Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster
240
Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster
240Hardcover(First Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226612218 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 03/25/2019 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.10(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Leonardo's Disasters
In his 1958 book, Leonardos Visionen, Joseph Gantner read the portents of disaster in Leonardo da Vinci, finding catastrophe everywhere he looked — in the oblique finger of John the Baptist pointing upward into the void, in the rocky background landscape of the Mona Lisa, in the artist's infamous non finito, and in the apocalyptic turbulence of the late drawings of deluge now held at Windsor Castle, where disaster is admittedly less hard to find. Writing in the shadow of the Second World War (Gantner had fled Germany in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution), he imagined disaster as the red thread that led through the labyrinth of the artist's body of work. Not everyone, however, saw the thread as clearly as he. In a 1959 review, Joachim Schumacher accused Gantner of confusing a "favorite approach to Leonardo with the essence of the actual Leonardo," echoing the objections of others that Gantner's account was deeply flawed. "It may well be doubted," Schumacher wrote, "that Leonardo ever allowed any particular concept or subject of his formative fantasy to possess his mind to the extent that he ceased to be the master of his visions to become, in his most mature years, the mere follower and fanatic of his own early obsession with destruction." But what would it mean to allow oneself to be possessed?
I want to begin by recuperating something of Gantner's insight: for Leonardo, catastrophes were not just objects of popular fear or scientific curiosity but images to think with. More specifically, I will argue that the artist's disasters are a point of entry into his materialism, the mere suggestion of which has been a cause of anxiety for his interpreters at least since Vasari accused him of thinking more about nature than about God. But, again, materialism need not refer here to atomism or Epicurean philosophy. Leonardo sometimes used the language of atoms to describe the nature of the elements, but he was not an atomist in any strict sense of that word. His materialism also cannot be explained entirely by his search for natural causes, though the value he placed on sensory experience and the identification of physical causes are good reasons to use the term. What I mean by Leonardo's materialism is rather a "cast of mind" — a style of knowing through which the mind tests its relation to what lies beyond the senses as it seeks out hidden causes and, in so doing, also tests its relation to itself.
I am adapting the phrase "cast of mind" from Michael Baxandall's seminal description of Leon Battista Alberti. But whereas Baxandall writes of Alberti's sometimes "exasperated" desire for balance and analogical stability, I look instead to Leonardo's propensity to catastrophize, his mind reaching, as if automatically, beyond the limits of the sensible by analogy. My ambition here is not to discount the spiritual (particularly Augustinian) elements in Leonardo that Steven F. H. Stowell and others have described, but rather to suggest an alternative to be found in the artist's experience and representation of the mind when it is left to its own devices — or shakes lose from conscious control.
The reflex of catastrophizing, I will argue, was for Leonardo an opportunity to observe the action of the mind when it approaches the imperceptible. The first part of the chapter concerns the discovery of disaster as a figure of thought by exploring Leonardo's "prophecies," or satirical riddles. It is in the context of these generic experiments that he begins to test a materialist style of thought, using the mind's rush to disaster or the worst as his laboratory. The second part reads the artist's representation of catastrophic wind and water as an expression of the mind's involuntariness — particularly the involuntariness of certain kinds of analogies. In the image of natural violence, Leonardo is taught to feel what lies beyond the realm of the senses as a dangerous confrontation. The chapter concludes by looking briefly to one of his contemporaries, Giambattista Pio, whose personal digressions in a humanist commentary shed another light on what it is like to be caught in the storm of catastrophic analogy.
Prophecies
"One shall be born from small beginnings which will rapidly become vast," Leonardo wrote of fire. The imagination too was a highly combustible thing. At the turn of the sixteenth century, all it took was a few lines from an almanac to light the match. When the prognostications of two German astrologers in 1499 were echoed and amplified in Italy shortly after, the vague predictions of an unspecified disturbance under the watery sign gave way to rumors of a second great flood that was to drown "nearly the entire world" in 1524. The news was apparently so common that Machiavelli described it as the kind of small talk one heard in taverns. Some took the prediction very seriously. Agostino Nifo tells us that a few men even built arks and fled to the tops of mountains in order to escape impending doom.
If he had lived long enough to see the failure of these predictions, Leonardo would not have been surprised. Roughly between 1496 and 1500, he composed a series of "prophecies" (profetie), as he calls them in the notebooks — satirical riddles that manage at once to imitate and explode the kind of apocalyptic discourse that would gather momentum as the Italian wars raged on and Luther's Reformation reared its head in the not-so-distant background. These riddles range in topic considerably. Leonardo gives us a taxonomy of them:
First, of things relating to animals; secondly, of irrational creatures [irrationali]; thirdly of plants; fourthly of ceremonies; fifthly of manners; sixthly of cases or edicts or quarrels; seventhly of cases that are impossible in nature [paradoxes], as, for instance, of those things which, the more is taken from them, the more they grow. And reserve the great matters till the end, and the small matters give at the beginning. And first show the evils and then the punishment of philosophical things [e mostra prima i mali, e poi le punitioni delle cose filosofiche].
