The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. Leonardo's Intellectual Greatness at the Turning Point into the Modern Era

[ 1 ] Leonardo’s name is constantly brought to the attention of countless people through the widespread circulation of what is perhaps his most famous painting, the renowned “Last Supper.” Who is not familiar with this Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, and who, upon seeing it, has not marveled at the powerful concept expressed in this very painting! There we see a meaningful moment vividly embodied—a moment that is indeed perceived by countless souls as one of the most significant in the history of the world: the figure of Christ in the center, flanked on either side by the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ. We see these twelve disciples in deeply expressive movements and postures. We see these gestures and postures so individualised in each of these twelve figures that we can indeed gain the impression: every kind of human soul-character is expressed in these twelve figures—every way in which any soul, according to its temperament and character, might respond to what the painting expresses.

[ 2 ] Goethe probably portrayed this moment most impressively in his essay on “Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper”—that instant when Jesus Christ had just uttered the words: “There is one among you who will betray me!”

[ 3 ] What takes place within each of the twelve souls—who are so intimately connected to the speaker and look up to him with such reverence—after these words are spoken, we see it all in the numerous reproductions of this work that circulate throughout the world, each one powerfully conveying the essence of these souls to us.

[ 4 ] There are depictions of the “Last Supper” that date from an earlier period. We can trace depictions of the “Last Supper,” for example—without going any further back—from Giotto to Leonardo da Vinci, and we will find that Leonardo introduced into his depiction of the “Last Supper” what might be called the dramatic element; for it is a wonderfully dramatic moment that confronts us in his portrayal. The earlier depictions appear to us as calm, as if intended merely to express the gathering itself; but the “Last Supper,” as it first appears pictorially in Leonardo’s work, conjures before us an expression of the most profound state of the soul, imbued with full dramatic power. But if one has absorbed this impression of the painting’s concept—from its world-famous reproductions—into one’s soul and heart, and then comes to Milan to that old Dominican church, Santa Maria delle Grazie, and sees there on the wall all those—one can’t really call them anything else—blurred, indistinct, damp splotches of color, the last remnant of the original, which has become world-famous through its reproductions—then one might delve into the past and, through that research, come to realize that for quite some time now, on that wall of the old Dominican church, one has actually been unable to see much of what people who saw it—after Leonardo had painted it—once spoke of in such enthusiastic, such exuberantly captivating terms. What once must have spoken to the souls from that wall like an artistic miracle—not only through the idea that has just been stammeringly expressed, but also through Leonardo’s expressive marvels of color, which conveyed the innermost depths of the souls, indeed, the very heartbeat of the twelve figures—must not have been visible on that wall for a long, long time. What must this painting have had to endure over the course of time!

[ 5 ] Lionardo felt compelled to depart from the techniques used by those who had painted on such walls before him. He found the types of paints that had been used previously to lack sufficient expressiveness. He wanted to conjure up even the subtlest stirrings of the soul on that wall, and so he attempted something that had never been done before in mural painting: using oil-based paints. This then brought to light a whole host of obstacles. The condition of the wall—and indeed the condition of the entire site—was such that these paints were bound to be affected by moisture relatively quickly; the moisture was seeping out of the wall itself. The entire room, which served as a Dominican refectory, was once completely flooded. Many other factors contributed to the damage, including the quartering of soldiers during wartime and other such events. All of these factors took their toll on the painting.

[ 6 ] There was a time when the monks of the monastery did not exactly treat this painting with particular reverence. For instance, they decided that the door leading into the monastery’s dining hall, located below the painting, was too low, so one day they had it raised. This resulted in part of the painting being damaged. Then, at one point, a coat of arms was affixed directly above Christ’s head; in short, the painting was treated in the most barbaric manner. And then there were—one must call them that—pictorial charlatans who painted over it, so that hardly any of the original color scheme remains visible. Nevertheless, when one stands before the painting, an indescribable magic emanates from it. All the barbarism, all the overpainting, all the diluting could not, in the end, completely destroy the magic that emanates from the image. Today it is, after all, only a shadow stretching across the wall, but a magic emanates from this image. For the most part, it is only half the pictorial quality left; it is the idea that affects the soul, but it has a powerful effect.

