By Drew Lichtenberg, Resident Dramaturg of Shakespeare Theatre Company
It took centuries to discover the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. In his late years, the artist—who died in 1519—seems to have despaired at the task of organizing his vast collection of papers. As he writes in 1508:
This is to be a collection without order, taken from many papers which I have copied here, hoping afterwards to rearrange them according to the subjects of which they treat; and I believe that I shall have to repeat the same thing several times; for which, O reader, blame me not, because the subjects of the world are many, and memory alone cannot retain them.
Today, we have more than 5,000 pages of these notebooks, an estimated one third of the original. Francesco Melzi, Leonardo’s companion at the end of his life and legal heir, was the first to assemble a text out of his literary remains. His collation was published as On Painting in 1632, followed by a more complete edition in 1817 and a facsimile in 1956. These notes on light, movement, and color helped create an image of Leonardo that lasted up until the 19th century, as the painter of The Last Supper and theorist of visual art par excellence.
When further excerpts began appearing in 1797, followed by the complete edition in 1883 and the discovery of a third, previously unknown manuscript in Spain in 1965, a different, wider, more complicated picture began to emerge.
The notebooks belong among the great artifacts of Western culture, even as their graphic medium, their scientific and mathematical preoccupations, and their circular forms of argument defy categorization. In Leonardo’s aphorisms and prose poems, we encounter his extraordinary autodidactic mind. At one moment, he states that “the sun does not move,” anticipating Copernican and Galilean heliocentrism. But Leonardo was first and foremost a great artist, and the chief interest of the notebooks is aesthetic. The artist’s beautiful drawings appear with a clarity that not even photographs possess, as fresh today as when he first drew them.
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Mary Zimmerman’s The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci premiered at Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 1993, after a self-produced iteration while Zimmerman was still in graduate school. As Zimmerman says, “It was the first thing I ever did off-campus.” Notebooks accomplished what seemed impossible, transferring to the stage the seemingly untransferable work of a visual art genius. It is also a foundational work for Zimmerman, anticipating later pieces such as her Tony Award–winning adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, much like its source material, is a collection of glorious fragments. The eight actors in the piece speak nothing but Leonardo’s words, an approach granting the audience a privileged encounter with his thoughts. Instead of fictional characters, they resemble aspects of Leonardo himself, who tended to sprinkle personal anecdotes and memories throughout the notebooks, assembling his own piecemeal autobiography. Rather than wrangling these writings into a linear narrative, Notebooks follows Leonardo’s lead, ushering audiences into a world of dream and memory as well as the vital theatrical present.
Zimmerman also, somehow, recreates the dizzying sensation of seeing Leonardo’s drawings paired with his words, enchanting the eye with a choreographic suite of movements that connect word and image in complex synthesis. The effect is musical as much as dramatic, a spoken opera-ballet that strikes a da Vinci–esque balance between the stillness of observation and the dynamism of bodies in motion. Like Leonardo’s drawings, which seem to quicken with the pulse of life itself, Zimmerman’s stage pictures are spectacular yet also crystal clear. And her radical approach to the dramatic elements of character, space, and time, rooted in a rigorous fidelity to Leonardo’s text, makes a compelling argument for the artist not as a Renaissance man but as a postmodern figure for our times, his artistic brilliance undimmed.
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According to Zimmerman, Notebooks is structured around two vivid autobiographical memories. In one of them, Leonardo describes coming “to the mouth of a huge cave,” drawn by “my ardent desire, impatient to see the great abundance of strange forms created by that artificer, Nature.” Leonardo would remain poised at the mouth of the cave, torn between his fear of its darkness and his desire “to see whether it contained some marvelous thing.”
Da Vinci’s powers of visual imagining are so acute that he elsewhere describes seeing entire landscapes in accidental stains and “indistinct things” left on the wall. This passage would serve as inspiration to early-20th-century avant-gardists, seeing in Leonardo’s words a premonition of non-representational art. Even as Leonardo’s art remained rooted in the keen observation of natural phenomena, he conjured forth forms not yet existing. This relationship to seeing and imagining, perhaps, is not unlike Shakespeare’s ability to use words to describe things as yet undreamt of in our philosophy. As Theseus says in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shape and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.”
This ability to perceive unity in all things also helps to describe Leonardo’s famous technique of sfumato, a distinctive blending of light and color that he described as his attempt to illustrate the idea that “there are no lines” in nature. Not everyone was a fan: Giorgio Vasari, Leonardo’s first biographer, described the Mona Lisa as an “indistinct smudge.” To most viewers, however, these works retain their uncanny glow. As Leonardo pondered elsewhere, “Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination when awake?” One way of understanding the peerlessly poetic quality of his art is as an attempt to represent the waking world with the vividness of a dream.
The notebooks’ most famous phrase has now become commonplace: “The eye is the window of the soul.” Less often quoted is the second half of that idea: “The latter is always in fear of being deprived of it.” Leonardo’s quest to discover the immanent realm of the soul was so keen that he became a groundbreaking anatomist. When autopsying human skulls, he would study the eye cavities, looking for links to the“ventricles of the brain, where anatomists believed the soul dwelled during life. Seeking to establish the brain’s exact shape, he injected wax into its ventricles. To study the play of light upon the curvature of the retina, he immersed eyes in egg white before boiling and dissecting them. Perhaps as a result, the eyes in Leonardo’s drawings are uniquely lifelike and arresting.
The second autobiographical memory, beginning the piece, resembles a hallucination. “Writing about the falcon seems to be my destiny,” he writes, describing a falcon visiting his cradle, opening his infant’s mouth with its beak, and striking him, “several times with its tail inside my mouth.” Freud thought this mysterious parable offered a cipher to Leonardo’s character. According to Vasari, he had a habit of purchasing caged birds in order to set them free. The falcon is praised for its gracefulness in flight, and Leonardo had a lifelong obsession with understanding the ability of birds to defy gravity. It led to his famous flying machine, an Ovidian metamorphosis of bird and man, making its author, Leonardo, at once a latter-day Daedalus and a prophet of the aeronautic age. In this irreducible image, Leonardo seems to be allegorizing the birth of his own genius, his wonder at the physical world of nature, and his proleptic flights of imagination.
Perhaps this is what the notebooks ultimately give us, and what has attracted Zimmerman to stage them, again and again, in her career: Leonardo’s ability to capture this fleeting, wild life, the dream of flight, the breath of the soul.
Reprinted with permission.
Photos: The cast of The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci at The Old Globe, 2023. Photos by Jim Cox.