The groups of prophecies in the notebooks don't strictly adhere to these divisions. Moreover, what is a "great matter" and what is a small one is sometimes hard to say. For E. H. Gombrich, the prophecies "belong to the most bizarre products of [Leonardo's] ever-active mind. These are humorous inventions in the same vein as his riddles and fables and some of them may strike one at first as little better than schoolboy jokes." Some of them, indeed, are quite silly — even obscene. "Oh! how foul a thing, that we should see the tongue of one animal in the guts of another," he wrote of sausages. Or this riddling pronouncement: "In you, O cities of Africa, your children will be seen quartered in their own houses by most cruel and rapacious beasts of your own country." The answer is "Cats that eat Rats." Other prophecies, however, seem less innocuous: "Men will have such cruel maladies that they will tear their flesh with their own nails." The answer again is something familiar — an itch. But for anyone, like Leonardo, who lived through the devastating plague of 1485 in Milan, disaster was perhaps all too close at hand.
We don't know what exactly Leonardo intended with his "prophecies." He may have composed them to entertain the Milanese court — perhaps in a spirited competition with his good friend and fellow artist Donato Bramante, or his assistant Tommaso di Giovanni Masini, known as "Zoroastro" and sometimes called "Indovino," or "the prophet." Perhaps he had in mind as his target Ambrogio Varesi da Rosate — the court astrologer who rose to prominence in Milan when he miraculously cured Ludovico Sforza of an illness. In the Treatise on Painting, Leonardo bluntly condemns astrology as deceptive, writing sarcastically, "Let him who makes a living from fools by means of it forgive me." While we know Leonardo carefully transcribed passages on animals from the medieval astrologer Cecco d'Ascoli's encyclopedic poem, he might have rolled his eyes at other verses, such as these on the effects of comets: "New, frightening and catastrophic / events can occur in the world when / the planet Saturn governs the weather. / Noblemen and kings, along with their / subjects and all other rational creatures, / shake with fear of uncontrolled violence" (lines 345–50). In another riddle Leonardo jokes, "All the astrologers will be castrated, that is the cockerels [roosters]."
One would not have had to go very far to hear prophets crying like roosters in public squares or to discover prognostications in cheaply printed pamphlets. Carlo Vecce cites Giuliano Dati's popular poem on a real Roman flood in 1495, Del diluvio di Roma (1496), as a key source for Leonardo's prophetic satire. Here, the word diluvio, which traditionally refers to the biblical flood, blurs the line between a local disaster and a global event. For Dati, the event was another telling sign of the world's approaching end. If we glance slightly forward in time, Leonardo's prophecies resemble the carnivalesque rhymes that Ottavia Niccoli has documented — ballads, for example, in which astral conjunctions become "conjunctions of cheese and lasagna." Like such texts, Leonardo's riddles translate the catastrophic into the stuff of the ordinary — though not always so deliciously.
Still, one might be forgiven for hearing his prophecies with dread. Leonardo even gives us a stage direction to this effect: "Tell it in a frenzy or crazy way, as if out of madness [in forma di frenesia o farnetico | djnsanja dj ceruello]." As all good fortune-tellers know, such language derives its efficacy from its intensity, but also from its vagueness. The mind leaps to the worst, automatically generating something out of nothing. Even if you are already aware that you are hearing a riddle, you might nonetheless imagine the disaster in all its frightful immediacy, in spite of yourself.
The relief of laughter can also be reflexive. Leonardo was an avid student of what he called accidenti mentali, or "mental events." As he instructs the painter, "Consider those who laugh and those who cry; watch those who scream in anger and, by means of this, all that happens in our minds." It was once reported that the artist told jokes so that he might study men in the act of laughing. Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, the sixteenth-century Milanese artist, describes the scene of Leonardo cracking jokes in order to induce the desired response: "And after they had left, he retired to his room and there made a perfect drawing which moved those who looked at it to laughter, as if they had been moved by Leonardo's stories at the feast!" We might understand the prophecies in a similar way — that is, as an opportunity to observe and study the figure of involuntariness, both the mind's sudden conjuration of the worst and an equally sudden deflation. The experience of involuntariness is the source of the riddles' comedy and also the key to their power.
Through the form of the riddle, Leonardo analyzes what imagining catastrophe does to thought — and what it makes possible conceptually. His materialist "cast of mind" emerges in and through seemingly innocuous examples, which offer leveling analogies between different species, images of otherwise invisible processes, and distortions of time, scale, and perspective. I want to begin to explore some of these ideas by replaying the dramatic stroke of surprise in two of the more dire-sounding "prophecies" before slowing down to explain how their punch lines echo and ramify across the notebooks:
These creatures will form many communities [molti popoli], which will hide themselves and their young ones and victuals in darks caverns, and they will feed themselves and their families in dark places for many months without any light, artificial or natural.
And many others will be deprived of their store and their food, and will be cruelly submerged and drowned by folks devoid of reason [giete sanza ragione]. Oh Justice of God! Why dost thou not wake and behold thy creatures thus ill used?