[ 7 ] Anyone who has become somewhat familiar with Leonardo’s other works, anyone who has sought, through reproductions of his works or through the works attributed to Leonardo that are on display in various galleries across Europe—and which have been preserved more or less as he himself painted them— in other words, anyone who has sought to familiarize themselves with Leonardo’s body of work and to delve into what he wrote over the course of time, and who has become acquainted with his life as it unfolded from 1452 to 1519—such a person still stands before this painting in the dining hall of the Dominicans in Milan, at the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, with very special feelings. For, in essence, as much as remains to us of the magical creation that Leonardo once painted on this wall—and that is indeed all that remains—one senses that this is all that is left in the collective consciousness of humanity of the immense greatness, the power, and the substance of this all-encompassing personality that was Leonardo himself. What we can allow to affect our souls today through Leonardo is hardly any different from what this all-encompassing personality once brought into the course of world history, just as these intermingling splashes of color relate to what Leonardo once conjured onto the wall. And just as one stands before this painting in Milan with a sense of melancholy, so too does one stand before the entire figure of Leonardo with a sense of melancholy.

[ 8 ] Goethe also points out that, when one allows the biographical accounts of earlier biographers to sink in, one gets the impression that, in Leonardo, a personality appeared to humanity who, with fresh vitality, was active in every sphere, joyfully contemplating life and joyfully influencing it, embracing everything with love, seeking to grasp all things with an immense thirst for knowledge, fresh in soul and fresh in body. Then one might also turn one’s gaze to that painting, which is considered a self-portrait and is preserved in Turin, and then one sees this self-portrait of the elderly Leonardo, this face with its expressive furrows—furrows made expressive by pain—with the embittered mouth and with features that reveal so much of what Leonardo must have felt as his opposition to the world and to everything he had to endure. Thus, this remarkable figure truly stands before us at the dawn of the modern era.

[ 9 ] If we return once more to the painting in Santa Maria delle Grazie and try to view, alongside this shadow on the wall of the refectory, the oldest engravings and the oldest reproductions that have survived of this painting—and if we try, so to speak, with the “eyes of the spirit,” to use this phrase of Goethe’s, to try to bring this painting back to life within ourselves, then perhaps a feeling, a sensation, may arise within us: did the one who once painted this picture, upon applying the final brushstroke, walk away satisfied with it? Did he say to himself: “You have accomplished here what lived in your soul?”

[ 10 ] It seems to me that one can arrive at this feeling, at this question, in a completely natural way. Why? When one considers Leonardo’s entire life, one must say: this life instills in one the very sentiment just described. When one begins to let Leonardo’s life sink in—how he was born a natural child, the son of a man of average intellect, Ser Pietro in Vinci, and a peasant woman who then disappears entirely from view, while the father marries according to his station and places his son in foster care; when one then sees the child growing up in solitude, in the company only of nature and his own soul, one says to oneself: there must have been an immense reservoir of vitality within this man for him to remain vibrant! And he did remain so at first. Then, since he showed an early talent for drawing, he entered Verrocchio’s workshop. His father had sent him there because he believed his talent for drawing could be put to good use. The young Leonardo was now employed to assist in painting the master’s works. An anecdote from this period tells that Leonardo once had to paint a figure, and that when the master saw it, he decided to stop painting altogether because he felt outshone by his student—an anecdote that is more than just that when one considers Leonardo as a whole.

[ 11 ] We then find him growing up in Florence, his talent as a painter developing more and more. . But we discover something else as well. If one traces the development of his talent as a painter, one gets the impression that, year after year, he was engaged in the most ambitious artistic projects—constantly devising new ones. He also received commissions from people who recognized his great talent and wanted to acquire one of his works. Leonardo first allowed the idea of what he wanted to create to take shape, and then began his studies. But what were these studies like?

[ 12 ] This study delved into every relevant detail in an extraordinarily characteristic way. If, for example, he had to paint a picture featuring three or four figures, he would set to work not only by studying a single model, but by walking around the city and observing hundreds and hundreds of people. He would often spend an entire day following a person if a certain trait of theirs interested him. He would sometimes invite all sorts of people from the most diverse walks of life to his home and tell them all manner of stories that either amused or frightened them, for he wanted to study the facial expressions associated with the most varied emotional experiences. Once, when a rebel had been captured and hanged, Lionardo went to the place of execution, and a drawing has been preserved showing how he sought to capture the hanged man’s facial expression and entire posture; in the lower corner of the sheet, a head is drawn specifically to capture the exact impression.

[ 13 ] We have sketches by Leonardo that have survived—incredible figures—and from them we can see what he was actually trying to achieve. For example, he had drawn a face and was now experimenting to see what would happen if he made the chin bigger and bigger. To understand the significance of the individual parts of the human form, he enlarged a single limb to determine how that limb, at its natural size, fits into the entire human body. Grotesque figures in a wide variety of distortions—we find all of this in Leonardo’s work. Drawings have survived in which he sketched individual parts over and over again, drawings that he then intended to use for corresponding works. Although some of these were created by his students, much of it is his own work.

