THE

INCOMPARABLE PAGEANT OF
LEONARDO'S ESOTERIC KABBALISM

Erol Aaron Araf

 
"The perfection of art is to conceal art."
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus

On the quincentennial anniversary of Leonardo Da Vinci's death, many

articles, reviews, books, essays, special editions, biographies, and documentaries
have been written and produced as befits the legacy of the most extraordinary
polymath born to eternity. But he remains elusive: his works are
cryptogrammatic, redolent with symbols, open to endless speculation, and
reinterpreted continually in the light of discoveries. Indeed, as Pietro C. Marani
wrote in Leonardo Da Vinci: Complete Paintings: "The publication of previously
unknown documents often profoundly changes our understanding of the history
of Leonardo's paintings, and sometimes reconfirms older hypotheses once
considered having been superseded by newer and more widely accepted ideas." 

The constant quest for knowing everything about Leonardo is one without
end. In a May 2019 National Geographic story, Leonardo: A Renaissance Man for
the 21st Century, Professor Martin Kemp, one of the world's leading Da Vinci
scholar stated: "I keep thinking I've finished with Leonardo; he keeps coming
back." His observation indicates that it is eminently possible to revisit the
polymath’s art and discover new enigmatic variations ensconced in riddles,
hidden in shadows, and wrapped in universal mysteries. Moreover, as the
German art historian Ludwig Heydenreich observed, less than half of chapters in
Leonardo's Codex Urbinas "can be found among the still extant Vincian
manuscripts proves that substantial parts of Da Vinci's literacy legacy have been
lost." It is, therefore, reasonable to conclude that the long journey into the
enchanting labyrinths of his mind may well not have reached its final destination
even after 500 years. 

Walter Isaacson's Leonardo biography, Leonardo Da Vinci, "magnificent and

spellbinding" as it undoubtedly is, makes no mention of the influence of Jewish
mysticism on Da Vinci's thinking and art. It should be noted, in all fairness, that
Kabbalistic motifs were not as pronounced in Leonardo's paintings as they were in
his contemporary rival Michelangelo's canvasses, murals, and sculptures. In their
classic work The Sistine Secrets, Rabbi Benjamin Blech and Roy Doliner maintained
that Michelangelo had a marked Judeo-mystical ethos manifested through
"embedded messages of brotherhood, tolerance, and free-thinking" in the
Capella Magna frescos. Leonardo, too, was influenced by the same intellectual
currents reflected in some of his works, albeit in a far more esoteric manner than
his nemesis Buonarroti. 

A note of caution is in order: there have been far too many eccentric
interpretations of Leonardo's paintings, particularly The Last Supper, over the
centuries. As George Wolfe, founding editor of Image observed: "Seemingly
endless layers of interpretations, allusions, and parodies have settled over the
original, endowing the painting with cultural ubiquity." Ross King, too in
his Leonardo and The Last Supper, reminded us of "crackpot" theories concerning
'the real meaning' of the wall painting as many critics have fallen into the trap of
hyperbolized interpretations, where conclusions have been drawn from a surfeit
of imagination and faulty premises without the advantage of informed and
insightful observations grounded in the historical and aesthetic realities of
Leonardo's oeuvre.

 The ludicrous often enshrouds the sublime in acts of cultural deracination

and visual recontextualisation: Luis Bunuel's Spanish film  Viridiana, a tableau
vivant of Leonardo's painting - staged with beggars, misfits, rapists, the sexual
avant-garde, and a leper dressed as a bride – was presented as a parody of The
Last Supper where saints and sinners became indistinguishable. Andy Warhol's
interpretation of the wall painting, clearly influenced by Brunel's irreverence,
explored the depths of absurdity by staging Christ in the company of winged
Honda motorcycles. According to Silvano Vincetti, an Italian researcher, there
were disguised and "hitherto undiscovered letters and numbers" in the The Mona
Lisa. Unfortunately, they were so well camouflaged that neither Martin Kemp nor
Kenneth Clark could find them. Bordering on the Monty Phytonesque, the
Japanese Budo Master Masatomi Ikeda discovered in the 12 apostles' stances in
the mural the basic position of classical Oriental martial arts. Some students of
Ancient Civilizations have discerned in the placement of apostles at the Seder the
aura of a winged sun-disk common in ancient heliocentric civilizations. 

“Curiouser and curiouser,” the same year that The Da Vinci Code was
published, an article in the prestigious Italian daily Corriere Della Sera, titled The
Nobility of a Talented Bastard, Leonardo  claimed that "the maestro of Vinci was
born of a Jewess who stemmed from Russia." Furthermore, it argued that
whereas the theory that "Leonardo's mother was a Tuscan countrywoman
remains valid, new evidence opens the additional option that she was, in fact, a
Jewish slave." The article asserted that this was not "farfetched," as both Venice
and Genoa controlled the slave markets of Eastern Europe for centuries. Although
the primary objective was to sell slaves to the marbled harems of sultans in the
Orient, many wealthy Italians bought human chattels in local agoras. Professor
Mario Bruschi of Pistoia, too, in his work Abitanti di Vinci (The Inhabitants of
Vinci), wrote that Leonardo's mother might have been a Jewish slave as many
such serfs were toiling as domestics or rural laborers in Tuscany.

Moreover, what are we to make of the following 'chiaroscuro' fables?