These two riddles appear to be predicting some great calamity; the mind races. Once again, however, the solutions are quite ordinary. In the first instance, Leonardo is describing the mundane lives of ants; in the second, the fate of bees, which are sometimes drowned for their honey. There is a certain wit already in Leonardo's selection of these particular subjects, for the behavior of ants and bees was itself thought to be prognostic. Leonardo might have stumbled upon this idea in the poetry of Virgil or any number of familiar sources. From the medieval friar Albertus Magnus, for example, we learn that ants "foretell the weather since, before a storm, they gather together in their homes." Bees likewise are described as "hav[ing] a natural knack for foretelling winter and its traits, as well as forecasting rainstorms." In Leonardo's hands, familiar acts of prognostication become doomsday prophecies.
Of course, one might find it easy to dismiss "prophecies" such as these with a laugh or a groan. The diminishment of human tragedy by comparing it to the comings and goings of ants and bees is on its face ridiculous, calling to mind humanist satire like Alberti's 1438 mock encomium on a fly, Musca, a text that Leonardo may have consulted in his teacher Verrocchio's workshop. But, like Alberti, Leonardo was serious about his play. After all, the way we "go to the ant" (as Solomon dictates) and other insects for instruction was an important point of contention for medieval and Renaissance commentators on Aristotle, who had much to say about the lives of these so-called irrational creatures ("irrationali," as Leonardo calls them). In glossing Aristotle's book on zoology, for example, Albertus Magnus argued that "irrational animals" participate in the perfection of man, though in a limited way:
Thus the ant and the bee both build houses and fill them with their stores. But they do not bring back these stores in order that they might organically serve a society of other animals, be they of their own species or of different ones. For one swarm of bees or ants in no way serves another one the way the richness of the storehouses of humans serve each other as means of governing cities and nations.
Such creatures create homes and "return to their dens and nests," but they do not "perceive of community as 'community' grasped in and of itself." We are told that, unlike men, they are amoral and cannot show love, that they kill without mercy. In Leonardo's prophecy on the bees, however, this is reversed. There, it is man who thoughtlessly (and cruelly) kills without mercy — who is "sanza ragione."
Leonardo was quick to point out man's hypocrisy — and cruelty — particularly with regard to other creatures. Riddles such as these also recall the language of medieval bestiaries, several of which we know he owned and studied carefully. The popular medieval bestiary Fior di Virtù, for example, makes bees the very illustration of justice in a passage that Leonardo copies out elsewhere in the notebooks, adding another layer of irony to the exclamation: "Oh Justice of God! Why dost thou not wake and behold thy creatures thus ill used?" In suggesting that bees themselves are worthy of God's justice, Leonardo was also perhaps thinking of Virgil, who had said in the Georgics that bees contain within them an infusion of the divine: "Led by such tokens and such instances, some have taught that the bees have received a share of the divine intelligence, and a draught of heavenly ether; for God, they saw, pervades all things, earth and sea's expanse and heaven's depth." If anyone might have taken this idea seriously, it was Leonardo. In a well-known letter, the Florentine traveler Andrea Corsali would even compare "our Leonardo da Vinci" to the Hindus ("Guzzaratti"): men, he explains, who do not eat meat nor will allow anyone to do harm to "any living thing" (alcuna cosa animate), including insects.
The other side of mistaking ants and bees for people is acknowledging the vulnerability of men. Harnessing the idea of disaster to alter our sense of scale and perspective, the riddles call to mind other moments of sudden relativism in ancient poetry — for example, when Virgil describes the fierce clash of bees in a field with the intensity of an epic battle only to put them again in their place: "These storms of passion, these savage conflicts, by the tossing of a little dust will be quelled and laid to rest." As the commentator Servius noted, from the perspective of the bees, the dust prophesies a "future storm."
This scene in Virgil raises a troubling question of identification. As L. P. Wilkinson has suggested, "Virgil does not say so, but the reader could hardly fail to reflect that if men can thus dispose of bees, Jupiter can thus dispose of men." Leonardo's "prophecies" likewise make tiny creatures of us all. On the same leaf where we find the riddles concerning insects, for example, there is a draft of a fantastical story about a trip to Armenia that includes an account of Mount Taurus collapsing: a disaster imagined at our own scale. Directly beside the scurrying of ants and drowning of bees are sketches of rocky crags and an ominously still body of water — the scene just moments before the collapse? In the foreground, one can make out "almost microscopic sail-boats" (fig. 1). As Gombrich has observed, "It is hard to envisage how Leonardo might have integrated his satirical jest with his tale of ruin and destruction." Reading across the page, we might understand this as the difficulty of attempting to make a home between seemingly incongruous scales and perspectives. Like a handful of dust scattered among a swarm of bees, even the joking evocation of disaster can unsettle our ordinary experience of scale and perspective.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsIntroduction. Catastrophizing: A Beginner’s Guide 1. Leonardo’s Disasters 2. Earthquakes of the Mind 3. Shakespeare’s Catastrophic “Anything” 4. The Earthquake and the Microscope 5. Disaster before the Sublime; or, Kant’s Catastrophes Afterword. Catastrophizing in the Age of Climate Change
Acknowledgments Bibliography Index