Edith Sherwood’s anagram cipher…

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A new day brings a new Google Adwords campaign from Edith Sherwood (Edith, please just email me instead, it’ll get the word out far quicker), though this time not promoting another angle on her Leonardo-made-the-Voynich-Manuscript hypothesis… but rather a transposition cipher Voynichese hypothesis. Specifically, she proposes that the Voynich Manuscript may well be Italian written in a simple (i.e. ‘monoalphabetic’) substitution cipher, but also anagrammed to make it difficult to read.

Anagram ciphers have a long (though usually fairly marginal) history: Roger Bacon is widely believed to have used one to hide the recipe for gunpowder (here’s a 2002 post I made on it), though it’s not quite as clear an example as is sometimes claimed. And if you scale that up by a factor of 100, you get the arbitrary horrors of William Romaine Newbold’s anagrammed Voynich ‘decipherment’ *shudder*.

More recently, Philip Neal has wondered whether there might be some kind of letter-sorting anagram cipher at play in the VMs: but acknowledges that this suggestion does suffer from various practical problems. I also pointed out in my book that Leonardo da Vinci and Antonio Averlino (‘Filarete’) both used syllable transposition ciphers, and that in 1467 Alberti mentioned other (now lost) kinds of transposition ciphers: a recent post here discussed the history of transposition ciphers in a little more detail.

So: let’s now look at what Edith Sherwood proposes (which is, at least, a type of cryptography consistent with the VMs’ mid-Quattrocento art history dating, unlike many of the more exotic ciphering systems that have been put forward in the past), and see how far we get…

Though her starting point was the EVA letter assignments (with a few Currier glyphs thrown in), she then finessed the letter-choices slightly to fit in with the pharma plant label examples she picked: and there you have it (apart from H, J, K, Q, X, Y, Z and possibly F, which are all missing). All you’d have to do, then, is to anagram the rest of the text for yourself, sell the book rights, and retire to a sea-breezy Caribbean island.

edith-sherwood-alphabet2

Might Edith Sherwood be onto something with all this? No, not a hope: for example, the letter instance distribution is just plain wrong for Italian, never mind the eight or so missing letters. As with Brumbaugh’s wobbly label-driven decipherment attempts, I somehow doubt you would ever find two plausible adjacent words in the main body of the text. Also: what would a sensible Italian anagram of “qoteedy” (“volteebg”) be?

Her plants are also a little wobbly: soy beans, for example, were only introduced into Europe in the eighteenth century… “galioss” is a bit of a loose fit for galiopsi (not “galiospi”, according to “The Botanical Garden of Padua” on my bookshelf), etc.

As an aside, I rather doubt that she has managed to crack the top line of f116v: “povere leter rimon mist(e) ispero”, “Plain letter reassemble mixed inspire” (in rather crinkly Italian).

All the same, it is a positive step forward, insofar as it indicates that people are now starting to think in terms of Quattrocento dating and the likely presence of non-substitution-cipher mechanisms, both of which are key first steps without which you’ll very probably get nowhere.

What is a ciphertext?

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Essentially, a ciphertext is a piece of text where the individual letters have been transformed according to a rule system – substitution cipher rules replace the shape of the letters (as if you had just changed the font), while transposition cipher rules manipulate the order of the letters.

THIS IS A CIPHER —> UIKT KT B DKQIFS  (substitute each letter with the one after it in the alphabet)

THIS IS A CIPHER —> SIHT SI A REHPIC (transpose the letters, writing each word back-to-front)

So, as long as (a) you know [or can crack!] the rules by which the “plaintext” (the original unenciphered text) was transformed, and (b) those rules can be played out in reverse, then you can decipher the ciphertext.

OK so far… but if you’re looking at historical ciphers, there’s a problem.