Francesco Cianchi's Was the mother of Leonardo, a slave? Angelo
Pratico's Leonardo Da Vinci: A Chinese Scholar Lost in Renaissance Italy, or Anna
Zamejc's Was Leonardo Da Vinci's Mother Azeri? The plot thickened when Luigi
Capasso, an anthropologist, and director of the Anthropology Research Institute
at Chieti University in central Italy, claimed that Leonardo's fingerprints indicated
his Middle Eastern ethnicity.

The arguments relating to the paternity of Leonardo were irrefutably laid to

rest by Professor Kemp, who forensically investigated the tax records of the
family and the circumstances of Leonardo's mother Catherina. "In the case of
Vinci,” Kemp said, “it has been verified that Caterina's father, who seems to be
pretty useless, had a rickety house which wasn't lived in, and they couldn't tax
him... He had disappeared and then apparently died young. So Caterina's was a
real sob story." The records also showed that Caterina had an infant stepbrother,
Papo, and her grandmother died shortly before 1451, leaving them with no assets
or support, apart from an uncle with a dilapidated house and few cattle. In short,
she was a poor orphaned peasant Christian girl who fell on hard times and was
seduced by Leonardo's philandering father.

Susan Sontag once observed that "Interpretation is the revenge of the

intellectual upon art." But sometimes, artists remain ambiguous about the
meaning of their work of art. A 'conversation' takes place between the creator
and the creation leading to a metamorphosis in stages. For example, Giorgio
Vasari's work Ragionamenti discussed his murals at the Palazzo Vecchio in
Florence and stated that "interpretation" was added both in painting and after
the work was completed. In a similar vein, Vincenzo Borghini, a Benedictine
scholar, wrote, "Reading the works of poets and other good writers and also
reconsidering and rethinking what has already been said, we shall little by little
sharpen up, embellish and enrich these intentions." However, for the art
historians and critics, the amplification of the intentions of the painter or writer
must take place within 'contextual consistency' where allegories are relevant in
their portents and in accordance with the praxes of the narrative construct. To
discern Kabbalistic motifs in some of Leonardo's works is one thing; to see in the
seating of the Apostles in The Last Supper the positioning of ancient Asian
warriors is another thing. Amplification, elaboration, and interpretation ought to
occur in the light of the French caveat: toute proportion gardée.

 With these proscriptions in mind, we would like to advance the working

hypothesis that for Leonardo the allure of Renaissance Universalism and
Esotericism blended with Kabbalistic motifs constituted the essence of his artistic
discourse on the disciplines of Beauty.

Long before Madonna, Demi Moore, Gwyneth Paltrow, and other modern
celebrities fell under the sway of Jewish mysticism, the leading lights of the
Renaissance became passionate about Hebrew, the Bible, Jewish sacred texts,
and the Kabbalah. The renowned art historian Matilde Battistini in her
work Losapevi dell' arte: Simboli e allegorie, wrote: "The symbolic images of the
15th and 16th Centuries were profoundly influenced not only by ancient Greco-
Roman myths but also by the philosophy of Plato and by the hermetic and
esoteric traditions derived from the Jewish Kabbalah."

Lorenzo Medici's golden era gave us a glimpse at the world of the latter-day
'Academy of Athens' in Florence, wherein Christian-Jewish synectics contributed
to a fundamental change of outlook by sweeping away the ‘verities’ of yesterday.
As Cecil Roth, in his work Jews in the Renaissance, argued: "There is no country on
earth where you can find a symbiosis more harmonious between Jews and
Christians than in the Italy of the Renaissance." As such, it was no accident of
history that the fates of Tuscan Jewry and the House of Medici were intricately
interwoven.

For a brief shining moment, the quintessential quest of the Renaissance,

"Going back to the original," engendered the florescence of Hebraic and Judaic
studies focusing on reading the Jewish Bible and Biblical exegesis in the original.
The poetry of the Kabbalah infused the world of Christian spirituality with
mysticism and provided artists with a new lexicon for conveying secret meanings
embedded in their paintings. Although most Christian Kabbalists considered the
Book of Splendours as a guide to convert Jews, the Kabbalah, nonetheless,
became a medium of conversation, paving the way for a Judeo-Christian
conversation that did not require transcription, but metamorphosis.

To appreciate the importance of Hebrew and Jewish mysticism in the early

Renaissance suffices to note that Johann Reuchlin - German-born Catholic
humanist and a scholar – argued that Hebrew was the language "God spoke with
his Angels." Also, we have to bear in mind that Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, many
popes, cardinals, and philosophers spoke and wrote in the Israelite language.
Moreover, Hebrew and Judaic Studies departments established with influential
patrons in Florence, Sienna, Mantua, and Venice immeasurably contributed to the
development of Judaic learning in Italy. Thus the new age of the Renaissance
created an intellectually and spiritually inclusive environment for Jews; they
openly embraced a myriad of profane and secular studies, including Hebrew
grammar, lexicography, poetry, drama, philosophy, even a passion for Neo-
Platonic scholarship. 

The extraordinary story of the Jewish Renaissance was told admirably by

Alessandro Guetta, in his book Les Juifs d’Italie à la Renaissance. In this new
world, Eliyahu Bahur Levita researched the vocalization of sacred Hebrew texts,
Azaryah min ha-Adumim criticized rabbinic interpretations of holy books, Yehuda
Abravanel wrote the well-known Neo-Platonic work Dialoghi d'amore, and
Yehuda ben Yitzchak Somi Misha'ar Ariyeh, philosopher-playwright, published the
wildly popular The Comedy of a Marriage. Elia Del Medigo, too, as a confirmed
follower of Averroes - a Muslim Andalusian philosopher and judge who wrote
about many subjects, including philosophy, theology, medicine, astronomy,
physics, Islamic jurisprudence law, and linguistics - espoused controversial views
about the unity of intellect and the autonomy of reason from the boundaries of
revealed religion. Looking at the world through the prism of the age of
discoveries, Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol, a Jewish-Italian geographer,
cosmographer, scribe, and polemicist, saw in the discovery of America the
dawning of a new age of Universalism. His contemporary, Rabbi Johanan
Alemanno, a leading Jewish humanist in Florence, became a celebrated and much
sought-after interpreter of the Kabbalah. 

