Beethoven, Da Vinci, and the mysteries of the creative impulse

Two geniuses, separated by their respective fields of study, their appearance, manner, and over two hundred years, but both kept detailed notebooks, jotting down their every thought. Beethoven, however, transformed his into hundreds of published works while Da Vinci wrote thousands of pages he kept almost entirely to himself.

Few would debate that Leonardo da Vinci and Ludwig van Beethoven were geniuses of the highest order, at the absolute top of their respective artistic fields, among the most talented individuals in all of human history.  Da Vinci is perhaps the most famous painter who ever lived, having created the most famous work of art in the world, the unmistakable Mona Lisa.  He is also renowned as one of our greatest thinkers, hundreds of years ahead of his contemporaries in their understanding of the human body, optics, perception, invention, and more.  Beethoven is equally famous as a composer, sometimes referred to as “universal” because his works had such wide appeal through the ages, both in his time and our own, among the broader populace and music critics alike.  Most, including me to be embarrassingly honest, know next to nothing about classical music, but the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies in particular along with many another melody we can’t name have been burned into our brains.  Beethoven might be more revered as a musician than a thinker and apparently struggled with even basic arithmetic, yet many musical theorists and scholars believe a deep understanding of mathematics was essential to his compositions and that his work often reflects subtle aspects of mathematical theory.  Interestingly, both were also something of public performers in their respective eras.  Most of Da Vinci’s work was court spectacle or theater, plays and pageants that pushed the limits of the imagination in the late 1400 and early 1500s.  He was also widely renowned as an excellent speaker, an orator of magisterial elegance, able to discourse on almost any topic, even part stand up comedian unveiling riddles and telling stories for the court’s amusement.  Overall, he was described “as a man of outstanding beauty and infinite grace.  He was striking and handsome, and his great presence brought comfort to the most troubled soul.”  Beethoven, before he tragically lost his hearing and became something of a paranoid recluse, was considered the most skilled piano player in the world, playing his own works in concert, no small feat when they remain some of the most difficult to master ever written, and improvising beautiful melodies for hours on end.  A short, abrasive, shabbily dressed, and generally unattractive man, one person described his apartments as “the dirtiest, most disorderly place imaginable,” he was said to come alive in front of the piano, literally transforming into a different person.  Somehow, he became more noble, “with his hands so very still…they seemed to glide right and left over the keys.”  The Czech composer Vaclav Tomasek wrote, “I found myself so profoundly bowed down that I did not touch my pianoforte for several days” after seeing him perform

Beethoven was almost ridiculously prolific throughout a career that began when he was little more than child, publishing some 722 works over the course of 45 years.  These works included almost every conceivable variety of music, symphonies, concertos, orchestrals, soloist performances, overtures, chamber music, chamber music for strings, chamber music for piano, chamber music for wind instruments, piano trios, piano sonatas, piano variations, short piano pieces, vocal music including operas, choral works, solo voices, and more.  In addition to concerts and other live performances, these works sold widely in print and generated a tremendous amount of money throughout Beethoven’s life.  Beethoven himself was known as a ruthless, some might say unscrupulous, businessman who regularly played publishing houses against one another, demanded the highest possible royalties, and generally displayed no loyalty to anyone in financial matters, even suing a widow for cash.  Once, he lied about leaving Vienna for France, claiming he was abused, and that he’d been forced to “contend with all sorts of difficulties, and as yet he has not been fortunate enough to establish himself here in a position compatible to his desire to live entirely for art.”  He also could be so obstinate he refused to accept his own birthday, believing he was born two years later than he actually was and insisting that was the case despite volumes of proof.  He remained a successful self-promoter despite any character flaws, however.  Advertising for an opera, he published “A Word to his Admirers,” declaring “How often in your chagrin, that his depth was not sufficiently appreciated, have you said that van Beethoven composes only for posterity!  You have, no doubt, been convinced of your error since if not before the general enthusiasm aroused by his immortal opera Fidelio, and also that the present finds kindred souls and sympathetic hearts from that which is great and beautiful without withholding its just privileges from the future.”  Somehow, all of this worked to his financial advantage, if not his reputation.  Tomasek, for example, referred to him as the “crassest of materialists.”  Still, the rave reviews mostly piled in, with some claiming his audience would “rise to the point of ecstasy.”  In more than one performance of Fidelio, he was asked to take the stage for a standing ovation between acts, overshadowing the players themselves.  The result was a series of windfalls, both from the sale of printed music, in some cases sold as special editions costing thousands of today’s dollars, and live performances, enough that he averaged four or five times the income of an ordinary citizen in early 1800’s Vienna.  Still, he always had trouble with money, living lavishly with multiple apartments, well beyond any normal means.

