Note 33 — Chapter X · FREETHOUGHT IN THE RENAISSANCE

As to the beliefs of the great artists in general we have little information. Employed as they so often were in painting religious subjects for the churches, they must as a rule have conformed outwardly; and the artistic temper is more commonly credent than skeptical. But in the case of one of the greatest, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), we have evidence of a continual play of critical scrutiny on the world, and a continual revolt against mere authority, which seem incompatible with any acceptance of Christian dogma. In his many notes, unpublished till modern times, his universal genius plays so freely upon so many problems that he cannot be supposed to have ignored those of religion. His stern appraisement of the mass of men33 carries with it no evangelical qualifications; his passion for knowledge is not Christian;34 and his reiterated rejection of the principle of authority in science35 and in literature36 tells of a spirit which, howsoever it might practise reticence, cannot have been inwardly docile to either priesthood or tradition. In all his reflections upon philosophic and scientific themes he is, in the scientific sense, materialistic—that is, inductive, studious of experiment, insistent upon tangible data.37 “Wisdom is daughter of experience”;38 “truth is the daughter of time”;39 “there is no effect in Nature without a reason”;40 “all our knowledge originates in sensations”41—such are the dicta he accumulates in an age of superstition heightened by the mutability of life, of ecclesiastical tyranny tempered only by indifferentism, of faith in astrology and amulets, of benumbing tradition in science and philosophy. On the problem of the phenomena of fossil shells he pronounces with a searching sagacity of inference42 that seems to reveal at once the extent to which the advance of science has been blocked by pious obscurantism.43 In all directions we see the great artist, a century before Bacon, anticipating Bacon’s protests and questionings, and this with no such primary bias to religion as Bacon had acquired at his mother’s knee. When he turns to the problems of body and spirit he is as dispassionate, as keenly speculative, as over those of external nature.44 Of magic he is entirely contemptuous, not in the least on religious grounds, though he glances at these, but simply for the folly of it.45 All that tells of religious feeling in him is summed up in a few utterances expressive of a vague theism;46 while he has straight thrusts at religious fraud and absurdity.47 It is indeed improbable that a mind so necessitated to discourse of its thought, however gifted for prudent silence, can have subsisted without private sympathy from kindred souls. Skepticism was admittedly abundant; and Leonardo of all men can least have failed to reckon with its motives.