Monday, July 21, 2025 at 10:28 AM

“Behold how, when we are away, we long to return to our home country, and our former state. How like it is to the moth with the flame. But the man who desires each new day and each new hour, thinking that they are too slow in coming, does not realize that he is longing for his own destruction.”—Leonardo da Vinci.

I try to tune out all the noise and bad news that seems to have overtaken our daily lives—confusion and discord at home and abroad. And as a lover of history and literature, my escape is finding my Oasis from the clamor of the crowded days, by submerging myself in the Renaissance period, which has always fascinated me. The Renaissance, which means rebirth, is that period when man left the dark ages behind, when the world was still in black and white, and stepped into an intoxicating world of color and art and literature and music and printed books. In the 15th and the early 16th century, there was an explosion of creativity, mostly in Italy, led by da Vinci (1452-1519), and his main rival, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564).

Leonardo da Vinci has been the only true genius that has ever lived, in my opinion. Sure, Michelangelo was a genius painter; Bach and Beethoven and Mozart were musical geniuses; but da Vinci was the real thing. He was a painter, sculptor, inventor, scientist, naturalist, humanist, poet, architect, a renaissance man in the true sense of the word. His curious mind led him to invent or design objects of war, flying objects like the helicopter, 500 years before its time, before it became a reality. He dissected human corpses, animals and birds, to understand their biological origins, and how they functioned—their muscles and sinews and form; and some of his diagrams, especially those of the human heart and its functions, are still used in modern day medicine. He was the first to put landscapes in paintings, the first to paint a woman looking straight ahead instead of in profile. He made the drawings of people emote emotions that made them seem real, not caricatures. He invented war machines and designed palaces. He did all this without going to a university; he did it all because of his curious and unquenchable thirst for more, and still more, and his incredibly imaginative mind.

He hardly completed most of his works, because he was never satisfied and expected more of himself. The Last Supper, Mona Lisa, the Vitruvian Man, Virgin of the Rocks, the Annunciation, and so many more. He thought that if he completed them he would probably have felt like his sense of worth diminished. He was born out of wedlock, and gay, as was Michelangelo, and most of the other artists of that time.

But he stood out, far apart, as someone special, and as a much better artist than any of his contemporaries, and all who have followed since, in my opinion. He was courted by popes and kings, all wanting to bask in the glory of his magnificent works. He died at 67 in France, finally accepting and acknowledging his greatness, his genius, in the last days of his life.

So, I read biographies and watch documentaries of these great men, who left such irreplaceable treasures of art and poetry and music that are all everlasting, will never go away, will probably never be replicated!

Then I have to leave that oasis to face the reality of the present, where little insignificant men like Trump and Putin and Xi dominate the zeitgeist, having contributed nothing to society but chaos and destruction and hate and oppression! Little men who will be forgotten as soon as they are gone from this earth. Wat a ting!

Even back then, and going farther back to Alexander the Great, who had Aristotle as his muse, leaders recognized the value of art as an integral component of the human soul. That artists were supposed to be nurtured and celebrated and left to their own devices, and in so doing, contribute to the greatness of their nations. Greatness has always been determined by art and museums and parks and architecture and an educated society that supports arts, solidifying the belief that the pen is mightier than the sword.

Ok, I’m going back, finding my way back into my oasis. It is much better than hearing the name Epstein, or ICE, over and over. Names that define our now. Wat a bloody ting!

Glen

P.S.:  I know I left out geniuses like Einstein and Oppenheimer and Jobs, but they were geniuses in specific fields, not all fields, as da Vinci was.