Leonardo da Vinci: The Daedalian Mythmaker

This study is the first to consider the whole body of Leonardo’s works with an eye to a comprehensive interpretation that combines both cultural history and the history of details. According to Maiorino, Leonardo’s was a myth making mode of activity that had a Daedalian range and affected art and technology alike. As both artist and inventor, Leonardo did not separate reason from experience, empiricism from abstraction, an attitude Maiorino characterizes as “Anti-Humanism.” Rather than accepting the earlier view that the culture of the Renaissance was divided, he argues that Anti-Humanism was present from the start in such founders as Petrarch and Alberti and continued to be a current in later authors and artists; hence the significance of Leonardo to Humanism and to Baroque and Renaissance culture at large.