[ 14 ] When you let all of this sink in, you get the impression that he often goes about things in the following way. He has some kind of commission to create a painting; he is supposed to depict this or that. He studies the details in the manner just described. Then something specific begins to interest him, and now he is no longer studying for the sake of the painting, but to learn about the details of an animal or a human being. When he wants to paint a battle scene, he goes to the riding school to study the details, or he goes somewhere where the horses are left to their own devices, and in doing so, he strays from the original idea for which he intended to use the study. Thus, study piles upon study, and in the end, he is no longer at all concerned with returning to the painting.

[ 15 ] Thus, among the more significant paintings from his early Florentine period—even though all of these works have been overpainted today and their original forms are no longer fully recognizable—we see the creation of *Saint Jerome* and *The Adoration of the Magi*, for which studies also exist, as has just been described, and one has the sense, moreover, that this man lived in the fullness of the world’s mysteries. He sought to penetrate the world’s mysteries, sought in an original way, as it were, to trace these mysteries of nature, and yet never actually produced a work of which he could have said that it had been brought to completion in any way. One must put oneself in the place of such a soul—one that is too rich to be able to bring to a close, in any way, what it undertook—a soul upon which the mysteries of the world exert such an influence that, whenever it begins something, it must proceed from mystery to mystery and never reach completion anywhere. One must understand this soul of Leonardo, which was too great in itself to ever be able to reveal its own greatness.

[ 16 ] We then follow Lionardo as he is entrusted with two commissions by Duke Lodovico il Moro in Milan, who had welcomed him to his court there: one was *The Last Supper*, and the other was to create an equestrian statue of the duke’s father. We now see how Leonardo worked on these two works for fifteen to sixteen years. However, many other things were happening at the same time. For if we wish to characterize Leonardo as we have just done, we must add—in order to fully understand him—that the duke had not called him merely as a painter. Leonardo was also an outstanding musician, perhaps one of the most outstanding musicians of his time, and the duke had taken particular delight in his musical talent. But the Duke also retained him because Leonardo was one of the most prominent military engineers, one of the most prominent hydraulic engineers, and one of the most prominent mechanical engineers of his time, and because he could promise the Duke to supply him with war machines that were something entirely new, as well as machines designed to harness water power, and flying bridges that could be easily erected and quickly dismantled. At the same time, he was working on designing a flying machine. To build it, he devoted himself to observing how birds fly. What has survived of Leonardo’s studies on bird flight is arguably among the most original research ever conducted on the subject. However, when reading Leonardo’s writings today, one must always bear in mind that some are copies containing many inaccuracies and, in their form, resemble what we still see today in *The Last Supper*. Yet throughout, it is clear just what a comprehensive mind Leonardo possessed.

[ 17 ] But now we see how Leonardo not only supported the court in Milan on every possible occasion—organizing this or that artistic or theatrical event—but we also see him devising all manner of military and other plans, as well as assisting with the construction of the cathedral through both advice and practical help. We also know how he trained countless students who went on to work on a wide variety of projects in Milan, so that today one can hardly imagine how much of Lionardo’s work has gone into the entire heritage of the city of Milan and its surroundings.

[ 18 ] Alongside all of this, Leonardo was now engaged in endless studies for the equestrian statue of the duke’s father, Francesco Sforza. There was not a single part of the horse that he did not study a hundred times over, in a hundred different poses, and over the course of many years he completed the model of the horse. It was then destroyed when the French invaded Milan in 1499, and the soldiers shot at this model as if it were a target, shattering it to pieces. Nothing of it has survived—nothing remains of the colossal work of a figure who, one might say, sought to explore one mystery of the world after another in order to create a work in which life revealed itself in its inanimate material just as life reveals itself according to its own mysteries in nature itself.

[ 19 ] We know how Leonardo worked on *The Last Supper*. He would often go there, sit on the scaffolding, and brood for hours in front of the wall. Then he would pick up his brush, make a few brushstrokes, and walk away again. At times he would go there, stare at the painting, and then leave again. When he wanted to paint the figure of Christ, his hand would tremble. And when you take into account everything that is known about it, you have to say: both outwardly and inwardly, Leonardo was not happy while painting this now world-famous work. To begin with, there were people in Milan at the time who were not particularly pleased with the slow progress of the painting. There was, for example, the prior of the monastery, who could not understand why a painter should not be able to whip up such a painting quickly, and he therefore complained to the duke. The duke, too, felt the matter had already taken too long, and he confronted the artist. Leonardo replied that the painting was intended to depict Jesus Christ and Judas—that is, the two greatest opposites; these could not be painted in a single year, and there were no models for either of them in the world, neither for Judas nor for Jesus Christ. He also said—after having worked on the painting for years—that he did not yet know whether he would be able to complete it at all. And then he added: if, in the end, no model could be found for Judas, he could always use the prior instead! Thus, the painting was extraordinarily difficult to complete. But Lionardo did not find inner joy either. For it was precisely in this painting that the contrast became apparent between what lived in his soul and what he was able to bring to the wall.

