Tea at Trianon: Between Leonardo and Hildegard: The Universal Man

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, July 29, 2022

Between Leonardo and Hildegard: The Universal Man

From Folia Magazine:

May 2, 1519: on this day, exactly 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci died at 67 in Château du Clos Lucé, a castle in the city of Amboise, France. As one of the most popular and widely-known artists of all time, Leonardo's works are unsurprisingly among the most famous in the history of art. Besides what many consider to be his masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, his most popular work is probably the Vitruvian Man: the representation of ideal human body proportions. Unknown to many, however, are the striking similarities between the Vitruvian Man and a medieval illustration in Hildegard of Bingen's Liber Divinorum Operum, her book of visions. More than 300 years before Leonardo's work, in fact, St. Hildegard of Bingen had created what is known as the Universal Man: just like the Vitruvian Man, the Universal Man represents the ideal of perfection; unlike Da Vinci's, however, Hildegard's idea of perfection is born not from science and measure but from poetry and music. These arts, in fact, are seen at the symbolic link between the philosophical concepts of macrocosm (the universe) and microcosm (man), and, similarly, between God and His Creation. (Read more.)