Prior to 1400, transposition ciphers were extremely rare, partly because words themselves were rare. Many documents were written without spaces – and without spaces, where do words begin and end? Effectively, this meant that in-word transposition ciphers (such as reversing syllables, as the Florentines Antonio Averlino and Leonardo da Vinci both used) would only happen in those few places (such as Florence) where people had a modern concept of what words were. A well-known modern example is “Pig Latin“, a (20th century) humorous in-word transposition cipher: and there’s the 19th century “loucherbem” in French, too.

Round about 1465, these flowered into some kind of complex system (by an unknown practitioner, and now apparently lost forever): Alberti, writing in Rome during 1465-1467, mentioned a number of ideas for a complex transposition system, though he recommended his own cipher wheel in preference to them.

Yet after 1500, these basically disappeared into the historical footnotes of cryptographic works. What replaced them (circa 1550) was the “rail-fence” Renaissance notion of transposition cipher: this was instead grounded in the print-centric culture of movable type. This saw messages as sequences of characters tick-tocking away to a metronomic beat (i.e. one per tick), and transposition ciphers not as a way of disrupting word contents, but instead as a way of disrupting (& subverting) the metronomic pulse of letters – a very different beast indeed.

THIS IS A CIPHER --> ISTHAY ISYAY AYAY IPHERCAY   (Pig Latin cipher)

THIS IS A CIPHER ---> T I I A I H R    (Railfence cipher)
                      H S S C P E X

It is this latter (16th century) two-dimensional transposition cipher that is widely used in modern cipher-systems, not the late medieval ‘anagrammatical’ transposition cipher.

cipher-timeline

Older histories of cryptography tended to situate all these cipher techniques within what I call a  “progressivist mythology” – the mistaken notion that every new idea not only flows out of all previous ideas, but also improves and refines them. In practice, of course, that’s not how things work : many brief local flowerings of ideas (basically, all the cipher varieties marked in italic above) made almost no impression on contemporary cryptographic practice. Even Vigenère’s autokey cipher (taught on every modern cipher course) did not get picked up by cryptography practitioners for more than two hundred years!

And now for the punchline of this post: if you discard the progressivist mythology, the range of possible local enciphering strategies for a given ciphertext is sharply constrained by the date and position of a document.

I argue that the Voynich Manuscript ciphertext is likely a prime example of this: its internal evidence dates it no earlier than 1450 and no later than 1470 – right at the time of the brief flowering of the kind of syllabic and interline transposition ciphers mentioned by Alberti in his De Componendis Cyfris (1467).

And so, if we seek to apply “pure” modern substitution cipher analytical techniques to something built around an unknown transposition cipher system, we would surely fail to make any sense of it – and this is, I believe, what has happened in the case of the VMs… why it has remained a “cipher mystery” for so long.

Review of “The Illustrated Herbal”…

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It’s an oldie, but a goodie: first published in 1979, Wilfrid Blunt and Sandra Raphael’s “The Illustrated Herbal” (particularly the revised 1994 edition) is a must-buy first read for any Voynich Manuscript would-be herbal decipherer – if only to make plain by how much its herbal pages differ from other contemporary herbals.

Of course, Blunt has sneaked a few pictures from the VMs in there (pp. 88-91); and though he cites Alfred Werner’s (1963) observation that one page in the water section is like “a plumber’s dream“, he quickly cautions that “…’Heath Robinson nightmare’ might seem more appropriate” (which is fair enough). But as for commenting on the plants themselves, Blunt is content to pass them by at some speed, in much the same way that Eric Sams fled from the ciphertext. You’ll just have to find your own answers, I guess.