[ 20 ] And here I am compelled to put forward a hypothesis from the humanities, one that anyone who delves deeply into everything that can gradually be learned about the painting might arrive at. This hypothesis occurred to me as I tried to find an answer to the question posed earlier. For when one traces Leonardo’s life in this way, one says to oneself: so much lived within this man that he could not reveal to humanity outwardly—for the external means were far too inadequate to represent it; could he really have painted something as magnificent as he undoubtedly intended in *The Last Supper* so readily and to his own satisfaction in this work? This question arises quite naturally. When one sees how he sought time and again to unravel mystery after mystery through his studies in order to bring something to fruition—and yet ultimately failed to do so—one is led to ask such a question. Then the answer almost suggests itself: if, on the one hand, Leonardo only managed to produce a model—which has since been lost—of the equestrian statue he intended to make a marvel of sculptural art, and he never even began the casting of the equestrian statue himself—in other words, if after sixteen years of work he completely abandoned this equestrian statue without having achieved anything—how, then, do you think he walked away from this “Last Supper”? One gets the feeling that he walked away from this Last Supper unsatisfied! Even if today all that remains of this painting is a ruin—nothing more than damp patches of color running into one another—and even if we have long since seen nothing of what Leonardo once painted on that wall, we may perhaps still assert that what he painted on the wall could not even remotely represent what lived within his soul.

[ 21 ] To gain such an impression, however, one must synthesize the most diverse impressions one can derive from the image. But there are also some external reasons. Among all the writings by Leonardo that have survived, there is also a wonderful “Treatise on Painting.” Painting is presented in its essence as an art form, describing how it should be practiced in accordance with perspective and color theory; it explains how it should be practiced according to artistic principles. This book by Leonardo on painting is—even though we have only a fragment of it before us—a marvelous work, the like of which has probably never been written in the world. The principles of the art of painting are presented therein in a way that only the greatest genius could have conceived. It is marvelous, for example, to read how Leonardo demonstrates how to depict horses in a battle scene—capturing both the bestial impression and yet the grandeur that the depiction of a battle is meant to convey. In short, this work reveals to us all of Leonardo’s greatness and, we may say, also all of Leonardo’s limitations. We shall speak of this later. But above all, it reveals how he was constantly concerned with studying, for his artistic depictions, the way reality presents itself to the human eye. The chiaroscuro, the color scheme—all of this is brilliantly depicted in this work by Leonardo on painting, showing how it should be applied in painting. And if we were to affirm the deep-seated longing in Leonardo’s soul never—not even in the slightest detail—to violate what he—as we shall see elsewhere—values as highly as truth, if we were to show how this lived within his soul, then we could say, it is evident throughout the treatise on painting that one must never violate the truth of the impression, but must never violate it in such a way that this impression is not justified in every respect in light of the inner mysteries of nature.

[ 22 ] When we allow his “Last Supper” to sink in, there are two things that make one feel unable to reconcile them with Leonardo’s demands on painting. One is the figure of Judas. Looking at the reproductions—and, to a certain extent, even at the shadowy original in Milan—one gets the impression that Judas is completely shrouded in shadow, entirely dark. Now, if one studies how the light falls from various angles, and how, as with the other eleven disciples, the lighting conditions are depicted in the most marvelous way, true to reality. Nothing really explains the darkness on Judas’s face! Based on the external lighting conditions, we do not receive a satisfactory answer as to why this darkness exists. And when one approaches the figure of Christ Jesus, a mere intuition can arise for the external observer—unless one proceeds from a spiritual-scientific perspective. For just as the blackness and darkness surrounding the figure of Judas are not justified, so too does the sun-like radiance of the figure of Christ—his standing out from the other figures in the sense implied—seem equally unjustified. We understand all the other faces from the lighting conditions, but not that of Judas and not that of Christ Jesus.

