One long-ago evening as I sat contemplating a picture in a book – Leonardo Da Vinci's Lady with a Stoat, reproduced in Jacob Bronowski's little volume of essays, Science and Human Values – my daughter, then 7, looked over my shoulder. “What's that picture?” she asked. “Is there a story of it?”
For Bronowski, there was more than one story. The girl, as he explains, was probably a mistress of Lodovico Sforza, the usurper of Milan, at whose violent court Leonardo then lived; the stoat (an ermine) was Sforza's emblem, and likely also a pun on the girl's name.
But the bigger story was how the painter had chosen to depict his subject: “Leonardo has matched the stoat in the girl. In the skull under the long brow, in the lucid eyes, in the stately, brutal, beautiful and stupid head of the girl, he has rediscovered the animal nature. ... The very carriage of the girl and the stoat, the gesture of the hand and the claw, explore the character with the anatomy. ... The Lady with a Stoat is as much a research into man and animal, and a creation of unity, as is Darwin's Origin of Species.”
Leonardo's Lady with a Stoat
How to sum that up for a child? I pointed out how the artist had painted the lady to look like the animal she held in her lap, and how this “echo” helped make the painting beautiful. My daughter gazed briefly at the picture, then ran off to play. Later that evening, she brought me a new crayon drawing. A horizontal line divided the page into water and sky. In the sky was a kite, its long tail strung with colourful bows; under the water, a large fish led a procession of colourful baby fishes. I couldn't prove that our “Bronowski moment” had inspired this drawing, but it was hard to believe it hadn't.
Jacob Bronowski – mathematician, physicist, biologist, humanist, lover of the arts, incomparable teacher, passionate believer in progress – was best known for his 1973 BBC documentary series The Ascent of Man, which placed science in the context of human history, defended it against those who claimed it was a dehumanizing force, and traced its role in the development of culture.
Bronowski bridges the gap between modes of thought often assumed to be diametrically opposed
I doubt that anyone who saw it will ever forget the ending of one particular episode in that series: when Bronowski, standing by the pond at Auschwitz, faces the camera and says, “Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And it was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance …” then slowly walks into the water with his shoes on, saying, “We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act,” suddenly bending down to scoop up a handful of wet mud as he speaks the words, “We have to touch people.”