What did I learn? A new way of looking at plants began to emerge from around 1380, which a handful of artists were plugged into – but which most plainly weren’t. For example, even Giotto wasn’t au fait with it (though he “painted birds and other animals with a tolerable naturalism, [he] still made trees like outsize herbs”, p.57), but Leonardo (circa 1500) certainly was (and I would add Van Eyck too). As far as herbals go, if you look at Rinio’s Liber de Simplicibus (1419) [which John Ruskin adored], or even Serapion the Younger’s Herbolario volgare (better known as the Carrara herbal, MS Egerton 2020) (1390-1400), I think there’s something ‘graphic’ about the rendering, that we might today recognise as a “draughtsman-like aesthetic”. But far, far beneath the soaring flights of these stunning, draw-what-you-see masterpieces, the pedestrian copy-what-you-know world of medieval herbals stumbled on regardless.

Voynich Manuscript f17r and f17v, side-by-side
Medieval and modern, on the front and back of the same folio!

In the big scheme of things, I would say that what we see in the Voynich herbal pages is annoying because it fails to fit in either of these two easy pigeonholes – neither the high flyers nor the low achievers. And so the VMs actually has a chasm on each side: and because it contains occasional flashes of both medievalism and modernity, it – doubly annoyingly – lets people read either (or indeed both!) of those into what they see. Yet in order for those flashes of modernity to be present at all, it has to postdate 1380, and must have had an author who was at least aware of both levels: while its overall drawing style matches 15th century stylistic conventions far, far more closely than it does 16th century ones. But there you go.

Blunt and Raphael’s work is built on two lifetimes’ worth of herbal scholarship and reflection: and, nicely, is happy to adopt a light tone when it suits the needs of the passage. This seems to happen particularly when quoting Charles Singer from the 1920s, such as Singer’s description of the Leiden manuscript as “a futile work, with its unrecognisable figures and incomprehensible vocabulary” (the VMs isn’t completely alone, then).

At the end of reading “The Illustrated Herbal”, I came away with my head buzzing with stuff, but none it about where the VMs’ herbals came from – Blunt’s Wittgensteinian “if you can’t say anything useful, stay silent” position on the VMs’ plants has a lot to commend it. No, what I was most inspired by was his discussion of the transmission of ideas about herbals during the 16th century: but I’ll have to return to that in another post (shortly)…

Edith Sherwood’s Voynich plants…

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A few years ago, people Googling for “Voynich” started to see a sponsored “AdWord” link on the right hand side provocatively posing the question of whether there might be some link between the Voynich Manuscript and Leonardo da Vinci, and pointing them to www.edithsherwood.com.

Naturally, I pointed out that this hypothesis was a load of rubbish, primarily because Leonardo was left-handed, and the VMs was written by someone right-handed – a pretty good prima facie reason to dismiss the claim. Edith also relied on a particularly partial reading of the month names in the zodiac section (one of them when mirrored looks a bit like “lionardo”): but failed to notice not only that they all read like Occitan month names (which there is absolutely no reason to think that a young Florentine like Leonardo would have used), but also that they were plainly written by someone else.

Still, unlike the majority of Voynich theory proponents out there, she is at least looking in the right century and (I believe) in the right physical milieu (and possibly even the right town, in a roundabout kind of way): and for that I am grateful. No, don’t be like that: I really am. honestly.

Since then, Edith’s website has had some ups and downs (of which being hacked by some kind of Russan spam harvester and having its mail inboxes overflow were probably some of the downs). But over the last month, she has returned to it and begun to fill it with many additional pages detailing her and her daughter’s thoughts on actual plants apparently matching the drawings in the VMs. They refer to some of Mr Dana Scott’s botanical identifications (but repeatedly refer to him as a her, which Dana doubtless finds irritating), though largely propose their own matches.

Unfortunately, at such a large historical distance, finding botanical equivalents is a hugely hazardous way of trying to move forward: and the secondary claim to have localized the VMs’ production to Italy and/or the Mediterranean from the resulting set of highly contentious / non-obvious plants is simply not methodologically sound, however they try to spin it.

Though many people have taken this same tack over the years, that doesn’t make it a sound methodology: in fact, the consistent lack of progress achieved by it is very probably a clear indicator that doing so is in fact brutally unsound.

