How do we get a new look at Leonardo, painter of the Mona Lisa?  Through composer Helmut Lachenmann's arresting setting of Leonardo's writing, of course.  Sospeso gives the New York premiere of  "...zwei gefühle...", muzik mit Leonardo on the April 5 concert, with Lachenmann himself as the recitant.

Leonardo da Vinci was born in Italy in 1452 and died in 1519. A painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer, his genius, perhaps more than that of any figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal.

At age 17, Leonardo and his father moved to Florence. In 1472 Leonardo became a member of the painter’s guild of Florence, where he had contact with other great Florentine artists including Michelangelo Buonarroti.

In 1481 Leonardo left Florence for Milan to offer his service to the local Duke. The Milan years saw Leonardo’s decided turn toward scientific studies. He began to pursue these systematically and with such intensity that they demanded more and more of his time and energy and developed into an independent realm of creative productivity. Within him there arose now a growing need to note and write down in literary form every one of his perceptions and experiences. It is a unique phenomenon in the history of art. Undoubtedly, the several treatises on art that appeared or were made available during those decades provided an external stimulus. Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (Ten Books on Architecture) was first printed in 1485; Francesco di Giorgio’s treatise on architecture was available in its first manuscript versions, and Leonardo had received a copy from the author as a gift. Moreover, Piero della Francesca in his De prospectiva pingendi (“On Perspective in Painting”) had provided for his contemporaries a model text on the theory of perspective. Finally, there was the mathematician Lucas Pacioli, who had become an acquaintance of Leonardo’s. In 1494 Pacioli published his Summa de arithmetica geometria proportioni et proportionalità, followed by his Divina proportione (“On Divine Proportion”), for which Leonardo drew figures of symmetrical bodies.

In this ambience Leonardo began to nourish the desire to write a theory of art of his own, and there arose in him the far-reaching concept of a “science of painting.” Alberti and Piero della Francesca had already offered proof of the mathematical basis of painting in their analysis of the laws of perspective and proportion and thereby buttressed painting’s claim to being a science. But Leonardo’s claims went much further. Proceeding from the basic conviction that sight is the human being’s most unerring sense organ, yielding immediate, accurate, and reliable data of experience, Leonardo—equating “seeing” with “perceiving”—arrived at a bold conclusion: the painter, doubly endowed with subtle powers of perception and the complete ability to pictorialize them, was the prime person qualified to achieve knowledge by observing and to reproduce that knowledge authentically in a pictorial manner. Hence, Leonardo conceived the staggering plan of observing all objects in the visible world, recognizing their form and structure, and pictorially describing them exactly as they are. Thus, drawing became the chief instrument of his didactic method.

In the years between 1490 and 1495 the great program of Leonardo the writer (author of treatises) began. In it, four main themes, which were to occupy him for the rest of his life, could be discerned and gradually took shape: a treatise on painting, a treatise on architecture, a book on the elements of mechanics, and a broadly outlined work on human anatomy. His geophysical, botanical, hydrological, and aerological researches also belong to this period and constitute parts of the “visible cosmology” that loomed before Leonardo as a distant goal. Against speculative book knowledge, which he scorned, he set irrefutable facts gained from experience—from saper vedere.

All these studies and sketches were written down in Leonardo’s notebooks and on individual sheets of paper. Altogether they add up to thousands of closely written pages abundantly illustrated with sketches—the most voluminous literary legacy any painter has ever left behind. Of more than 40 codices mentioned in the older sources—often, of course, rather inaccurately—21 have survived; these in turn sometimes contain notebooks originally separate and now bound together so that 31 in all have been preserved. To these should be added several large bundles of documents: an omnibus volume in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, called Codex Atlanticus because of its size, was collected by the sculptor Pompeo Leoni at the end of the 16th century; its sister volume, after a roundabout journey, fell into the possession of the English crown and was placed in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Finally there is the Arundel Manuscript (British Museum, MS. 263), which contains a number of Leonardo’s fascicles on various themes.

It was during his years in Milan that Leonardo began the earliest of these notebooks. He would first make quick sketches of his observations on loose sheets or on tiny paper pads he kept in his belt; then he would arrange them according to theme and enter them in order in the notebook. Surviving are a first collection of material for the painting treatise (MSS. A and B in the Institut de France, Paris), a model book of sketches for sacred and profane architecture (MS. B, Institut de France, Paris), the treatise on elementary theory of mechanics (MS. 8937, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid), and the first sections of a treatise on the human body (Anatomical MS. B; Windsor Castle, Royal Library).

Two special features make Leonardo’s notes and sketches unusual: his use of mirror writing and the relationship between word and picture.

Leonardo was left-handed; so mirror writing came easily and naturally to him. It should not be looked upon as a secret handwriting. Though somewhat unusual, his script can be read clearly and without difficulty with the help of a mirror—as his contemporaries testified. But the fact that Leonardo used mirror writing throughout, even in his fair copies drawn up with painstaking calligraphy, forces one to conclude that, although he constantly addressed an imaginary reader in his writings, he never felt the need to achieve easy communication by using conventional handwriting. Yet occasional examples of normal handwriting (drafts of letters, notes, and comments to be submitted to third parties) show that Leonardo was completely at home in it. In the overwhelming majority of his notes in mirror writing, therefore, one gets the strong impression of “monologues in writing.” Finally, then, his writings must be interpreted as preliminary stages of works destined for eventual publication, which Leonardo never got around to completing. In a sentence in the margin of one of his late anatomy sketches, he implores his followers to see that his works are printed.

The second unusual feature in Leonardo’s writings is the new function given to illustration vis-à-vis the text. Leonardo strove passionately for a language that was clear yet expressive. The vividness and wealth of his vocabulary were the result of intense self-study and represented a significant contribution to the evolution of scientific prose in the Italian vernacular. On the other hand, in his teaching method Leonardo gave absolute precedence to the illustration over the written word; hence, the drawing does not illustrate the text; rather, the text serves to explain the picture. In formulating his own principle of graphic representation—which he himself called dimostrazione (“demonstrations”)—Leonardo was a precursor of modern scientific illustration.

Thus, during Leonardo’s years in Milan the two “action fields”—the artistic and the scientific—developed and shaped his future creativity. It was a kind of “creative dualism,” with mutual encouragement but also mutual pressure from each field.

Encyclopedia Britannica