Interview With Giuseppe Fornari
ROME, 13 MARCH 2006 (ZENIT)Few would think to question Leonardo da
Vinci's genius, yet his life and works have often been the object of
serious misinterpretations.
Some books have presented him as an unbeliever and homosexual, who was
threatened by the Church. Others, such as Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci
Code," present him as a master of esotericism.
To help put things in their right place, philosopher Giuseppe Fornari
has just published a book entitled, "La bellezza e il nulla.
L'antropologia cristiana di Leonardo da Vinci" (Beauty and Nothingness:
The Christian Anthropology of Leonardo da Vinci), published by Marietti.
In the work, Fornari argues that "far from being a heretic and
blasphemer, a compiler of riddles (as pop esotericism would like)
Leonardo was rather a tormented Christian, irregular by necessity but
profound and impassioned." He shared more in this interview with ZENIT.
Q: Several authors have spread the idea that Leonardo da Vinci was a
"naturalist" who was distant or even opposed to Catholic thought and
culture. In your book, you argue just the opposite. Can you explain why?
Fornari: The principal error, committed for example by Sigmund Freud,
lies in attributing to Leonardo a naturalist vision similar to that of
the 19th and 20th centuries. There could be no greater distortion of his
thought.
Leonardo was already a modern because he saw nature as an immense whole
of forces and phenomena that man must try to know, and over which he has
the right to intervene, wherever possible.
The great difference in regard to the vision that prevails today, is
that for him these forces are of a profoundly spiritual character,
understanding spirit as an energy and end which is not material, which
is within nature itself, and which refers to a transcendent origin.
And such a vision not only is not in contradiction with the Catholic
vision, but rather corroborates it in the most penetrating way.
Undoubtedly it was a vision that was too advanced for the age, as
documented for us by the misunderstandings of [biographer] Giorgio
Vasari, concerned that Leonardo's scientific researchers might have led
him to religiously skeptical and heretical positions.
It is, therefore, an old prejudice, which is based essentially on a
misunderstanding.
Q: In your opinion, which are the pictorial works in which Leonardo
expresses his affinity with Christian culture and theology?
Fornari: Without a doubt, in all his works with a religious theme, one
sees a growing maturation which finds the fullness of its maturity in
the "Adoration of the Magi."
A constant in such paintings is meditation on the reality and centrality
of the sacrifice, accepted by Christ for the salvation of humanity, a
meditation that came to him from Tradition and from the suggestions of
theologians with whom he was in contact every now and then, but which
Leonardo deepened increasingly in the light of difficult personal
experiences, marked by his condition of illegitimate son.
All this led him to give an interpretation of moving truth and
profundity to the great themes of the Incarnation, the Fatherhood of God
and the motherhood of Mary.
I will give you just one example that impressed me especially during the
preparation of the book: the "Benois Madonna" kept in the Hermitage on
St. Petersburg.
In this work, still youthful, we see a Mary who is virtually a girl, who
gazes with a smile full of ingenuous joy, and with a secret melancholy,
barely insinuated, at the Child she holds in her arms, absorbed in the
contemplation of a flower, symbol of his future crucifixion.
It is a scene that is charged with moving connotations if we think of
the little Leonardo, who was separated when he was still small, from his
very young natural mother, Catalina, obliged to marry, in a marriage of
reparation, and to leave little "Lionardo" in the father's house.
How can one not refer to the wisely filtrated re-elaboration of a
traumatic experience, which Leonardo undoubtedly knew from his mother
herself, in addition to his own emotional scars? In this sort of
"flashback" one can measure Leonardo's closeness with the most profound
content of the Christian message, through the cognitive re-elaboration
of his own experience.
Q: You say that for Leonardo artistic beauty is the means by which man
is united with God. Can you illustrate this concept?
Fornari: It is an articulated and complex argument because, to
reconstruct it, we must unite explicit observations of Leonardo with
what can be deduced from other testimonies, above all from his own
works.
Leonardo begins with a vision that goes back at least partially to
Florentine Platonism, according to which, beauty belongs to an ideal
sphere, superior to the corruption of the material world, but this
reflection is full of implications that are in no way consoling.
The same prodigious facility with which he knew how to give visible form
to this "divine beauty" must have put him on guard. His enormous talent
in fact also gave him the power to use it for other ends, such as
vanity, ambition and sensuality.
The beauty of art therefore is ambiguous and depends on the way in which
we respond with our freedom to its ambiguity: if we opt for its
authentically spiritual orientation, or if we remain with a more
equivocal vision. I believe this meditation on the ambivalence of
beauty, and on its claim on our liberty, became an ever more important
topic in this artist's career.
The only way out is the image of Christ himself. By accepting to be
equal to us and to die for us, he shows us the only solution: the
acceptance of suffering and sacrifice for love of others.
In this way, through him, we can rise again, and the beauty of the
world, which seemed to be and was destroyed, resurrects through love.
The image of Christ makes a reality the image and likeness of God, by
whom we were created, and the beauty of Christ is revealed as the beauty
of the resurrected body, of creation led to redemption.
With God himself, who makes himself our image, we ourselves become his
image. I believe that this is the secret of the greatest Christian art,
the secret of Leonardo's art. ZE06031301
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