What is going on? I think that what we see expressed in the herbal drawings is not metaphor (a symbolic equivalent to or conceptual parallel of an original object) so much as metonymy (where component parts stand in for the whole). One classic example linguists give of this is the way Cockney geezers call a car a motor (or, in its gloriously glottal-stopperish glory, a “mo’er”), where a key component (“the motor”) is sufficient to stand in for the whole (“the car”). You may also recall this from Alexei Sayle’s “‘‘allo John go’ a new mo’er… / I keep tropical fish / in my underpants” [etc etc]).

Despite all that, the possibility remains that Edith and Erica might have managed to make some good observations. As I’m not a botanist, all I can say is that I think their reading of colours in the VMs is once again codicologically naive (because there seem to be plenty of reasons to conclude that most of the strong “heavy” colours in the VMs were not added by the original author): which would unfortunately seem to point in the opposite direction.

Hidden Van Gogh painting…

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Here’s a nice little article showing how science and art history research can work together in a harmonious way: using high-intensity x-rays, a materials scientist and a chemist found an portrait hidden beneath Van Gogh’s “Patch of Grass”.

Incidentally, the webpage is #1 of a set of 7, most of which are a bit poor: but photo #6, Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Cecilia Gallerani with her ermine (though I think it’s actually a weasel) as captured by Pascal Cotte’s multispectral trickery, is quite cool. 🙂

Become A Voynich Manuscript Expert In Just 5 Minutes…

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Would having “Expert on the Voynich Manuscript” on your CV significantly raise your perceived intellectuality (i.e. an extra ten grand per year on your salary)? It would? Then read on, and I’ll reveal the secret two-stage process that They don’t want you to find out…

Stage One. You start out by pretending to be a Voynich expert. All you have to know is:

(a) That the two jargon terms for the Voynich Manuscript are “VMs” (because “Ms” or “MS” is short for “manuscript”) and “Beinecke MS 408” (because it’s 408th in the Beinecke Library’s collection of manuscripts);
(b) That the VMs lives at Yale University in New Haven (because that’s what the Beinecke Library is part of); and
(c) That the VMs is a mysterious old handwritten book that nobody can read. Not even me!

If you really want, you can also read the Wikipedia VMs page: but apart from the fact that the Voynich Manuscript was [re]discovered in Italy in 1912 by dodgy book dealer Wilfrid Voynich (hence its name), feel free to basically skip the rest.

Incidentally, if you’re ever asked about anyone who has written about the VMs (Newbold, Brumbaugh, Terence McKenna, anyone really), any real Voynich expert would nod sympathetically and say “Poor old X – if only they had known what we know now“. Of course, this is a big fat lie, because we still know basically sod all about the VMs.

Stage Two. You continue by actually becoming a Voynich expert. This is also easy, as long as you can get a working grasp of the following basic statements:-

  • The VMs was probably made by a right-handed European between 1250 and 1640.
    If post-1622, explain how Jacobus de Tepenecz’s signature got on the front
    If post-1500, explain how 15th century quire numbers got on it
    If pre-1450, explain how Leonardo-style hatching ended up in some of the drawings
  • If the VMs is a language, note that its words don’t function like those in real languages
    If the VMs is a cipher, note that it doesn’t work like any known cipher
    If the VMs is nonsense, note that its letters appears to follow unknown rules
    If the VMs’ plants are botanical, note that most don’t resemble real plants

Now all you have to do is to devise your very own really, really lame signature theory. As long as it amuses you and doesn’t trample on the above dull bullet-points too badly, congratulations – you’re right up there with the big hitters! But how should you construct this new theory?

Actually, it’s quite helpful here to project how you feel about your own work onto how you think the original author(s) felt about the VMs. For example, if you think that your own work is meaningless, vacuous nonsense written solely to convince your employers to pay your wages, then you might try devising your own variant of the basic hoax theory template (which argues that the VMs is meaningless, vacuous nonsense written by [insert name here] solely to convince Emperor Rudolf II to pay a rumoured 600 gold ducats).

