Renaissance and

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LEONARDO
The fundamental antinomy of the Renaissance con- perfection. But, it could never attain perfection as
ception of perfection is this: only if God is capable of mortal mind. It could only do so when it lost --
o I
being expressed in dynamic terms, himself under- divested itself of -- its most unique quality, its
going the process of development, can his existence existence. Cusanus posed the problem differently.
cohere with active development taking place in and Mind most genuinely experienced God's perfection
through real men. As long as God is conceived as a through the recognition of its limit with respect to that
fixed point outside the lawful progress of all existence, perfection. Knowledge however can not establish a
then no matter how close we come to reaching per- limit unless it has already transgressed it. The
fection, we remain forever infinitely distant from it. problem can be stated thus: what is it that is known
F/c/no had confronted just this problem, and in his when we know God as the complete other of our
emphasis on the human soul through the activity of its knowledge of our own limit
intellect acting as the mediation between perfection God must be the essence, the simple idea of
and Being, he opened the path to the resolution of the _existence. But this content can not be known by the
antinomy; but, in preserving the medieval finite individual in himself. In place of the human
Aristotelian notion of Being as essentially inanimate, being as an individual, a self-evident particular
he was forced to locate the creative, active, quality of existence, there mu§t be humanity which possesses
mind outside of Being, in the realm of the ideal. It is universal content. This universal humanity Cusanus
this ideal virtue, the Venus humanims, that Botticelli identifies with Christ.
illustrated. Christ is both the integration of all existence
To avoid the trap that F/c/no and Botticelli fell into, because he includes within himself all things, and the
required locating perfection in Being• But then one differentiation from existence because he is the inhad
to dissolve the hierarchical structure of the tensif/cation of things as they truly are, but which they
universe and, in particular, destroy the Mother never are in themselves. But, as P/co pointed out, this
Church and the Papacy whose ideological power lay is precisely what man is: he is all things and that
entirely in mediating one's fixed and finite relation to which is distinct from the rest of being because he has
God. P/co yearned to do this but ultimately shrank no fixed identity. To recognize Christ as humanitas is
back into the protective embrace of the Chuch. What to identify in man's nature both his finite limit and his
lay beneath the attraction of the Church was the terror capacity for infinite existence. It is to render perof
the unknown, of a universe in which one would fection attainable to man within terms of his own
forever lose one's way in an infinity of infinites, nature, whereas to representhumanitas as Venus is to
It was precisely this step which Leonardo da Vinci express perfection as ineffable, forever unattainable
took which made possible the uniting of all scientific within existence.
inquiry into nature (the realm of Being) with the Christ humanitas is the subject of Leonardo's Last
Ficinian notion of perfection. Rather than Supper. It lays out the content of 80 years of thought.
representing some empiricist opponent of the neo- In so doing, it is a complete break with the previous
Platonists, Leonardo explicitly conceived of himself banal treatment of the subject, and it is the high point
as the great reformer of their work, one who was able in the Renaissance polemic against all the obscuranto
resituate the problem of perfection within Being. tism and anti-Humanism of the medieval worldview
The problem of self-perfection then becomes the still rampantinDominicantheology. (Fig. 11)
process of discovering perfection within Being, the The Last Supper was painted in the dining hall of the
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perfection of knowledge. The free act_vlty of the mind Dominican monastery of S. Maria delle Grazie in
is the process by which the mind explicates its own Milan. Milan was roughly a half-century behind
true nature. Florentine development, and, in the 1480s and 1490s,
To locate perfection within existence, however, the Renaissance struggle against the Dominicans was
posed devastating problems. It meant that perfection just beginning. Imagine, if you will, this Dominican
must be at once finite and infinite, complete and in- dining room, the monks pledged to the rule of silence,
complete. Leonardo's solution to these problems rests seated at long tables under the baleful eye of their
on the work of Nicholas Cusanus, and it is here that he superior. He alone would be seated at the short end of
surp_assesFicino'sformulation, the hall on a raised platform opposite Leonardo's
Ficino had recognized the mind's perfectibility fresco. Each of the silent monks is precisely one of
because the mind could conceive of God's existent those individual souls withdrawn into himself who, in
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