The symbiosis of these two Renaissances, finding common ground in Jewish,

Kabbalistic, Classical, and Neo-Platonic studies, had far-reaching consequences for
the history of the European civilization. The Renaissance thirst for "drinking from
the well and not the pitcher" - with its emphasis on the original "written word" in
the Hebrew Bible - was to play a significant role in the nascent Reformation. In
the long journey of the opening of the European mind that would eventually lead
to Spinoza, Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Leibniz, Fenelon, and Bayle, to name
but the most illustrious, not to mention the philosophers of the French
Revolution, Florentine Jewish and Christians scholars explored the boundaries of
the Humanist temperament during the Quattrocento.

How was Leonardo affected by these new trends in Florence?

The most prominent influencers of Leonardo's Esoteric and Universalist

thinking were two Florentine Kabbalists Marcilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola,
and the Franciscan reformer Joao de Mendes de Silva [Amadeus of Portugal] a
converted Jew who never forgot his origins.
The Procession of the Bishop in Front of the Church of S. Ambrogio by Cosimo Rosselli, detail of
Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino

As Paolo Bernardini observed in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the
West 1450- 1800: "The most daring scientists and philosophers, such as Marcilio
Ficino and Pico Della Mirandola were decisively influenced by Jewish mysticism
and scholars are beginning just now to understand and reappraise the role of the
Kabbalah, prominent and so far neglected, in late Renaissance authors, such as
Giordano Bruno. This is only the beginning of what is bound to become a
significant reassessment of Christian Renaissance thought." 

Marsilio Ficino was an Italian scholar and Catholic priest, student of Judaism,
Biblical scholar, Hebraist, and one of the most consequential humanist
philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance. He was best known for his
translations of Plato's writings and the corpus of esoteric, mysterious old treatises
known as the  Hermetica from Greek to Latin; these works became widely
available in Florence after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The  Hermetica,
probably originating from Egypt in late antiquity, was attributed to a mysterious
ancient philosopher, Hermes Trismegistus, influenced by Mosaic Esoterism.
Accordingly, as we shall argue, the spiritual and metaphysical formulations of
the Hermetica, through Ficino's influence, may have found esoteric echoes in
some of Leonardo's oeuvre. 

In Ficino’s student and friend, Pico della Mirandola’s view, the Kaballah
offered a different mystical doctrine derived from the Hebrew lawgiver and a
similar outlook on cosmology. Armed with a greater knowledge of Hebrew than
any other non-Jewish scholar and his burning interest in the Kaballah, Pico
formulated a new synthesis of Hermetic-Kabbalistic formulations in Twenty-Six
Magical Conclusions. 

The most significant outcome of Pico's encounter with Jewish mysticism was
his Kabbalistic theses "according to his own opinion" (Conclusiones cabalisticae
Secundum opinionem program). The work embarked to confirm the truth of the
Christian religion from the foundations of the Kaballah. Its main conclusions were
included in his book the 900 Theses epistemologically derived from all branches of
knowledge and submitted for disputations in Rome in 1486. The Kaballah, also
mentioned in his celebrated Oration on the Dignity of Man, was discussed at
great length in Apologia, where he defended 13 of his theses, condemned
explicitly by the Church: one of which was the idea that "no science can make us
more certain of Christ's divinity than magic and Kaballah." 

The Heptaplus, a sevenfold interpretation of the biblical account of Creation,

also featured Kabbalistic traits. Pico's conception of Genesis was fundamentally
different from orthodox medieval and Renaissance approaches to Biblical
interpretation. Rather than use the traditional four senses of Scripture, Pico
adopted an esoteric- hermeneutic stance infused with Kabbalistic exegesis about
the Master of the Universe and the origins of the world. Pico, obviously, like
Freud, thought that the Kaballah 'was pure gold!

The members of the Florentine Academy often met at Pico's library, which
contained the most outstanding collection of Kabala manuscripts in Europe. In
1486 della Mirandola charged Flavius Mithridates– alias Raimundo Moncada, a
converted Jew of Sicilian provenance – to translate from Hebrew into Latin a
whole Kabbalistic library, encompassing most of the Jewish mystical works then
available. Mithridates devoted many years of his life meticulously writing his rich
esoteric corpus. When Pico died in 1494, the manuscripts with the translations
were gifted the Vatican Library in Rome, where they have remained in the
archives till today.

Pico's Kabbalistic- Humanist conception relating to Creation being a reflection

of divinity may well have influenced Leonardo’s disposition to strive to give
expression to the divine through the agency of his intellect and creativity. He thus
observed: "We, by our arts, may be called the grandsons of God."

In such a rich climate of interfaith studies anchored in the source of the faith,
some Christian Hebraists adopted the heretical notion that all religions and
spiritual traditions contain the same eternal truths and were harmonious. The
allure of such notions for Leonardo was amply supported by his multifarious
philosophical observations in his Note Books. Giorgio Vasari, who understood Da
Vinci’s deism and 'Ecumenical Universalism,' wrote: "[Leonardo's] cast of mind
was so heretical that he did not adhere to any religion, thinking perhaps that it
was better to be a philosopher than a Christian.

