Leonardo's days: "Non ci manca modi né vie di conpartire e misurare questi nostri miseri giorni” (Codex Atlanticus, c. 42v)
Italiano

by Carlo Vecce

April 13th, 2019
Vinci, Teatro di Vinci

On a folio illustrated with drawings of orioli (clocks), produced when he was a young man, there is a fragment of a meditation on time that would run throughout Leonardo's work and life. The inexorable "consumer of all things", time is presented as a measurable entity.

By the end of the Middle Ages, thanks to the technological revolution in the mechanical arts, it was possible to produce increasingly accurate instruments of measurement, which in turn enabled the experimental study of physical phenomena. Time was transformed from the organic perception of the ancients to the abstract, scientific, mathematical measure of the moderns: from human time to the time of things (of the world, of the cosmos).

But there was still also the time of lived experience, of individual and collective consciousness, a means of orientation in society. The gesture of recording it, especially in writing, was very important to Leonardo. Events, texts and drawings were fixed at precise points in the flow of time, and preserved by memory as "moments", points on a line which in turn became "history". Dates mark the points of that line: decisive moments in his artistic career, scientific and intellectual experiences, events from everyday life. References are often made to religious festivals, as was natural in a world still regulated by the Church calendar. Finally, Leonardo's days enable us to read his manuscripts as a single libro di ricordi, or book of recollections, a writing of memory arising from and developing in an indissoluble relationship with time.