HSEM3072H: Leonardo da Vinci: Between Art and Science, History and Myth

This course is designed to introduce students to Leonardo da Vinci the historical man, and to his rich body of work produced during his lifetime from 1462-1519. It is also designed to consider as well how a mythic understanding of Leonardo da Vinci was also fashioned from this same historical foundation, turning him into an almost supernatural icon of the universal creative genius. Especially noteworthy in the mythic idea of Leonardo is his seeming transcendence of the imagined “Two Cultures” divide between the Arts and the Sciences, and his identity as a virtuoso artist in multiple domains simultaneously (painting, scuplture, architecture, and the visual arts overall) a pioneering figure in science, engineering, and the history of technology in fields ranging from anatomy to hydraulics and engineering to physics. How, this course will ask, did each of these aspects of Leonardo’s work come to be a part of his historical life and accomplishments, and how after his death was his fully historical life and work refashioned into our contemporary mythistorical understanding of Leonardo as a singular universal genius and seemingly supernatural "Renaissance Man"? The course will pursue these topics in three parts. Part I (Weeks 1-7) will be devoted to the historical Leonardo, and during spring break (March 3-12) we pursue Part II by traveling to Italy to experience Leonardo’s Italy as it exists today, and to start connecting the historical life with the imagined legacy of it. In Part III (weeks 12-15), we will consider the invention of the mythistory of Leonardo in the centuries after his death, especially the forging in the modern era (after 1870) of his contemporary identity as a seemingly magical and superhuman creative genius who defies interpretation in ordinary historical terms.

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