[ 23 ] But if we approach this from a spiritual-scientific perspective, the thought arises of its own accord in our soul: the painter must have strived to bring to life the reality that in these two opposites—“Jesus” and “Judas”—light and darkness confront us not from without, but from within. Perhaps he wanted to convey that this face of Christ stands before us in such a way that, while we may find it outwardly unmotivated by the external lighting conditions, we can nevertheless believe: the soul behind this face imparts a radiance to it through itself, and this face is allowed to shine in contrast to the lighting conditions. And in the same way, when looking at Judas, one can get the impression that this figure, as it were, conjures up a shadow upon itself that is not justified by any of the shadows cast by its surroundings.

[ 24 ] As I said, it is a hypothesis in the humanities, but one that has taken shape for me over many years—a hypothesis that one might believe will be confirmed all the more the deeper one delves into the problem as a whole. According to this hypothesis, one can understand how Leonardo—who strove for natural truth throughout his works and studies—worked with a trembling brush to depict a problem that could only be justified in relation to that particular figure. And then one can understand that Leonardo may well have been bitterly disappointed—without a doubt—because it was impossible, given the means of the visual arts of his time, to express this problem with full truthfulness and plausibility; because he could not yet do what he wanted, and ultimately despaired of the possibility of execution, and thus had to leave behind a painting that did not satisfy him after all.

[ 25 ] Then, in perfect harmony with Leonardo’s entire persona and his intellectual greatness, one answers the question of feeling that has been raised: Yes, with the bitter realization that, in his most significant work, he had set himself a task whose execution—given the means available to humankind—could not satisfy him, Leonardo likely turned away from this painting; and even if no eye in later centuries will see what Leonardo had conjured onto the wall in Milan, it was certainly not, even in his own time, what lived in his soul. Indeed, when one looks at him in this way in relation to his most significant creation, one is all the more tempted to ask: What mystery is actually hidden behind this figure?

[ 26 ] When we considered the figure of Raphael here fourteen days ago, we attempted to show how one can understand such a figure in an entirely different way if one draws on the foundations of spiritual science, if one is clear that the human soul is something that returns again and again through many earthly lives, so that a soul born into a particular era does not live just this one life, but brings with it, in its entire constitution and mode of development, the predispositions from earlier earthly lives; and now, with what it carries into the present life as predispositions from earlier earthly lives, it finds itself confronted with what the spiritual environment has to offer. When one views the soul in this way, recognizing that it enters existence with an inner spiritual heritage derived from repeated earthly lives, and when one adds that the entire process of development appears meaningful and wise—assuming that nothing occurs by chance in certain epochs, but rather regularly and according to law, just as the flower of a plant appears after the green leaves— if, then, one assumes a wise design in the historical unfolding of humanity and sees the human soul returning again and again from spiritual realms, only then do the individual figures become understandable. But what is to be studied in the individual human life is revealed most clearly when one focuses on those human souls that stand out from mediocrity. If one considers Leonardo in the way we have attempted to summarize the individual moments of his life only in sketch form, then one can be led again and again to the backdrop against which this soul stands out. And this backdrop is the era in which this soul is situated, from the year 1452 to the year 1519.

[ 27 ] What kind of era is this? It is the era before the emergence of the modern scientific worldview. It is the era before Copernicus’s worldview took hold, before Giordano Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo made their contributions. How do we view this era from the perspective of the humanities?

[ 28 ] We have repeatedly pointed out that the further back we go in the course of human development, the more different the entire human perspective and human interaction with the environment become. In the most ancient times of human development, we find in every soul a kind of clairvoyance through which souls, in certain intermediate states between sleep and wakefulness, gazed into the spiritual world. This original clairvoyance was lost over time, but a remnant of it from earlier times persisted well into the fifteenth century. Not clairvoyance itself—that had long since been lost—but what remained was a sense of the human soul’s connection to the spiritual background of the world. What the souls had once beheld, they continued to feel; and although this feeling had already grown faint, the souls nevertheless sensed that, at their very core, they were connected to the spiritual reality that permeates and interweaves the world, just as the physical processes within the human body are physically connected to the physical events of the world.

[ 29 ] It is now one of the laws of development that the ancient connection between the human soul and the spiritual world had to be lost for a time. Modern natural science could never have flourished if the old clairvoyance had remained. This entire old way of perceiving had to be lost so that souls might turn toward what presents itself to the senses and what can be scientifically explored through the intellect, which is bound to the brain. It was only because humanity’s old spiritual way of perceiving the world had been lost—and because human beings had turned, as one says, “objectively” or “concretely” toward external sensory perception and toward what the intellect can grasp through sensory perception—that the scientific worldview which has developed from the time of Leonardo to the present day became possible.

