Leonardo Da Vinci and the objection of Conscience.

Original painting by Stefano Frassetto (6).

 

 

 

Leonardo Da Vinci was painting the ‘Cenacolo’[2] in Milan, between 1494 and 1497, on commission of Ludovico il Moro, to the Court of whom he specifically came from Florence. Leonardo didn’t like painting religious themes and preferred, to the culture of the clergymen, the cruel and lashing one of his patron, who however did right ask Leonardo with the ‘Last Supper’ for the refectory of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie. So that Leonardo should ‘come into’ the person of a thinking Jesus. He chose the sorrowful acknowledgement without any condemnation : “One among you will betray me… The one who’s dipping into my own plate.” [3]

Leonardo did work enigmaticly : the apprentice Matteo Bandello reported about him that sometimes the Master was been working non-stop even for lunch, and sometimes instead he gave just a few brushstrokes and left, disappearing until the next day. Especially about the ‘Cenacolo’, Leonardo often covered again what he himself had already painted. Thanks to a restoration lasted twenty years and able to come back to the original painting, nowadays we can know how was thinking a man said a genius, but mainly treated by his own contemporaries as an odd kind of person and not to be approached.

Sigmund Freud published in 1910 ‘A childhood memory of Leonardo Da Vinci’, twelve years after his shortest but dedicated stay in Milan, in September 1898 and after publishing ‘The translation of dreams’ and the well done ‘Case of child Hans’. Also the essay about Leonardo Da Vinci was once more dedicated to know how a child is thinking to be conjugated, and the corruption of his thinking in the said ‘Oedipus complex’, as an inhibition and objection of Conscience to love.

During his visit in Milan, Freud didn’t find that fresco in the persuasive condition as we today can enjoy it, so that he couldn’t free Leonardo from inauspicious diagnosis which Freud himself only supposed, that is a ‘natural’ and biological perversion, a capacity at the limit of the human, inhibiting up to directly sublimate the desire for conjugation so staying on this side, almost an insuperable fence built by one’s own thinking and from where oneself thinking does jump somewhere else, without any reasonable link. Any technical and scientific skill would then have substituted in Leonardo child and then young man, replacing as a whole any trace of love, passion or libido, raising the man to a genius, damned by the nature itself.

However, we know today it was not, thanks to his own thinking offered by Leonardo in his ‘virgin’ work, before his following uninterrupted changes of mind, undoubtedly proved by the different coats of painting and by the overlapped brushstrokes.

First of all, Leonardo preferred, but without any evident reason, the ‘dry fresco’ technique which, opposite to the traditional ‘fresco’ technique which he himself well knew, would have exposed his work in progress, and during that longest making up, to a rapid and irreversible decay. Almost if he would hide, in the foreseeable ruin of that fresco, his true thinking which was a thinking love.

Working hard to be able to come into Jesus thinking, Leonardo got to think indeed the conjugation he desired but finding himself betrayed hurted violated.  

In ‘Cenacolo’ there is a game of hands, something prepared to escape an audience looking at the faces, and showing what the painter really was thinking about the relation between Jesus, so bright and central, and Judas, twisted and shadowed figure.

Since that dream Leonardo reported and commented by Freud, the bird of prey represented an aggressive and choking maternal affection. In ‘Cenacolo’ of Milan the greedy hand diverted by possession comes back with evidency, and will not link again the loving hand of Jesus-Leonardo, also if turning towards Judas’ hand, in whom Leonardo represented his own father, Ser Piero Da Vinci.[4] 

Lacking legitimate offspring infact, ser Piero Da Vinci bought Leonardo from his own natural wife, almost collecting the child as he lacked of legitimate children, but ignoring that Leonardo would like to be loved by his father.

When the fresco was ready, the lavish Ludovico il Moro had no more money to pay the excellent work made by Leonardo, who had to accept - swallowing yet another disappointment - a famous  vineyard in the centre of Milan. After that ‘Cenacolo’ Leonardo didn’t come back on the item, also if that important work opened to him his hidden capacity to love, even subsequently an unsatisfying maternal rapacity.

His own thinking of love was no more over, nor he was biologically not able to love as Freud, wondering assumed.

Leonardo however didn’t arrive on time to enjoy a real analytical work, so proving[5] his own buds of ‘salus’ he could cultivate.

 

 

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio - May 24, 2016

 

 

[1] This text has been briefly proposed during a Work session in class in the past ‘Symposium 2015 – 2016’.

[2] I took part in the guided tour of the Association “Neiade Immaginare arte”.

[3] Mathew Gospel - Mt 26, 20-25

[4] Ser Piero Da Vinci, was living between 1427 and 1504 and was father of Leonardo, also notary in Florence and man of culture.  

[5] Il pensiero di natura, Giacomo B.Contri – SIC Edizioni (1998). It’s clear the thesis that any individual thinking works ‘on’ the biological nature and not recognizing oneself as submissive : that is since the birth of a child.

(6) Stefano Frassetto is born in Turin in 1968. After his degree in Architecture at ‘Politecnico’ he begun as graphic novelist for local magazines. In the ‘90s he edited in France too, on ‘Le Réverbère’ and on ‘Libération’ : then he created ‘Ippo’ for ‘Il Giornalino’ and then the stripe ‘35MQ’ for the swiss magazine ‘20 Minuti’. In 2000 he came into ‘La Stampa’ as portraitist for cultural page and the insert ‘Tuttolibri’, then for the weekly ‘Origami’. Today he works also for the swiss magazine ‘Le Temps’.