From fable to emblem: the mechanics of words and images in Leonardo's personal library

My dissertation centers on Leonardo da Vinci’s compositional methods in his drawings and writings, and investigates their relationship with scientific diagrams and mechanical principles. Taking my cue from recent scholarship in art history and visual culture—such as W.J.T. Mitchell, Leonard Barkan, and Marco Ruffini—I identify the main sources for Leonardo’s development of visual and written narratives in the books belonging to his personal library. Subsequently, I analyze recurrent patterns in Leonardo’s folios featuring fables, emblems, and engineering projects, and examine the convergence of his use of empirical, diagrammatic, and pictorial strategies toward the investigation of nature. I argue that in order to represent tensions between nature and artifice, Leonardo applies notions of mechanics to his fables, and structures them on a binary scheme that displays simultaneously the causes and the effects of a situation. Then he develops his fables into emblems, which are synthetic texts condensing written and pictorial material, modeled on the same binary structure. By deeply engaging with both visual and textual elements in Leonardo’s manuscripts, my study reveals the intimate links between scientific knowledge and humanistic thought across his oeuvre.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Giuditta Cirnigliar