[ 30 ] Today we stand once again at a new turning point—a turning point in an era in which modern spiritual science once again makes it possible for human beings to attain a spiritual perception of things. For the development of the natural sciences has a twofold significance. On the one hand, it was meant to bequeath to humanity a certain scientific legacy. Over the centuries since the time of Copernicus, Kepler, and others—since natural science has marched from triumph to triumph—this legacy has become wonderfully integrated into practical and theoretical life. That is the one thing that has been achieved through natural science in the last few centuries since the time of Leonardo. The other is that which could not come about all at once, but which has only become possible in our time. For not only do we owe to science what we have learned through the Copernican worldview, through the observations and investigations of Kepler and Galileo, and through modern spectral analysis and so on, but we also owe to it a certain education of the human soul,

[ 31 ] At first, the human soul turned its gaze outward toward the sensory world; this gave rise to the natural sciences. But through the natural sciences, new ideas and new concepts emerged. And where the natural sciences have achieved the greatest feats, they did not become great through sensory perception, but through something entirely different. This has already been pointed out. In one particular field, people in the pre-Copernican era relied on sensory observation. What was the result? People had believed that the Earth stood still in the universe, and that the Sun and the other planets moved around it. Then came Copernicus, who had the courage not to rely on sensory perception. He had the courage to say that if one relies on sensory perception, one makes not a single empirical discovery; but that one arrives at empirical discoveries when one rigorously synthesizes everything one has previously observed. People have since followed in his footsteps, and it is a complete misunderstanding of the situation to believe that the natural sciences have reached their current level because humanity has relied solely on the senses.

[ 32 ] But what has come into humanity through the natural sciences has also left its mark on our souls; the ideas of the natural sciences live in our souls and have shaped them. In addition to the content they have provided, the natural sciences have also served as a means of education for the souls; and today, as the ideas of the natural sciences are truly not only thought but lived within the soul, the souls have matured to the point of being drawn into spiritual science of their own accord. But for this to happen, humanity first had to mature. For this to happen, the centuries since the time of Leonardo had to pass.

[ 33 ] Now let us consider Lionardo. He entered his era with a soul that, in a previous life, had belonged to those initiates who, in the ancient way, had risen to the mysteries of the worldview. He was unable to live this out fully when he was born in the fifteenth century. For in earlier incarnations, depending on what those earlier earthly lives made possible, one could have immersed oneself in the mysteries of the world in a grand and powerful way; how one brings these into consciousness in a new existence depends on the outer physical body. A fifteenth-century body could not express, in terms of inner thoughts, inner feelings, and inner creative power, what Leonardo had absorbed within himself in earlier stages of existence. What he had from earlier times acted only as a force, but he was immediately confined within a body in the age preceding the flowering of the natural sciences and felt constrained in every way. The time was approaching—its dawn was already here—when people wanted merely to look out with their senses into the world of sensory existence and to think solely with the intellect, which is bound to the instrument of the brain. Leonardo was drawn everywhere toward the spirit, for that was what he had brought with him from earlier lives. And in a magnificent way, it drew him toward the spirit.

[ 34 ] Let us first consider him as an artist. Art had changed completely by the time Leonardo lived, compared to, say, the Greek era. Let us try to put ourselves in the shoes of a Greek artist as he creates, for example, a sculptural figure. What kind of impression do we get, even when we look at the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, for example? Those who created such works would never have made detailed studies—as Michelangelo or Leonardo did—to recreate such forms based on an external model. The magnificent horse in the statue of Marcus Aurelius was certainly not studied in the same way that Leonardo was able to study his horse for the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza. And yet, how vividly these ancient statues stand before us! Where does this come from? It comes from the fact that in Greek times, human souls felt themselves to be the direct creators of their own bodies, because they felt at one with the soul forces of the entire world. In those times of Greek art, for example, one could sense in an arm all the forces that shaped it. One felt one’s way into the independent inner being of one’s own form. One did not view the forms from the outside, but created from within with knowledge, while still being conscious of the form-shaping power. This can still be demonstrated even in the external form. Consider the Greek female figures: they are all the product of direct perception. That is why they are all depicted at an age marked by upward growth. Everywhere we sense that the artist has recreated nature, because he stood within the spirit of nature and felt connected to the spirit of nature in his soul.

[ 35 ] This sense of connection with the spirit that weaves through and animates all things was to be lost in Leonardo’s age, and it had to be lost, for otherwise the entire new era could not have come about. This is not a critique of the era, but a description of the meaning of the facts.