 The story of how Leonardo might have been exposed to renewed interest in
Hebraist & Kabbalists studies unfolded in the palaces, castles, and country villas of
Lorenzo de Medici, "the laurel who sheltered the birds that sang in the Tuscan
spring," [as the patron of the arts was referred to in Florence] remains to be told
fully. We know very little about Leonardo's time in Lorenzo's court during his
initial Florentine Period. Giorgio Vasari, his first biographer, remained silent on his
relationship with the Medicis; but, according to Anonimo Gaddiano, an enigmatic
chronicler of Florentine artists, Leonardo was welcome in Lorenzo's court: "As a
young man, he was with the Magnificent Lorenzo de Medici, who provided for
him, and employed him in the gardens in the Piazza di San Marco in Florence."
Lorenzo obviously must have thought very highly of Da Vinci for he encouraged
him to spread his wings in Milan where the Duke Lodovico Sforza was searching
for a gifted artist to design and create an equine statute of his late father.
 It is not unreasonable to assume that so talented an artist like Da Vinci would
have been invited to attend various colloquia, art presentations, and discussions
at Lorenzo's palaces in Fiesole, Poggio, Caiano, and Cafaggiolo, in the Abbey
Camaldoli, Palazzo Medici Riccardi or in Ficino's academy at Careggi where artists,
painters, sculptors, and intellectuals gathered. We have evidence that Da Vinci
and Michelangelo attended the lectures of John Argyropoulos: a leading Greek
hermetic scholar who taught in Florence at the time.

     It would be incorrect to suggest that Leonardo was a member of Pico's Neo-

Platonic set. His entourage consisted of his understudies Tommasso and Atalante;
his' book club' friends Cammelli and Bellincioni; his teachers Toscanelli and
Argyropoulos, and his intimate friends Jacopo and Fioravanti. He also knew other
artists living in Florence at the time inter alios: Botticelli, whom he did not admire;
Michelangelo, whom he could not stand; Ghirlandaio, whose Last Supper he
studied; and Perugino with whom he apprenticed at the workshop of Verrocchio.
Nevertheless, the intoxicating perfume of Jewish mysticism wafting through
Medici palaces adorned with classical busts, statutes, columns, inscriptions, and
Roman sarcophagi would have aroused Leonardo's latent esotericism.

The manifestations of Kabbalistic-Esoteric inflections in some of Leonardo’s

paintings and drawings have been discussed by Michael Rapp in L'Esoterisme de
Leonardo De Vinci, by Paul Vuillaud in  La pensee esoterique de Leonard de Vinci,

and by Josephin Peladan's in La Dernière Leçon de Léonard de Vinci, and in L’Art

Idealiste and Mystique and La philosophie de Léonard de Vinci d'après ses
manuscripts. All three philosophers, students of the aesthetics of Esoterism were,
not surprisingly, profoundly influenced by Jewish mysticism. Accordingly, the
distillation of studies mentioned above revealed that Leonardo's metaphysical
curriculum was a syncretical construct of his Esotericism, Universalism, tinged
with Kabbalistic motifs.

Leonardo’s philosophical ‘building blocks’ can be considered in the context of

five major intertwined paradigms embedded in his art: Symbolism, The Prime
Mover [the quest for God], Macrocosm and Microcosm, Man and Nature,
Androgyny [confluence of opposites], and Divine Archetypes.  

1- Esoteric-Kabbalistic Symbolism

The essence of Leonardian symbolism comprised of his quest to unite the

Infinite and the Finite- a quintessentially Esoteric and Kabbalistic endeavor- has
been captured by Thomas Carlyle in his celebrated observation quoted in G. B.
Tennyson's Carlyle Reader: "In a symbol, there is concealment and yet revelation:
here, therefore, by silence and by speech acting together comes a double
significance. In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more
or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the
Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were,
attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made
happy, made wretched." Accordingly, the ethereal embroidery of mysticism
informed many Leonardo paintings under a mantilla of hidden codes expressed in
the hieroglyphic language of allegories, symbols, and allusions designed to blend
the Infinite with the Finite.
 Leonardo’s drawing of pain and pleasure: confluence/unity of opposites

2- Prime Mover - Quest for God

        According to Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Kaballah and Jewish Mysticism, Kabbalah
refers to the teachings of Jewish mystics, their reflections on the divine, and their
experiences of God through which seekers embark upon a spiritual quest to
discover the Infinite and his immanence in souls, nature, and the world. With
Leonardo, the search for the Eternal provided the inspiration which he poured
into his works. "The painter's mind is a copy of the divine mind," argued Da Vinci,
"since it operates freely in creating the many kinds of animals, plants, fruits,
landscapes, countryside, ruins, and awe-inspiring places." He found proof for the
existence and omnipresence of God in nature, light, color, botany, the human
body, and creativity. In his mind, Beauty reflected the perfection of the Prime
Mover; the Creator thus gifted Beauty to the world through nature; and artists, in
communion with the Infinite, created a template for capturing Beauty in all its
manifestations through divinely sparked talent.
 All his faith-based paintings reflected the inspiration he derived from the
Prime Mover. Giorgio Vasari, on Leonardo da Vinci, Lives of the Artists, expressed
the dialect between the Eternal and Leonardo as follows:  "The heavens often rain
down the richest gifts on human beings, but sometimes they bestow with lavish
abundance upon a single individual beauty, Grace, and ability, so that whatever
he does, every action is so divine that he distances all other men, and displays
how his greatness is a gift of God and not an acquirement of human art. Men saw
this in Leonardo."
3- Macrocosm and Microcosm - 'As above, so below.'