But be bold in your theorising! Be creative! Perhaps think of some vaguely Renaissance figure you admire (though Leonardo’s already taken, and he was left-handed anyway, d’oh!) or just happen to remember, preferably someone whose name you can consistently spell correctly. Wafer-thin historical connections to herbal medicine, astrology, astronomy, ciphers and mystery are probably bonuses here. So, Nostradamus would be a good ‘un: Queen Elizabeth I not so good.

But remember, you’re not trying to prove your theory is correct here (for what kind of an idiot would attempt that with such scanty evidence, 500-ish years after the event?) Rather, you’re just staking your claim to the possibility that

no images were found

might have been the author. And the level of proof required to achieve that is, frankly, negligible.

And hey, even if you choose the name with a pin and a biographical dictionary, if it eventually turns out that you are right, think how unbearably smug you’ll be. Possibly for decades!

Finally: however bad projecting your own life onto the VMs’ blank canvas may be as an historical approach (and believe me, it lies somewhere between ‘rubbish‘ and ‘pants‘), it is guaranteed to give you plenty of interestingly ironic things to say about the VMs when you’re asked about it at those hip higher-earner parties you’ll be attending. Oh, and at your book-launch too, naturally. 🙂

Czech Voynich theory…

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My fellow Voynich old-timer Jan Hurych has long been interested in various Prague-linked research strands: after all, Prague was home to the first three properly-documented owners of the Voynich Manuscript (Jacobus de Tepenecz, Georg Baresch, and Johannes Marcus Marci), as well as its most illustrious claimed owner (Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II).

It is certainly true that Rudolf’s interests and obsessions acted as a powerful magnet to draw wonders from all over Europe to his court. Yet given that the claimed link with John Dee and Edward Kelley is gossamer-thin, it is no less sensible to wonder whether the VMs had been brought to Prague by someone from the town: perhaps someone well-travelled?

I mentioned Rudolf II’s manuscript-collecting astronomer / astrologer / herbalist / physician Tadeás Hájek here recently (who studied in Italy), but Jan Hurych regales me with tales of several others: for one, Hájek’s father (Simon Baccalareus) studied alchemy and collected manuscripts… though what happened to his library after his death is not currently known.

Jan has put together a nice page on one of his favourite Renaissance Czech travelling knights, Krystof Harant de Polzic and Bezdruzic, and his travels from Venice to Crete to Cyprus to the Holy Land to Egypt (etc). But I have to say that if a writer had picked up an intriguing cipher manuscript on their travels, it would be one of the first things they would write about: yet there is no mention. So we can probably rule Harant out, sorry Jan. 🙁

But Jan brings up a rather more full-on Czech Voynich theory, courtesy of Karel Dudek’s Czech webpage (though I used Google Translate, Dudek also put up his own English translation here). Dudek discusses Georg Handsch of Limuz (1529-1578), whose 1563 German translation of Mattioli’s Latin herbal came out a year after Tadeás Hájek’s Czech translation (it even used the same nice woodcuts!) Like Hájek, Handsch was a physician living in Prague, but whose main client was instead Ferdinand II Tyrolský (1529-1595) and his wealthy wife Filipina Welserová (1527-1580).

Dudek got his information from Leopold Selfender’s “Handsch Georg von Limuz – Lebensbild a Arztes aus dem XVI.Jahrenhunderts”: but after a bit of a false start (linking Handsch directly to Baresch, which I doubt would convince anyone), he proposes a possible chain of ownership from Handsch -> Welserová -> Ferdinand II Tyrolský -> Rudolph II -> Jacobus de Tepenecz, before Tepenecz’s estate got looted in the chaos of 1618 and the manuscript somehow ended up with Baresch (with the signature erased).

