Leonardo da Vinci and Damien Hirst - Essay Example

Leonardo da Vinci and Damien Hirst: Representations of culture (3000 words) This essay will compare two artists which, at the time of creating theirworks of art, were at the cutting edge of the art world and who both, in their very different ways, represented the culture and society in which they were working. This first of these artists is Leonardo da Vinci. The so-called archetypal ‘Renaissance man’, Leonardo’s work reflects the Renaissance obsession with form, perspective and the human body. By focusing on his work Vetruvian Man, this essay will outline not only how this work of art captures a precise cultural moment but also how Leonardo moves far beyond his contemporaries. The second artist that this essay will consider is Damien Hirst. Although his work is at first sight radically different to that of Leonardo, working as he does with very different materials and in a time period and geographical location remote from Renaissance Italy, Hirst’s work can however be seen to reflect the very specific cultural context in which he is working in a similar way to Leonardo. By considering his Natural History series, and in particular Mother and Child Divided this essay well demonstrate how Hirst’s works at times contain an obsession with form similar to that of Leonardo’s. It will also show how Hirst, like Leonardo, has carved his own path in the art world. Leonardo da Vinci has long been held as a typical example of a Renaissance man. This reputation is due largely to his fame and to the immediate accessibility his works still have in the twenty-first century. However, by taking a brief look at the cultural context in which Leonardo was working, it becomes immediately apparent that he was in fact far from the standard model of the artist in Renaissance Italy. Artists in Italy during the Renaissance survived on a system of patronage which saw them commissioned to produce works of art on demand. Michelangelo’s masterpiece on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome was not inspired by a flash of artistic genius, but rather by a handsome payment by the Roman clergy. Similarly, Leonardo was artist to the court in Milan, working for the wealthy Sforza family.1 However, his Vetruvian Man, one of the most iconic of all his works, was not born of commission, but rather the obsessive drive which Leonardo had to understand the proportions of the human body. Although it is apparently an ink on paper drawing like any other, it actually represents a striking divide between Leonardo and other Renaissance artists. Humanism was the guiding principle of art during this period. The driving force behind humanism was the idea of placing man at the centre of the universe, in a break with the Medieval deity-centric view of the world.2 Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam is one of the most celebrated examples of this, with Adam as the focus and God reaching down to him in order to give him life. At first glance, Leonardo’s Vetruvian Man could appear to be motivated by similar ideals. It focuses on man, with the naval at the centre of the picture reinforcing the notion that, while God may have created the universe, it is in fact man who procreates, invents and innovates. There was also an obsession with accurate representations of the human body during this period. As Zöllner (2000: 40) explains, ‘detailed knowledge of human proportions had already become a matter of course for many artists by the mid-15th century, although none had devoted such detailed attention to it as Leonardo’. Clearly, then, Leonardo had much in common with other artists of his time. However, as Ackerman (1998: 208) points out , ‘trained as a painter, sculptor, and designer of machines, Leonardo da Vinci was no humanist. At the start of his career he was unable to read the texts upon which he would have to base his scientific knowledge.’ With his astute scientific approach, Leonardo was unable to accept this neo-platonic theory. He was, rather, much more in tune with the Aristotelian approach to proportion which was based on strict mathematical calculation. Leonardo was not concerned with a naturalistic approach to form, but rather a scientific dissection of it. Maiorino (1992: 183) reinforces this argument, with particular reference to Vetruvian Man. He comments that ‘instead of setting his Vitruvian nude against a natural background, Leonardo placed it in a world of linear abstractions as autonomously humanist as the architectural text he drew from’. This brand of ‘autonomous humanism’ was unique to Leonardo, as was his use of classical sources. A rediscovery of classical art is the hallmark of the Renaissance. The nude, kept largely out of the public eye during the Middle Ages, became a subject of devoted fascination for Renaissance