmonious and unified system. He refers to an “earth system” in which climate, flora, fauna, and human life are interdependent. Humboldt believed in studying the “intrinsic link” between the general and the particular, which allowed him to perceive the interconnectedness of different regions and climates. In his ultimate 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—physical and celestial—as a “magnificently ordered and harmonious system.” Like Cusanus and Leonardo da Vinci, he argued that a scientific understanding of natural processes increases our appreciation of their beauty.

Ukrainian-Russian geophysicist Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–1945) viewed life as eternal and inseparable from the cosmos, not just from Earth. He proposed that living matter was a “cosmic phenomenon” that had appeared elsewhere or had always existed, shaping the chemical environment of planets. He defined the “Biosphere” as a “life-saturated envelope” around the Earth, where living organisms and inert matter interact constantly, inseparably, and dynamically. Vernadsky described the transition from the biosphere to the “Noosphere” as the next stage of evolution, where rational human activity, science, and technology become the main geological force shaping the planet. He was convinced that the future of humanity depended on recognizing this unity, suggesting that human thought was a natural extension of geological and cosmic processes.

What do we see?

It is with this “Long arch of History” in mind, that the viewer can discover the “Shadow of Vernadsky » in Leonardo’s Saint Anne. 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 Forrester² 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. Vincent Delievin, La Vierge, l’Enfant Jésus et sainte Anne, dit La Sainte Anne, website of the Louvre; ↩︎
2. 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. ↩︎