 Analogies between Microcosm and Macrocosm are vital components of

Jewish mystical philosophes. There is a structural similarity between the human
being, the Micro realm, known as Olam Katan [the minor universe], and the
celestial Macro kingdom: the Kingdom of the Prime Mover Olam Gadol. Leonardo
embraced the analogy in both his art and his science. He famously wrote: “The
ancients called man a lesser world, and certainly the use of this name is well
bestowed, because his body is an analog for the world.”

4- Man and Nature

Martin Kemp, in his superb intellectual biography of the polymath, Leonardo

Da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Men, argued that the Florentine's
search for scientific rules governing both man and the universe resulted in the
imaginative reconstruction of nature in masterworks such as The Last Supper, The
Mona Lisa, and St. John, which revealed his increasingly complex vision of man in
the context of nature. “And towards the end of his life, Leonardo became
fascinated with the mathematics underlying the 'design of nature,' behind which
lay the ultimate force of the 'prime mover,' as manifested with supreme power in
his Deluge drawings," concluded Professor Kemp.
 A Leonardo’s Deluge drawing

5- Androgyny Fusion of Male & Female Aspects of Deity 

Kabbalistic and Esoteric dualities - 'confluence of opposites' – were central to

Leonardo's art and applied as a method of capturing 'truth beyond perception.'
Leonardo tried to capture the mysteries of the aura between the physical and the
metaphysical through exploring the resonance of a myriad of aesthetic equations
including the male-female dialectic pertaining to the ‘harmony of opposites’
evidenced in his androgynous paintings of St John the Baptist with the Attributes
of Bacchus, John in The Last Supper fresco, Madonna portraits, Salvador Mundi,
Baptism of Christ with Verrocchio, the angel in the Virgin of the Rocks, and
numerous male-female drawings such as his studies of Youthful Heads. We also
have the erotic and transsexual drawing by Leonardo that surfaced from art
repositories featuring a different version of his Louvre portrait of the Baptist
depicting the saint with female breasts and male genitals. It became known as
Angelo incarnato — "the angel made flesh" through the infusion of opposites.
Indeed, as John Ruskin wrote: "In all exquisite objects, there is found the
opposition of one part to another and a reciprocal balance." 
 Were his androgynous works of art, in any way, influenced by the Kabbalah?
Truth be told, there are no clear- cut answers; we can, nonetheless, postulate that
Jewish mysticism, so prevalent in his milieu, could have been one of the factors
where deity’s male and female aspects were seen as central to the identity of the
Prime Mover.

Among a myriad of transcendental gifts Leonardo possessed, connecting

opposites and creating a whole was probably the most consequential. He
articulated his concept of the ‘confluence of opposites’ by stating: “We live in a
world of duality, but our purpose is to find opposites, connect them and create
oneness. Our passion should be using the illusion of separateness to create new
wholes.” And one of his quotes on the ‘coincidence of opposites’ was pure
Kaballah: “Only by knowing the wholeness of both sides we can realize that they
are actually one ‘coin.’ Only by knowing the wholeness of a thing we can go
beyond and use it with its true potential.”

Likely Leonardo self-portraits as a young man: Incarnate Angel (drawing 1514, private
collection), St John the Baptist (1514, Louvre, Paris); Salvador Mundi (1513, Collection of the
Marquis de Ganay, Paris); Man with Dog (National Museum, Washington DC).  
 The spheres of divine Creation in the Kaballah are also represented in the
Tree of Life, encompassing God's male and female attributes expressed as the
'confluence or coincidence or unity of opposites.' These balancing elements are
called Chessed, the feminine and G'vurah, the masculine side are harmonized to
attain spiritual serenity in life: a prerequisite for reaching out to the celestial
sphere.
  As Rabbi Allen S. Maller observed, "Kaballah teaches that the Shekhinah (the
feminine presence of God) rests on a Jewish man when he makes love to his
Jewish wife with a sense of reverence, tenderness, adoration, and on Shabbat.
The Shabbat adds holiness and closeness to their feelings. The key attitude is the
sense that his wife is God's gift, the source of his blessings, and the most
wonderful manifestation of God's presence."

While male-female dualities are central in many diverse esoteric

civilizations, nonetheless, as Elliot R Wolfson observed in his fascinating work
Circle in the Square: Studies of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism, gender in Jewish
mysticism, featuring the thematic correlation of eroticism and esotericism, is of
immense significance. The eroticism of Leonardo’s paintings presented an
incomparable pageant redolent with the vague sensual poetry of temptations, a
sequence of desires, nirvanic reveres, and longings on the cusp of consummation.
The equation of man-woman fusion with the union between Heaven and Earth
was so profoundly Jewish and so surreptitiously embedded in Leonardo’s
paintings that we might be forgiven for reasoning inductively that Judaic
mysticism must have animated his brush.
 f
Saint John the Baptist

 6- Archetypal Cosmic Image Divine Archetypes

As Karen Carty argued in the Art of Sacred Geometry, many Kabbalistic

impressions have also been interpreted as Christian, Platonic and Greco-Roman
motifs. This is not surprising given that all three Abrahamic faiths have drawn
from the mythological wells of Anatolian civilizations preceding them by
millennia. "Sacred Geometry is now being uncovered in architecture, art, myth,
legend, symbol, and texts left as legacies to modern man by ancient civilizations
around the globe. It is found in the great mystery schools of Plato and Pythagoras,
the esoteric brotherhoods throughout the ages, the Hebrew Kabbalah, and during
the Renaissance, in the works of Vitruvius, Fra Luca Pacioli, and the great Master
Leonardo Da Vinci" concluded Carty. And nowhere is the Esoteric-Kabbalistic
paradigm based on ideal proportions of the Human and the Heavens rendered
more explicit than in the polymath’s iconic Vitruvian man.