[ 36 ] Let us now see how Lionardo goes about his work when he studies the movements of the hand, the individual parts of an animal, or human physiognomy! He proceeds in such a way that he possesses an inner knowledge, an inner experience in his soul, which, however, does not rise to consciousness. It is something that creates these forms with life, but Leonardo cannot grasp it from within. He feels as if he were cut off from it—from this inner grasping. And now nothing is enough for him. Now he stands there—for the newer scientific worldview does not yet exist, in anticipation of this scientific worldview; but he cannot yet possess it himself. Take his writings: on every page, ideas leap out that people would not rediscover until the course of the next three centuries—and in some cases have not even found to this day. Leonardo had the most marvelous ideas, which often had no impact at all in his own time. We find them in his works, including his artistic creations.

[ 37 ] In him, we sense the powerlessness with which a soul had to face an era that was coming to an end for the old worldview, and in which the new worldview had not yet emerged. This new worldview, however, had the effect of fragmenting the entire human perspective into a focus on details. We see the emergence of specialization in the various fields of activity. With Leonardo, everything still appears united. He is at once a comprehensive painter, a comprehensive musician, a comprehensive philosopher, and a comprehensive engineer. He united these within himself because his soul, carrying great abilities from the old era, has crossed over into the new era and can now “touch” things everywhere, but cannot fully enter into them. And so, from a human perspective, Leonardo appears as a tragic figure; yet, viewed from a higher vantage point, he appears immensely significant at the turning point toward a new era.

[ 38 ] You can see this for yourself if you look at the rest of Leonardo’s work. He only took his most significant works so far; then his students continued working on them. And even in works such as the “St. John” or the “Mona Lisa” in the Louvre in Paris, we see how they were executed using techniques that meant they were bound to lose their luster sooner or later. Yet we also see everywhere how Leonardo himself could never be satisfied with his own work. It is impossible to discuss the details of Leonardo’s paintings without having the actual works at hand. If one delves deeply into them, it becomes evident everywhere how Leonardo, as an artist, came up against limits he could not transcend, and how, in every instance, what lived in his soul could not even reach the point where it shines up from the inner experience into consciousness—where, in a single moment, it bursts forth from that stage of inner experience so brilliantly that one cries out with joy, and yet one would like to sink back into pain because it did not reach clear consciousness. Not even that happened for Leonardo.

[ 39 ] We actually follow Leonardo with rather bitter feelings as we see how he was eventually summoned by Francis I of France to spend the last three years of his life in the residence Francis I had assigned to him, where he spent those years in spiritual contemplation, immersed in the mysteries of existence. For he appears to us there as a lonely man who, in truth, can no longer have much in common with the world around him, and who must have felt an immense contrast between what he perceived as the fundamental principles of existence—which can take shape through art—and what he was ultimately able to offer the world only in fragments.

[ 40 ] If one looks at things this way, one looks at Lionardo and says to oneself: There is a soul there, and much is going on within it. Much—infinitely much—is going on within it. The impression it makes on the viewer is profound when one imagines what this soul will pass on to the process of humanity. Whatever this soul reveals to the human process outwardly—even at the time of Lionardo’s death—how insignificant that is compared to what lived within this soul! How do we stand before the economy of existence if we were to subscribe to the view that human existence is exhausted in what merely manifests itself outwardly? How meaningless and purposeless does the life of a soul like Lionardo’s appear when we see what took place within it, and what it was able to suffer and endure because of these inner processes, and when we compare this with what it was then able to give to the world? What a contrast there would be if we were to say that this soul should be regarded solely in terms of how it manifested itself in outward life! No, we cannot view it that way! We must take a different standpoint and say: Whatever it has given to the world, whatever it has experienced, whatever it has gone through inwardly—all of that belongs to another world, one that is supersensory in relation to our own. And such people are, above all, proof that human beings, with their souls, exist in the supersensible realm, and that such souls have a connection to the supersensible realm, and that what they convey to the outer world is merely a “byproduct” of what they must undergo in their entirety.

[ 41 ] Only then do we arrive at a true understanding when we add another, supersensible current to the current unfolding in external human events and say: Something is happening in parallel with the sensory current, and such souls are embedded in the supersensible. They must live there so that they may serve as the connecting links between the sensory and the supersensory. The existence of such souls only makes sense if we can conceive of a supersensible existence in which they are embedded. Thus, we see little of Leonardo when we look at his outward creative work; thus, we gain an insight into the fact that this soul still has something to accomplish in the supersensible existence, and then we say to ourselves: we understand! — In order for this soul, in the course of its entire life spanning many earthly lives, to be able to continually reveal this or that to humanity, it had to undergo, in that “Lionardo existence,” a process whereby only the very smallest part of what was within this soul could find its way into outward expression. Thus, souls such as the Leonardo soul are themselves true mysteries of the world and of life—embodied mysteries of the world.