OK… but why Handsch? Dudek points to the VMs’ botany, and Handsch’s translation of Matthioli’s herbal (though I’d have to say that Hájek fits that bill even better). Dudek also discusses a book by Handsch based on his trips to visit medicinal baths and spas in 1571 called “Die Elbfischerei in Bohmen und Meissen” (eventually published in Prague in 1933), and sees parallels with the VMs’ water section there.

But Dudek gets even more speculative, talking about whether Bartoloměj Welser was financed by Charles V to undertake a (possibly Lutheran?) mission to South America, and drew pictures inspired by exotic plants he saw beside the Orinoco (hey, I thought he was a Womble?)

It’s a good story, but a little lacking in connection to the VMs: and doesn’t really explain why we see (for example) 15th century handwriting in the quire numbers, or even the Occitan-like month names on the zodiac, etc. Perhaps we should really admit that looking for an origin for the VMs in Prague may be a little too hopeful, not dissimilar to the way 19th century German historians’ looked to see if Nicholas of Cusa might secretly have been some kind of Teutonic Leonardo. Nice try… but no cigar.

Leonardo gets a face…?

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It’s not the greatest of art history mysteries, but if you haven’t seen this 4-minute YouTube clip from www.ted.com (an interesting boundary-crossing conference phenomenon you may not have come across) about how Siegfried Woldhek went looking for Leonardo’s face in his notebooks, I think you’ve missed out.

Most modern stories about Leonardo I’d advise taking with a pinch of salt (occasionally more), but this one’s perhaps just a touch more substantial. A simple idea, but one nicely followed through!

[Big restecp goes out to my artist sister Liz Jose for passing this link my way.]

Thorndike on the Voynich Manuscript!

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I’ve often wondered what Lynn Thorndike thought of the Voynich Manuscript: after all, he (his first name came from the town of Lynn, Massachusetts) lived from 1882 to 1965, and continued to publish long after his retirement in 1950, and so was active before, during and after the 1920s when Wilfrid Voynich’s cipher manuscript mania/hype was at its peak. As a well-known writer on alchemy, magic and science, my guess is that Thorndike would surely have been one of those distinguished American academics and historians whom Voynich tried so hard to court after his move from Europe to New York.

One of my ongoing projects is to work my way through all of Thorndike’s works, as it seems to me that his science/magic research programme carved a trail through the jungle of mostly-unread proto-scientific manuscripts that probably falls close to where the Voynich Manuscript is situated: and few historians since him have felt any pressing need to build on his work except in generally quite specific ways. All of which is why I happened to be reading Chapter VII “Nicholas of Cusa and the Triple Motion of the Earth” in Thorndike’s “Science & Thought in the Fifteenth Century” (1929).

Firstly, you need to understand that Thorndike thought that the whole Burckhardtian notion of the (supposedly fabulous and extraordinary) Renaissance was plain ridiculous: there were countless examples of ingenuity, invention, and insight throughout the Middle Ages (and, indeed, throughout all history) to be found, if you just bothered to take the time and effort to place events and writings within their own context.

Furthermore, Thorndike believed that lazy historians, having set up this false opposition between (high) Renaissance culture and (low) medieval scholasticism, then went looking for exceptional individuals who somehow bucked that trend, “forerunners, predictors, or martyrs of the glorious age of modern science that was to come.” (p.133) The list of usual suspects Thorndike suggests – “Roger Bacon, Nicholas of Cusa, Peurbach and Regiomontanus, Leonardo da Vinci” – appears to me not far from how the fake table of Priory of Sion Grand Masters would have looked, if Pierre Plantard been a tad more receptive to non-French history.