artists. Michelangelo’s David is one of the most celebrated examples of this subject. Leonardo, too, in his Vetruvian Man deals with the naked human body. However, as Maiorino so succinctly noted, his inspiration is not the classical statues of ancient Rome and Greece, but rather an architectural text written by the Roman architect Vetruvius. This unlikely source of inspiration reinforces the scientific approach which Leonardo took to his exploration of human proportion. Rather than working from observation, trial and error, the meticulous scientist used Vetruvius’ measurements of the proportion of the human body, combined with his own privately collected measurements, to demonstrate the geometrical proportions of the human body. Placed within a circle and a square, Vetruvian Man is not a naturalistic expression of form but a scientific study of dimensions. It is clear, however, that this private concern was not reflected in his publically commissioned works. The Mona Lisa and The Last Supper are among the most celebrated examples of Renaissance art, clearly demonstrating a more humanist style, designed to meet the tastes of those who commissioned these works. However, it is in Leonardo’s notebooks, and particularly in Vetruvian Man that the artist’s allegiance to science can be seen. Time and again images are seen which divide the human body into segments, as Leonardo attempts to understand the human proportion. Most notable among these are his studies of skulls. Leonardo places these inside grids in order to create the accurate dimensions of the human head. These sketches in themselves did not have a commissionable value and so Leonardo limits himself to using them to design more classical acceptable works of art. However, they reveal the true interests of this Renaissance man. Moving into the twenty-first century, however, the art world offers a range of material of expression beyond painting, drawing and sculpture. As Howells (2003: 64) summarises: The fact remains...that considerably many more people are nowadays choosing both to record and to express their world using these new media than through painting. Indeed, even among professional artists, painting is finding itself increasingly further from the cutting edge. Damien Hurst and Tracy Emin, for example, have been household names as contemporary artists in Britain, yet neither is famed for their work in paint. The visual distance between Leonardo and Hirst is therefore, at first sight, enormous. There seems to be little common ground between the two. Hirst, is much less limited in what he chooses to express and how he decides to express it. Indeed, the so-called enfant terrible of Brit-Art has constantly pushed the boundaries of expression when it comes to art, and, some would argues, good taste. However, areas of common ground do emerge upon closer inspection. Hirst is, like Leonardo before him, drawn to the body as a mode of expression. However, he incorporates form and dimension into his art in a radically different way to his predecessor. Hirst has indulged in creating scandal, and his piece Mother and Child Divided is no exception. The work is composed of a female cow and her calf, both split in two and preserved in formaldehyde. The viewer can move in between the two halves of mother and child, since each half is contained within a sealed glass unit. The effect is to allow the viewer to see inside each animal, almost as if they had entered into a science laboratory. It is, essentially, a study in anatomy very similar to the method of dissection used throughout the Renaissance to better understand the workings of the human body. By splitting the cow and calf open along the spine, the internal organs are opened up in a spectacular cross-section. However, it is difficult to understand what place such a work has in an art gallery, let alone a twentieth century art gallery. As Mey (2007:77) poignantly comments ; Here, modernist art meets science. The matter-of-fact display is situated ambiguously at their intersection. Hirst’s use of animal cadavers and the application of standard scientific preservation methods do not seem to fulfil any particular purpose that inherently necessitates and justifies such and undertaking other than to stun and provoke the audience. There is, it is clear, a strong link between science and art in this work, just as there is in Leonardo’s Vetruvian Man. What is much less clear, however, is what purpose this relationship serves. In order to resolve this issue, it is necessary to consider the cultural context in which Hirst is working. Mey explains that Hirst is working in a modern, or perhaps postmodern, mode. His is a comment which goes beyond the mere representation of life, but rather examines how the concept of life has been understood by man. However, here Hirst is not concerned with human life. Rather, he explores animal life and the relationship that it has with sceince. Mey (2007: 77) concludes that ‘‘from within the confines of art, Hirst may have managed to send a pertinent reminder of the perversity involved in our life practices, in which millions of animals are experimented on in the name of science.’ The installation is clinical in its execution. It does not shock through violence or blood shed, but rather by its calm divisions and its clean lines. The futile cow, floating motionless in the formaldehyde is powerful for its very tranquillity. Death, in this context, has been rationalised. It has been divided evenly and placed in crisp glass boxes. In the same way, science has come to regard animals as a clinical necessity. This is Hirst’s statement against such rationalisation. The calm boxes stand in direct contrast to the sentimental name of the piece itself. There is, nevertheless, a very clear commitment to a careful consideration of space and proportion in this work, as there is in the work of Leonardo. Mother and Child Divided is part of Hirst’s Natural History series. In this collection the motif of the animal divided and compartmentalised in clear glass boxes is omnipresent. As Christopher (1999: 172) notes ‘the minimal style and attention to spatial relationships are also characteristic of [Hirst’s] Natural History series.’ Proportion and space is all important in these works. Perhaps the most striking example of the neat division and compartmentalisation at work in this series is found in Some comfort gained from the inherent lies in everything. In this piece, the cow reappears divided into twelve glass boxes; As is clear from the above picture, the white boxes and light blue solution give a sense of serenity to what is, in reality, a butchered cow. Again, Hirst allows the viewer to move around the individual pieces of the cow, to consider the mutilation from a respectful, clinical distance. In the name of this piece, Some comfort gained from the inherent lies in everything, Hirst really focuses on his purpose in all these pieces. The ‘inherent lie’ is the negation of death which humans regularly perform in order to gain comfort from the terrifying inevitability of it. The compartmentalisation of the cow, therefore, reflects man’s ability to do the same thing with his fear of death. Hirst plays on this when he presents the pieces of cow in such a detached and almost accessible way. By dividing the cow up it becomes abstract and it is easy to forget that it is a creature which was once living, but is no more. Indeed, the reason that the collection is entitled Natural History is because it presents a corrupted sort of museum. Horwitz and Singley (2004: 294) comment that the dissected bodies of cows, isolated in a number of vitrines filled with formaldehyde, create a spectral amalgam that draws our attention to the fragment of the beast and the space it now occupies. Hirst, who aims to corrupt the environment, creates a tension between the glass cases, the space they occupy, and the suspended contents they hold at bay. These tanks reflect and disturb the calm control of the white cube. They represent the containers of natural history of museums and their desire to arrest decay. This ‘desire to arrest decay’ is much like the denial of death by man. However, Hirst subverts the reassuring museums cases by chopping up his specimen, forcing the observers to face death. This is why the work is so compelling. It is a comment on the very modern detachment of man from his own mortality. Unlike Leonardo, Hirst is not restrained by patronage and so his private sketches can burst openly into the public arena. Although Saatchi may have been instrumental in building Hirst’s career early on, Hirst has now established the financial means to forge his path without this multi-millionaire art collector.3 This is perhaps what makes Hirst so endlessly fascinating and why his work draws so much attention. The art works are successful not just because they are often surrounded by scandal, but rather because they constantly push the boundaries of the artist perceived role of representing the world around them. The Renaissance artists represents the human body because perfecting that particular subject has not yet been achieved. In the twenty-first century, Hirst must look elsewhere for his inspiration and so he looks beyond and inside this body, reflecting the psychological rather than the physical. How better to tap into the modern psyche than through death? Hirst explores the uncomfortable spaces into which art has rarely delved so decisively. He breaks taboos and puts twenty-first century human paranoia at the centre of his work repeatedly. Most notably, he does all this in a determinedly individualistic fashion. These two concepts