Vitruvius’s design instantly captured Da Vinci’s imagination as it offered a

Platonic analogy illustrating the symbiotic relationship between the Macrocosm
and Microcosm. In other words, it offered a Weberian Ideal Type embodying the
cardinal sources and components of his world view: Renaissance Humanism,
Universalism, Esotericism and the Kaballah.

Kabbalah’s ‘Adam Kadmon’

Leonardo's Vitruvian Man was more than the study of ideal human
proportions; in Renaissance terms, it embraced Pico's cardinal thesis that
humanity expressed the quintessence of Creation as a Universalist paradigm. "In
Renaissance mathematics and Neo-Platonism," wrote Richard Hooker in a paper
on The Early Italian Renaissance, "the Square in geometry represents the
terrestrial world, and the Circle depicts the celestial world, while the Triangle
delineates the divine world. The Circle and Square in da Vinci's drawing represent
more than the mathematics of drawing a human figure; they represent how the
human being encompasses in its reach the whole of the terrestrial and celestial
worlds." 
 The Ten Sefirot Vitruvian Man

The Vitruvian Man is the ‘Primordial Man,’ also called 'Supreme Man' and
Adam Kadmon, who in the Kabbalah is the first conception of Man, not the
Biblical flesh and blood Adam, conceived after the contraction of God's infinite
light heralding the advent of Creation after Destruction. It is interesting to note
that in Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, we find the mirror image of the Kabbalistic Tree
of Life based on the emanations and attributes of the Creator called the Ten
Sefirot. 

A clarification is in order: the Esoteric Archetypal Cosmic Image of the human

found its counterpart in the Divine Archetypes of the Ten Sephirot [ten different
channels through which God is manifested] in the Kaballah. Leonardo's Vitruvian
Man both from the point of ideal proportions [he was not only measuring the
human, but he was also scaling the Heavens] constituted the perfect
manifestation of the merging of the visible with the invisible, the flesh with the
soul, the body with the emanations of God with spheres representing spiritual
attributes. Superimposing the Ten Sefirot on The Vitruvian Man revealed the
thematic confluence of the Microcosm and the Macrocosm. In short, Leonardo's
Vitruvian Man was a universal symbol, a Kabbalistic construct featuring the
emanations of the Infinite expressed as a synthesis of the above and the below.

The languid conversations in the Neo-Platonic halls of Florence were rudely

interrupted when the peace of Italy came to an abrupt end. Savaronola's fire and
brimstone reign extinguished the fledgling light of Renaissance that held a lantern
to Da Vinci's Universalism. A Catholic theocracy of damnation and apocalyptic
messiahs flung open the gates of Dante's Inferno; Dominicans and Franciscans
joined hands with Rome in silencing science and reason. In celebrating the bonfire
of the vanities, in acts of insensate barbarity, magnificent works of art were lost
to incandescent philistinism; fear and loathing coursed through the veins of the
gentle land. As if the return of the dark ages was not enough, the French under
Charles VIII brutally invaded Italy and lay to waste many cities; Jews and the
remnants of the Medici family were expelled from Florence. All these calamities
left deep seams in Leonardo's consciousness. 

These events also exacerbated his profound disdain for rigorously enforced
religious orthodoxy; he refused to abide by the prescribed acts of obeisance
before the reigning lords of faith. Da Vinci was appalled by the lucrative business
of selling relics for salvation, saying: "I see Christ once more being sold and
crucified and his saints martyred." In his notebooks and letters, he "vehemently
objected to the sale of indulgences, liturgical and ceremonial pomp, obligatory
confessions, and the cult of the saints." Da Vinci could not stand theological
inflections: he criticized all ecclesiastical authorities for their lack of ethical
standards, absence of fundamental Christian values, and gluttonous indulgence in
earthly pleasures; their insincere pious edifications repelled him. As a scientist, he
questioned the contemporary reality of priests and monks' miracles and lamented
the clergy's ignorance. Inevitably, he became the prototypical reformist without
adhering to any creed. 

   His "heretical" views," "blasphemous anatomical studies," "outrageous

drawings," "satanical designs," and nonconformist paintings finally caught the
attention of the Grand Inquisitor, Thomas de Torquemada, circa 1492. During
Leonardo's questioning, the head of the Holy Office, burning with apostolic fire,
lambasted the polymath's sexual preferences, among his other alleged sins, and
roared at him: "The sodomites in your city have the souls of the unborn on their
conscience. Those souls scream for justice — to the fire. To the fire! Instead, your
leaders promote sodomy by levying fines instead of the proper sanction, which is
the fire. When you tax crime, you make it a commodity. The Medicis make their
fortune from this vice, at the price of Florence's eternal shame!" He survived
thanks to the influence of his admirers in Florence and Milan. Still, his journey
remained perilous as it was the one that would consign Bruno Giordano to the
flames and eventually destroy Galileo for "vehement suspicion of heresy." In an
age where a sinister friar like Savaronola, with Mephistophelean malice, could
incite the masses with venomous sermons, Leonardo trod on a path of thorns. 

