Finished!

I finally finished Math and the Mona Lisa!  I thought it was really good, but you have to be into the whole integration of math and art thing.  It had my favorite poem excerpt in it too!  It’s from “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake, and is referred to as, “a timeless credo for the scientist, and so too for the artist”:

 

To see the world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

 

Yes, and if I was to read only one passage about Da Vinci for my whole life, this would be the one:

 

“Leonardo was an illegitimate son in a society that afforded little opportunity to such an individual.  He was a vegetarian who found detestable the idea of becoming “a cage for dead animals,” and an animal rights activist who would purchase birds in the marketplace just to release them into the air.  He was left-handed in a time when left-handedness was regarded as sinister.  He may have been homosexual at a time when society, guided largely by the Church, regarded this as sinful.  He seems to have had no adult involvement with women, and yet painted the most enigmatic and timeless portrait of a woman in all of Western art.  In a time when dissecting human bodies was proscribed by law he spent endless hours studying cadavers.  Under the intolerable conditions of fetid chambers he dissecting human bodies in carious states of decay, and created reams of anatomical drawings.  He was a pacifist with an aversion to warfare who was employed as a military engineer, designing devices to fortify castles and machinery to breach them, shields to protect the bearer while striking fear into the enemy, and weapons as deadly as any conceived up to that time.  As for that vexing curse – the reputation for failing to finish projects – was his mercurial focus and frenetic pace somehow connected to a higher form of attention deficiency hyperactive disorder?  Or was it a case of too many ideas for a finite lifetime.  Labels to oversimplify phenomena; in Leonardo’s case, they are beyond absurd…”

            “… In the last hours before his death, Leonardo, with an air of forlorn resignation, remarked to an assistant, “Tell me, did anything get completed?…”

            “… In Leonardo’s case there also resonates the tone of frustration at unfulfilled ideas and unfinished work.  One cannot deny that the reasoning out of solutions, especially in art, and the creating of mental inventions, especially theories in science and technology, were more important for Leonardo than bringing them into actuality.  Thus his chronic problem of darting from one beckoning source of curiosity to the next was real.”

 

I guess the people who've gotten their only impression from The Da Vinci of Leonardo really bug me because of this.  They don't realize the entirety of his life and just try to make him out for some sort of conspiracy magnet just because they've got issues and they decide to take it out on him by clouding his good name.

Tags: Scholarship