Leonardos Kraft oder: Die Natur im Augenblick

According to Leonardo’s Libro di pittura, painting has a paradoxical nature, since it is a product of human skills – a “technique”; but at the same time, qua “image”, it has the power to “irradiate” itself and its illusionistic “virtue” without fading and passing away. This paradox is at the centre of my presentation. It is studied by linking Leonardo’s ideas on painting to his theory of vision and perspective, and by showing that in this field there is a parallel development: as Leonardo moves away from his early extromissive, half-magical approach and opts for an intromissive theory of species and simulacra, he also changes, gradually, his ideas on the quasi-magical virtues of the image as something capable of spontaneously and immediately acting on the viewer, and reverses this idea into its opposite: that the image has no immediate or spontaneous power, but it receives its power from the interaction between image and viewer. This passage from an absolute to a relative notion of “painting” and “image” will be exposed by examining two key-notions from Leonardo’s Libro di pittura, namely vivacità (vivacity) and prontitudine (quickness, promptness, but also stillness). Both are features of an image that not only imitates natural reality but also challenges it, by giving the impression of real life and real experience. A reconstruction of the use of these notions in the Libro di pittura will show that they gradually merge and finally collapse into a new meaning of prontitudine, where the vivacity of the image is reduced to the skilful representation of an allusive set of gestures able to arouse in the viewer’s imagination the sensation of real life. As for Alberti, who is probably Leonardo’s source here, for Leonardo prontitudine means something that pushes the viewer to think about, or to feel, what cannot be seen and experienced, namely the passions that are hidden behind the surface of the painted bodies. But there is in Leonardo’s idea of prontitudine something more, namely an emphasis on the fact that in the image, motion and immobility are articulated and inseparable, and that this happens because the image is not “life” but “expression” of life, that is by the fact that image is thought of as a visual meaning.