Conceptual Metaphor Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The tale of a meeting between Leonardo and Savonarola in the summer of 1495, later reported by Vasari (1550 and 1568) but confirmed by a memorandum remained in Leonardo's possession (Codex Atlanticus, f. 628 r), which refers explicitly to a "mission" assigned to him (presumably by Ludovico Sforza) to go to Florence, in order to get (through a competent mediator, probably Bernardo Rucellai) a detailed report about the new political rules promoted by the friar, lends credibility to a hypothesis of comparison between their anthropological conceptions, especially as they emerge from their "transfigured" use of the prophetic semantics, despite their shared repudiation of astrological quackery. If, on the one
hand, Savonarola's preaching does not have any properly predictive character, in terms of intentional "divination", standing rather as a projection or representation of the contingency of the current days, in purely political terms, Leonardo's riddles, which he literally called "prophecies", on the other hand - and similarly - transform the genre of presages or predictions into entertainment tools for courtly audiences, that, however, in some cases, become a vehicle for a critical evaluation of the troubles of contemporary society. The likelihood that, on the occasion of his convocation in Florence in 1495, Leonardo was able to listen to Savonarola's sermons, so steeped in apocalyptic prophecy, may provide an
explanation to the appearance of writings called "prophecies", among his notes, just in the last five years of the century. Their underlying vision of man, clearly pessimistic, offers significant points of contact with the negative anthropology advocated by Savonarola's preaching, which also makes use of animal apology, especially in the conceptual and ideological interpretation of the "anti-human" conflictuality among men, that makes them "beasts" towards themselves, in a sort of anticipation of Hobbes' famous motto homo homini
lupus.