[ 42 ] What I wanted to discuss today should not be presented in sharply defined terms, but rather should offer a hint as to how one might approach such souls. For spiritual science is truly not meant to provide theories! Spiritual science is meant to engage, through all its power, the entire emotional and sensory life of the human being and to become an elixir of life in and of itself—an elixir of life that enables us to gain a new relationship to the world and to life. Spirits like Leonardo are particularly well-suited to guiding us so that this new relationship to the world and to life, which we can gain through spiritual science, may come into being. When we look at spirits like Leonardo, we can say: They enter existence in a mysterious way, because they have a greater destiny to fulfill than their age can provide. Because they bring something from the past with them, souls like Leonardo do not merely enter existence in humble circumstances, but rather in the very way that Leonardo entered life. Born to a mediocre father and a mother who soon disappeared entirely from view after giving birth to her natural child, Leonardo was raised among mediocre people. Thus we see him entirely on his own, expressing what he had carried over from previous lives. It is precisely when we look at the unfavorable circumstances of his birth that we recognize they did not prevent the greatest depths of his soul from being revealed.

[ 43 ] Thus we see Leonardo’s soul as so sound, so all-encompassing, that we can empathize when Goethe, speaking from the depths of his own great soul, says: “Regular and beautifully formed, he stood before humanity as a model of man, and just as the eye’s capacity for perception and clarity actually belong to the intellect, so clarity and intelligence were perfectly inherent in our artist.” If we wish to apply these words to Leonardo—and they are applicable— then we can apply them to the youthful Leonardo, who appears before us physically and mentally fresh, perfect, full of creative zest, joyful in the world, and yearning for the world all at once—a perfect human being, a model human being, born to conquer, a man who is also born with a sense of humor, for he demonstrated this on the most varied occasions throughout his life. And then let us turn our gaze to that drawing, which is regarded—and rightly so—as a self-portrait: the old man whose face bears the deep furrows carved by many experiences, many difficult and painful experiences have carved deep furrows, whose features around the mouth hint at the entire disharmony in which we finally see the lonely man, far from his homeland, in exile with the King of France, still wrestling with existence in this world, but lonely, abandoned, misunderstood, though loved by friends who have not failed to accompany him.

[ 44 ] Thus, the greatness of this spirit—which passes through much suffering—is particularly evident to us in Lionardo, as it enters this body, first shaping it perfectly and then, embittered, abandoning it. We look into this face and feel the genius of humanity itself gazing back at us from this human face. Yes, we begin to grasp the era—the era of twilight in which Leonardo lived, and the era in which Copernicus, Kepler, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo lived, with whom a new dawn is breaking—and we see all the limitations and constraints that Leonardo’s great soul had to endure. We understand the age and understand the great artist who stands behind all human means—and who, after all, can work only with human means. We must bring our entire human understanding to bear and gaze into Leonardo’s face, having first delved into it through spiritual science—and the very nature of the age gazes back at us from this face. Yes, from these embittered facial features, the human spirit—which at first tends downward—looks back at us. We must come to know it in this way so that we may once again recognize the full magnitude of the power that must have existed for a Copernicus, a Kepler, a Galileo, and a Giordano Bruno to have emerged.

[ 45 ] Truly, it is only then that we gain a proper sense of awe for the path and development of the human spirit—when we learn to deepen the sense of tragedy we feel at the sight of Giordano Bruno’s pyre by also contemplating the soul of Leonardo, who felt powerless in the face of the preceding, declining age. Leonardo’s greatness becomes clear to us only when we gain a sense of what he was unable to achieve. And this is connected to something we wish to summarize at the end of today’s reflections. It has to do with the fact that the human soul can indeed be satisfied—indeed, even blissful—at the sight of imperfection, though it finds its greatest bliss not in the sight of small imperfection but of great imperfection, in the sight of that creative work which, because of its grandeur, dies in its very execution. For in the forces that are dying away, we ultimately sense—indeed, behold—the forces preparing for the future, and in the evening glow, the foreboding and hope of the dawn dawn upon us.

[ 46 ] Our soul must always view the development of humanity in such a way that we say to ourselves: all becoming unfolds in such a way that we see—wherever what has been created falls into ruin, there we know that new life will always blossom from the ruins.