Leonardo da Vinci in Muratov’s Perception: Between Visionary Enchantment and Rationalism
This article examines why Muratov devotes neither an essay nor a separate chapter of Obrazy Italiito Leonardo, despite repeatedly referring to this figure in the sections on the fifteenth century. Muratov’s engagement with Leonardo is complex. In the tormented and enigmatic personality of the Vincian genius—marked by “dazzling intellectualism” sustained by ideas of striking modernity— he recognises a sensibility akin to that of modern man. He links Leonardo with Botticelli, discerning in both an awareness of existential solitude and the conviction that art, understood as the creation of eternal beauty, constitutes the sole path to salvation. Leonardo’s multifaceted conception of beauty underlies Muratov’s ambivalent attitude and measured admiration towards him. On the one hand, Leonardo appears as a felicitous interpreter of the aspirations of fifteenth-century art, through his enchanting landscapes and his profound sense of the world’s immediacy and mystery; on the other, he stands as the one who nullified those very aspirations through the rationalism and philosophical depth that pervade The Last Supper—a work of astonishing perfection, yet devoid of life.
