Toppling Leonardo: historian claims Leonardo da Vinci a “Hero Cult”
It is not just statues that can glorify a wrongful past. Art historian Susan Grundy identifies Leonardo da Vinci as a hero cult, one that thrives on a collective myth of unassailable authorship. The great white male polymath genius is deemed to be the foundation of the modern intellect. It is a troubling fantasy, as from the end of the nineteenth century onwards it became clear to European scholars that the man who wrote the Notebooks couldn’t have been the Italian Leonardo da Vinci, a point denied.
A painter promoted to genius
Michelangelo was more productive and Raphael more refined, yet the reputation of those towering artistic figures of the Italian Renaissance comes nowhere close to the hero worship reserved for a Tuscan farm boy turned painter, Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo’s heroic status now outstrips all his rivals. It is a modern phenomenon, fame firmly rooted in the recovery and publishing of thousands of unpublished notes, only initiated around the end of the nineteenth century. These notes were considered to be the work of Leonardo, and no one ever challenged this attribution or even tested it.
The notes were transcribed, translated and reproduced as polished texts, despite the inherent difficulties in reading and interpreting them. Versions of meaning now circulate as de facto the author’s intentions. By 2019, when the world feverishly celebrated what it considered unequivocally an Italian achievement, Leonardo had replaced Homer as the literary demi-God of western thinking. However, certain disciplines where the Notebooks excel in intellect and achievement, until the Renaissance were led by Middle Eastern thinkers. In optics and in anatomy, for example, the sources for the Notebooks are realized now as being Arab.
Was Leonardo da Vinci an Arab? At the turn of this century the discovery of Middle Eastern fingerprint whorls found all over pages of the Notebooks led to the startling theory “Leonardo” might have been ethnically half Arab. This was soon followed by a theory he was half Chinese, as it is true much of the technology found in the Notebooks was already thought of or in use in Ancient China. But by 2019, these ethnicity challenges had been firmly squashed by Leonardo cult leaders, and this European hero presented as a demi-god by journalists and academics around the world. Leonardo was reinforced as an unassailable European genius.
The Arab whose identity became subsumed in a European hero cult
Yet the reality is Leonardo da Vinci couldn’t read Arabic or Chinese, and in fact he perhaps couldn’t read and write at all. He hadn’t been to school, never mind to the East. He wasn’t an architect, or an engineer, or a sailor or a botanist. He couldn’t draw maps or design weapons of mass destruction. He was a painter, that was all. That is what he stated he was in his Will, and that was how he was buried. But as just a painter, the whole hero cult collapses.
Cultural definitions play into the social zeitgeist, such as “Italian”, those great lovers of beauty and art, and “(European) Renaissance”, that seeming bedrock of the modern world. But the hero cult teeters and cannot absorb words like “Arab” or “Chinese”, so when Angelo Paratico published in 2015 that Leonardo’s mother might have been Chinese, leader scholar Martin Kemp flew to Italy and in a fevered pitch metaphorically dug up the bones of an Italian peasant he declared (with authority in numerous news articles) was the Italian mother of his great Italian hero.
Certainly, Leonardo da Vinci was Italian. It was the note-maker who wasn’t. In 2019 Susan Grundy published an even more startling theory: it wasn’t that Leonardo da Vinci was Arab or Chinese, it was the note-maker who was Eastern, and the note-maker wasn’t Leonardo. It would take a while for this logic to catch on, but a deep-rooted Western angst will have to find another great polymath hero — or go without one. She presented to the world the obvious candidate to have authored the thousands of pages of notes and designs. He was Zoroastro, which name is Persian. It is unsurprising therefore that the fingerprints are Middle Eastern.
Hero cults, Homer and the bearded-old guy Leonardo
Hero cults are rooted in Ancient Greek culture, but are also an offspring of ancestor worship. The mythical or semi-mythical half-human half-godlike hero is venerated for his almost divine perfection. “Leonardo da Vinci” is a modern manifestation of the hero cult. Like all cults the Leonardo cult has cult leaders, in this case English-speaking and Italian-speaking men who control the thinking of the masses of adherents who worship the European figure of Leonardo da Vinci without question. In the face of all reason, the implausibility of artist Leonardo da Vinci as the greatest European polymath genius is sublimated to the need for that great European polymath genius.
The play to this Homeric hero cult status of Leonardo da Vinci requires the image of the bearded old guy to maintain its stranglehold on unformed opinion. Cult devotees wallow in this image and widely circulate it, even though many images of Leonardo as a younger man have been promoted, such as the Vitruvian man, or the man of around forty or so in Bramante’s portrait of Heraclitus and Democritus (c.1483). It may be partly because instinctively even cult devotees know that the man in Bramante is not Leonardo, but it is also because the cult itself can only thrive on the correct heroic image, and that image is Homerian.
The image of the hero in Vitruvian man is subordinated to the old man, as the flowing beard appeals to the archetype of scribe and prophet. Even though at least three-quarters of the Notebooks were written by a man in his prime, this prime must be muted to feed into the Homeric hero cult. Leonardo is supposed to have, at times, been a military man, yet you never see Leonardo in armour or even armed. If Leonardo had really served as a Borgia general, his skills with the sword would surely have been legendary, but Leonardo is not a hero in the manner of Achilles or Hercules, he is a hero in the manner of Homer, so the old man with beard prevails. He is worshipped for what is thought to have been his mind, not his muscle.
Cult or cultural benefits
Italy has become synonymous with the rebirth of learning after the so-called dark ages, and Leonardo da Vinci has become synonymous with Italy and rebirth. But the root of that synonymy is local. Leonardo is European, Italian, Tuscan, Florentine, Vincian. Significantly, hero cults are always found in the single place, in ancestor worship, and cult leaders of Leonardo da Vinci drive the passion for minute details of his birth and upbringing, even inventing, it would appear, a birth and baptismal record with ten neighbours said to be worshipping at the baby Leonardo’s crib.
Each cult has its shrines, which become the object of devotion and even pilgrimage. In the case of the Leonardo da Vinci hero cult, the existence of actual physical objects other than the Notebooks facilitates the growth of the cult. Adherents flock annually to worship the Mona Lisa, although if you ask, most rational visitors will tell you in reality it’s not that interesting. Another site of pilgrimage is the crumbled and heavily restored Last Supper in Milan. And, of course, Vinci itself attracts adherents to this obscure Tuscan village seen as the birthplace of relearning.
But the wider cultural benefits of hero cultism are minimal. Like all cults, the Leonardo da Vinci hero cult benefits the cult leaders far more than it might cult followers. This local hero, the Tuscan monolingual farm boy from Vinci, is promoted as having slain medieval ignorance, lighting the torch of a renewed interest in learning. But it is all false. The man who wrote these Notebooks was rooted in other ancient cultures, had a solid education, and was undoubtedly a polyglot. He brought this erudition to late medieval Europe, but he didn’t learn it there. This Zoroastro was real, while Leonardo is almost entirely fake.