 In the gradual process of his disenchantment with the orthodoxies of his
time, Leonardo gradually blended his Esoterism, his Universalism with Jewish
mysticism's grand intellectual architecture, inspiring him to develop a new
aesthetic curriculum redolent with symbols, allegories, allusions, and metaphors
designed to conceal his doubts about his faith without compromising his belief in
an omnipotent deity. He endeavored to deal with these conflicts by incorporating
concealed messages in his paintings. Making the hidden meaning beneath more
critical than the surface images was a time-honored method of communicating
the unthinkable and the forbidden in the age of spiritual absolutism. 

Among all the Renaissance Judaic scholars who contributed to the

development of Leonardo's ideas, especially in the context of divine equivalence
of all faiths, one philosopher stood out: Joao de Mendes de Silva [Amadeus of
Portugal] a Jew who converted and tried to unite the two faiths. He reminds us of
the life, times and philosemitism of His Eminence Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger,
Archbishop of Paris who converted but referred to himself as “Cardinal, Jewish
and son immigrants.”

We know this because Amadeus' 'bestseller' Apocalypse Nova was

mentioned by Leonardo as "Libro Del Amadeus" in a list of books he possessed.
His Latin, which was deficient in Florence, improved considerably in Milan, where
he might have read Amadeus' work. Consequently, we believe Da Silva's
conceptual griffe – the Judeo-Christian ethos- may well have played a role in the
polymath’s thinking and painting.

Amadeus' journey in life was fascinating: after a series of mysterious

peregrinations in the new and old words, combining piety with war, he landed in
Rome to become an advisor to the Vicar of Christ. During his sojourn in the City of
St. Peter, he wrote the Apocalypse Nova, composing it as a prophetic revelation
made to him by an angel. The literary genre was that of the latter part of the
Quattrocento preoccupation with the end of times. The revelation did not,
however, deal with events but with the meaning of history. It also followed the
Franciscan scholar, Duns Scouts who had placed 'free will' at the core of his
philosophy. Scouts was influenced by the Judaic precept that for Man to have free
choice, he must have inner free will and an environment where a choice between
obedience and disobedience exists. God thus created the world, according Jewish
sages, where both good and evil could operate freely. Leonardo's view that "Man,
having been granted free will, is the protagonist in life" neatly summed up the
essence of the ideas of Duns Scouts, Kabbalist Isaac Luria, and Amadeus of
Portugal.

Samuel Kurinsky and Father Franco Bontempi's Hebrew Historical Association

monograph titled Leonardo Da Vinci, Artist, Humanist, Scientist, Jew dissertated
the philosophy of Amadeus in Apocalypse Nova in considerable detail. Although
they were wrong on the ethnicity of Leonardo, their cogent Judeo-Christian
interpretation of some of Da Vinci's paintings made a compelling case for arguing
that Amadeus had a significant influence on Da Vinci’s interest in interfaith
rapprochement.

 "Amadeus’ work is in two main parts," wrote the authors," the first regarding
Amadeo receiving the revelation, the second, entitled Sermones, a theological
treatise attributed to John the Baptist.” The format simulated disputations
between Christians and Jews, initiated in Paris in the 13th century and carried
over to Spain. Amadeus took the controversial and heretical position advocated
by Nachmanides in the course of the Barcelona Disputation [1263] that the ‘law is
eternal, the rule of God is eternal, and the people of Israel are eternal.”
Furthermore, Amadeus argued that the task of the Messiah was to confirm the
Old Law and that Christianity and Judaism were branches of the same tree and
Jewish festivals were not obsolete but valid and alive. 

Kurinsky and Bontempi also explored the Judaic significance of Leonardo's

mysterious painting Saint John the Baptist in the light of Amadeus' nonconformist
philosophy. In Mendes de Silva’s mind, John the Baptist represented the old and
Jesus the new religion and the cousins were coequal. Leonardo's Saint John
provided the perfect template for metaphorically portraying this quintessential
Judeo-Christian duality embedded in the hermaphrodite saint.

  According to Brian C. Dennert, in his dissertation on John, the Baptist and the

Jewish Setting of Mathews, John's ministry was rooted in Jewish expectations, and
his use of the Jordan River revealed him as "organizing a symbolic exodus from
Jerusalem and Judea to return as a renewed Israel." Indeed, the Halakah of John
showed him to have been a profoundly observant Jew in conflict with the
Pharisee establishment in Jerusalem. He was more closely associated with Old
Testament Hebrews than Jesus although he foretold, according to the Gospels,
the latter's ministry. For both John and the Qumran Essenes, 'wilderness' was the
place of spiritual preparation. They also emphasized the need for purification by
ritual cleansing in 'living water,' Mikveh [ritual bath], which is associated with
eschatological salvation in Jewish tradition. Therefore, the act of baptism was
firmly rooted in Jewish traditions, and John the Baptist remained an integral part
of this austere Jewish world in the wilderness. 

