Thoughts on Art and Life

seem pleasant, so a life well employed makes death pleasant. A life well spent is long.”

Leonardo’s views on aesthetics are all-important in his philosophy of life and art. A worker’s thoughts on his craft are always of interest. They are doubly so when there is no trace of literary self-consciousness to blemish their expression. He recorded these thoughts at the moment of their birth, for a constant habit of observation and analysis had early developed in him into a second nature. His ideas were penned in the same fragmentary way as they presented themselves to his mind, perhaps with no intention of publishing them to the world. But his ideal of art depended intimately, nonetheless, on the system he had set forth seemingly in so haphazard a manner. His method gives to his writings their only unity. It was more than a method: it was a permanent expression of his own life, which aided him to construct a philosophy of beauty characteristic of the new age.

He had searched to find a scientific basis for art, and discovered it in the imitation of nature, based on rational experience. This idea was, in part, Aristotelian, absorbed with the spirit of the time; though in the ordinary sense of the word Leonardo was no scholar, least of all a humanist. His own innovation in aesthetics was in requiring a rational and critical experience as a necessary...