converge clearly in his striking work For the love of God. This work consists of a platinum skull encrusted with diamonds and precious stones. At a cost of between eight and ten million pounds, Hirst commissioned the work himself, from the jewellers to the Crown, Bentley and Skinner. Reported in the Observer as ‘art’s costliest ever work’, Hirst himself has commented that ‘this will be the ultimate two fingers up to death. I want people to see it and be astounded. I want them to gasp.4 Hirst, therefore, clearly regards this as a more positive take on death, a playful way to confront death head on, rather than a way to delve into the human psyche. The skull is transformed into a thing of beauty, a precious object, to be admired and to inspire awe. Hirst wants people to gasp, to be astounded, rather than to be shocked, horrified or offended. However there is, nevertheless, a similar process at work. While Hirst subverts the museum setting with his animals in formaldehyde, he is here also subverting the skull. By casting it in platinum and covering it in diamonds, Hirst claims to create a jewel. However, the skull remains to remind the viewer of the contrast between the timelessness of the diamonds and the timelessness of death. Wealth, proclaims Hirst, cannot save you from the inevitable. The modern obsession with beauty and money is no protection from death. However, in this work, Hirst goes one step further. This expensive skull, commissioned by Hirst himself, is the ultimate expression of his liberation as an artist. Gone are the restraints which limited Leonardo and formed his artistic expression. Instead, Hirst can trifle with money, can risk a fortune on commissioning a diamond encrusted skull, can flaunt his freedom to choose his mode of expression. This is what the skull, therefore, truly represents. It is bold statement by Hirst of his power as an artist. However, perhaps it is also a comment on the part of the artist, on the place he has made for himself among the most famous artists in the world. Long after he is dead, Hirst’s glittering skull will mark its creators immortality. It may be a far cry from Leonardo’s dimension sketches, but both representations of the cranium ensure their artists immortality. Hirst is, therefore, something of a Leonardo for the twenty-first century. He is as obsessed with form, and life (in as abstract a sense as Leonardo is) in his work, but rather than dwelling on the body as a calculable whole, he deals with it as fragmented and fallible. In this way, just as Leonardo did before him, Hirst pushes the boundaries of art. He re-invents, though a studied concern with space and dimension, the living form. Leonardo seeks to represent the proportions of the human body accurately. Hirst has no need to represent, because he takes the body itself as his raw material. He takes the animal form, rather than the human one, but his deliberate fragmentation of the animal mirrors the same fragmentation which the human for undergoes after death. He undoes what Leonardo has done before him, unpicking the true dimension of the living form and replacing it with a set of individual pieces. It is this tendency which will allow Hirst’s work to be as relevant in one hundred years as they are today. He breaks down walls, experimenting with ever more extreme ways for the artist to interact with what he perceives. This boldness to innovate, especially via the jewel encrusted skull, while at the same to referring to the most basic of all human concerns – the relationship between life and death – ultimately allows his work to transcend time and place. Word count: 3086 Bibliography Ackerman, James. S. (Winter, 1998) ‘Leonardo Da Vinci: Art in Science’, Daedalus. Vol. 127, No. 1 pp.207-224 Christopher, David (1999) British Culture: An Introduction. Oxford: Routledge Gibbons, Fiachra (2003) ‘Hirst buys his art back from Saatchi’ in Guardian. 27th November http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/nov/27/arts.artsnews Accessed 27th April 2009 Horwitz, Jamie & Singley, Paulette (2004) Eating architecture. Massachusetts: MIT Press Howells, Richard (2003) Visual Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Kristeller, P.O. (1990) Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press Maiorino, Giancarlo (1992) Leonardo Da Vinci: The Daedalian Mythmaker. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press Mey, Kerstin (2007) Art and obscenity. New York: I.B. Tauris O’Hagan, Shawn (2006) ‘Hirst’s diamond creation is art’s costliest work ever’ in Observer. 21st May. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/may/21/arts.artsnews Accessed 27th April 2009 Paoletti, John & Radke, Gary (2005) Art in Renaissance Italy. London: Laurence King Publishing Zöllner, Frank (2000) Leonardo da Vinci: 1452-1519. New York: Taschen Read More