In the context of Jesus blessing John in Leonardo's charcoal drawing The

Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, one might interpret
Jesus' benediction of the Baptist as an act sanctifying continuity of faith. In
traditional iconography, the roles were reversed; it was Saint John the Baptist
who consecrated Jesus. 
 The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist

Likewise, in the Louvre central panel of the Polyptych for The Confraternity of
the Immaculate Conception [The Virgin of the Rocks] depicted Mary, the infants
St. John the Baptist and Jesus, together with the Archangel Uriel, in a mysterious
cavern. The child Baptist was placed higher than the infant Jesus, and it was Jesus
who blessed his cousin, not the other way round, as shown in the epiphany of
traditional representations. The lower right side of the picture [Jesus] was almost
incidental to the story; the de rigueur iconography was absent: no haloes, crosses,
winged angels, and no radiating Holy Spirit. Also, in the painting, Uriel pointed to
St. John the Baptist and not to Jesus; it was the Virgin who held the cherub Baptist
and not the child Jesus. "Leonardo expresses this syllogism in theological terms"
wrote Kurinsky and Bontempi, "by placing Jesus below John the Baptist in
the Apocalypse Nova, John the Baptist is given equal honor to that of Jesus. John's
birth is given the same weight as the birth that took place in a cave at
Bethlehem." The influence of Amadeus was palpable in this canvass. As Pietro C.
Marani wrote: "For the composition, Leonardo seems to have been inspired by
the Apocalypse Nova, a semi heretical text. His book offered a different Gnostic
interpretation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. According to this
vision, the Virgin and St. John, rather than Christ, are the protagonists of the New
Testament." 
 Prior Bartolomeo Scorlione and the Brothers of the Confraternity, who had
commissioned the work, were displeased with the unorthodox interpretation of
the first version. In the second narration, now in London, these 'errors' were
'corrected.' There was a cross resting on the shoulder of the Baptist; it looked like
a prop inserted to signal orthodox virtue; the protagonists now had halos, the
winged angel [in the first version the angel had no wings] however, did not point
to Jesus; and the celestial light shined on all four gospellers equally. In the second
‘religiously correct’ painting, the flowers at the Baptist's feet were Narcissus:
hermaphrodite blossom containing both male and female reproductive organs.
Here, once more, we had the 'confluence of opposites' symbolizing the unity of
the male and female aspects – a central paradigm of the Kabbalah- that also
corresponded to Amadeus' notion of the unity of the two faiths: a utopia
prevalent in the aspirations of the Universalist humanists and anti
'supersessionist' Christian Kabbalists of the time. 

Amadeus' inevitable conclusion was that the new faith was predicated on and
rooted in the old one. According to the authors, he did not reject Christianity, nor
did he present an alternative; his thinking merely reflected his stand on the law:
"The substance is the Jewish religion, the new religion is incidental." Long before
the term "Judæo Christian" first appeared, Amadeus had laid the foundations of
the confluence of Judaism and Christianity as opposites envisaged in terms of
constituting a continuous and harmonious whole.

 
 Two versions of Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks [Louvre and London]

Beyond the concept of Esoteric-Cabalistic and Judaic influences on

Leonardo’s thinking and art, we should bear in mind that our age has forgotten
that many prominent 19th Century observers had recognized the polymath’s
Universalist and even secular tendencies in his paintings in general and his The
Last Supper in particular.

Paul Valéry, for example, in his Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da

Vinci, published in 1895, raised a few eyebrows when he confessed to knowing
very little about Leonardo but compensated by constructing a Universal Man
based on the impressions engendered by Leonardo's The Last Supper.

Romantic Pantheist Goethe, who developed a deep affinity with Leonardo's

mystical naturalism, thought of it as "poetry of reality reflected on canvass." His
famous essay, Observation son Leonardo Da Vinci's Celebrated Picture of the Last
Supper, based on Giuseppe Bossi's four-volume study of the mural, Del Cenacolo
di Leonardo da Vinci, interpreted the work as 'secular.' By this, he meant that he
saw the mural as a Universal allegory transcending the boundaries of the Gospels.
In other words, the sage of Weimar conceived The Last Supper not only as the
depiction of the Eucharist but also as a painting that symbolized the universal tale
of sacrifice, death, and redemption. The tragedy of the archetypal hero, found in
so many world mythologies, was in Goethe's mind what ennobled the mural with
its ultimate significance. Goethe also drew our attention to Da Vinci's mysticism
when he wrote: "Leonardo began to be aware that behind the outside of
objects...there still lay concealed many a secret, the knowledge of which it would
be worth his utmost to attain." Here, Goethe was alluding to the perception that
geniuses created their most significant works when they incorporated concealed
meanings in their masterpieces.

Marie-Henri Beyle – Stendhal – while translating Luigi Lanzis' Storia Pittorica

dell' Italia commented on Leonardo's Universalism and sublime spirituality.
Likewise, Edgar Quinet took the argument one step further in his Revolutions of
Italy in 1848-52, where he described Leonardo as a Universal man "heralding a
new world order."

While Charles Baudelaire, in his iconic work Flowers of Evil, wrote that Da

Vinci's works were like a "deep dark mirror reflecting the light and image of
celestial mysteries," Theophile Gauthier heard music in The Last Supper. He
argued: "Leonardo is, par excellence, the painter of the mysterious, the ineffable,
and the crepuscule. His painting has the air of music in the C minor key. His
shadows are veils that he half removes or that he thickens to make for us a secret
divine thought; his tones are deadened like the colors of objects in the moonlight
and time..." 

Hyppolyte Taine too reflected on the polymath's quest for the Prime Mover
as follows: "There may not be in the world an example of another genius so
universal, so incapable of fulfillment, so full of yearning for the Infinite, so
naturally refined." Walter Pater, who saw that beauty in art was universal and
transcendental, admired the painting as a prime example of how art could eclipse
sacred and profane meanings and “assume a significance that embraces the ideal
Universal Man.”

That the Esoteric artist who tried all his life to paint a Universal utopia by
conceptualizing the design of the divine plan through the aesthetic transmutation
of the mysteries of the universe may well have been alive to the spiritual insights
of Jewish Book of Splendors should astonish no one.