Of course, Thorndike – being Thorndike – then goes on to demonstrate precisely how the whole myth around Nicholas of Cusa arose: basically, German historians looking out for a German ‘forerunner, predictor, or martyr‘ plucked three marginal fragments from Nicholas’s work and wove them together to tell a story that was, frankly, not there to be told. Then you can almost feel the fever rising in Thorndike’s genuinely angry brow when he continues:

“Could anything, even the most childish of medieval superstitions, be more unscientific, unhistorical, and lacking in common sense than this absurd misappreciation and acceptation of inadequate evidence, not to say outright misrepresentation, by modern investigators and historians of science?” (p.137)

Punchy (and grouchy) stuff: but he’s far from finished yet. He has an example of something even more scandalous which he feels compelled to share with us:-

“When are we ever going to come out of it? To stop approaching the study of medieval science by such occult methods as the scrutiny of a manuscript supposed to have been written by Roger Bacon in cipher, instead of by reading the numerous scientific manuscripts that are expressed in straightforward and coherent, albeit somewhat abbreviated, Latin?” (p.137)

So there you have it. In 1929, while Wilfrid Voynich was still alive, Thorndike took a measured look at Voynich’s and Newbold’s “Roger Bacon Manuscript” nonsense, and placed it straight in the category of “absurd misappreciation and acceptation of inadequate evidence, not to say outright misrepresentation“.

John Manly may have been more dismissive of Newboldian cryptography in his article in Speculum 6 (July 1931), but Thorndike was no less dismissive of Newboldian history in print in 1929. Just so you know!

The cult of Leonardo?

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(…da Vinci, not di Caprio, in case you think I’ve lost my mind).

Sure, Leonardo was a lovely guy, great technique, cutting edge, a bit flaky – but he was a Quattrocento Florentine, and (if you read Jacob Burckhardt only a little bit too literally) they were pretty much all like that back then. So what is the modern-day ‘cult of personality’ surrounding Leonardo really about?

An old friend’s Italian partner once told me that people in Italy generally rated Brunelleschi over Leonardo: and I can quite see (Brunelleschi’s famous sinking barge aside) why that might well be true. For me, there are two raw types of genius: visionary (who can see how things ought to work with a clarity the rest of us don’t have access to) and practical (who make the impossible actually happen). Sure, Leonardo was a visionary genius, who managed to ‘ship a few products’: but Brunelleschi’s genius comes across as both visionary and practical.

And so it seems to me that sometime over the last century, we (as a society) began to value the visionary over the practical (and the inspiration over the perspiration), as if we can somehow subsist on ideas without action. The cult of Leonardo merely rides this cultural wave, not unlike a carved figurehead on the prow of the ship we’re sailing in: he was simply a good match for the impractical historical non-hero archetype we happened to be looking for.

Which is not to say that I don’t value all the wonderful books on Leonardo out there: my two current favourites are the epic 3d model-fest “Leonardo’s Machines” by Mario Taddei and Edoardo Zanon (Giunti, 2005), and Martin Kemp’s splendid “Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design” (V&A Publications, 2006). But rather, I see Leonardo as being the poster-child for modern anti-practical sentiments, chosen centuries after his death: and the modern worshipping of his life and work as being part of an ideological programme I don’t really understand. The culture preceded the cult, if you like.

I can’t also help wondering if the study of Leonardo is somehow holding back our notion of early modern history, as if we cannot but help look at the Quattrocento through the knotted cluster of ideas about invention we project so strongly onto da Vinci. Perhaps we can do better…

Anyway, today’s gratuitous Leonardo link comes courtesy of The Guardian: a story about film director Peter Greenaway quite literally projecting his own story onto the Last Supper. Having said that, Leonardo would probably have approved: his career in Milan revolved not around painting or engineering, but around designing dramatic entertainments for the Sforza court and its visitors – he was essentially a film director without film.

Incidentally, I recall a Philip K. Dick short story where a whole sequence of “Mona Lisa”s are discovered, along with a huge wooden machine in a cave for “playing” them, like a gigantic zoetrope: which then reveals the (surprisingly saucy) secret behind her smile… But perhaps I just dreamt it. 🙂