Da Vinci, meanwhile, was a miser in his work at least, having produced only some 25 paintings, or at least contributed to them though art historians debate precisely how much.  The great thinker published no books or treatises while he was alive, though he planned several on everything from the importance of painting and its elevation as an artform above poetry to a dissertation on the human body itself.  He was, however, an incredibly prolific author, writing and illustrating thousands of pages in his notebooks on almost every topic imaginable.  It is through these tomes that we have developed a full understanding of his genius, but oddly, one might say for someone who spent so much time and energy devoted to his craft, he rarely showed them to anyone while he was alive except close friends and associates.  A visitor once casually remarked that Da Vinci had “written a treatise on anatomy, showing the limbs, muscles, nerves, veins, joints, intestines, and everything that can be explained in the body of men and women, in a way that has never been done before.”  The same person added, he had “also written on the nature of water, and has filled an infinite number of volumes with treatises on machines and other subjects.”  The notebooks collectively were of a kind that perhaps only Da Vinci himself could ever have created, combining prose (written in a backward mirror script because he was left handed) with striking drawings clearly from the hand of a master artist, along with random notes, doodlings, laundry lists of things to do and see, even itemized receipts for everything from clothing to the costs of the funeral of his mother.  It is here that we see the full scope of this genius, far more than I can get into in this post except for a few highlights.  The designs for potential flying machines, scuba diving equipment, and other inventions that would not exist for hundreds of years in some cases are perhaps most famous, but the most striking to me is his sweeping study of the human body mentioned earlier.

Biology was not a profession yet or even a particularly well defined field of study, but Da Vinci took it upon himself to catalog every bone and muscle, drawing each in exquisite detail in a style that would not be out of place in a modern textbook, and measuring the various relationships between all the respective parts.  He described his effort, “This work should begin with the conception of man, and describe the nature of the womb and how the fetus lives in it, up to what stage it resides there, and in what way it quickens into life and gets food.  Also its growth and what interval there is between one stage of growth and another.  What forces it out from the body of the mother, and for what reasons it sometimes comes out of the mother’s womb before due time. Then I will describe which parts grow more than the others after the baby is born, and determine the proportions of a child of one year.  Then describe the fully grown man and woman, with their proportions, and how the nature of their complexions, color, and physiognomy.  Then how they are composed of veins, tendons, muscles, and bones.  Then, in four drawings, represent four universal conditions of men.  That is, Mirth, with various acts of laughter, and describe the causes of laughter.  Weeping in various aspects with its causes.  Fighting, with various acts of killing; flight, fear, ferocity, boldness, murder, and everything pertaining to such cases.  Then represent Labor, with pulling, thrusting, carrying, stopping, supporting, and such like things.  Then perspective, concerning the functions and effects of the eye; and of hearing – here I will speak of music – and describe the other senses.”  Elsewhere, he noted he was interested in “What nerve is the cause of the eye’s movement and makes the movement of one eye move the other?”  He wanted to know what made us express “wonder,” “What sneezing is,” “What yawning is,” “Epilepsy,” “Spasm,” “Paralysis,” “Fatigue, “Hunger,” “Sleep,” “Thirst,” “Sensuality.”

To achieve this level of understanding – completely unheard of in his day – he dissected dozens of corpses, some old, some young, uncounted animals, conducted experiments, and relied on his acute powers of observation, comparing and contrasting structures throughout nature, and adapting ideas from a wide variety of sources.  He cannot be said to have achieved all he hoped, but he came closer than any single person before or since by a huge margin.  Scholars are not exaggerating when they say that had Da Vinci published his works on the human body alone, he would be known as the greatest, most influential biologist who ever lived, right beside Charles Darwin in the pantheon of the profession.  He was the first to detail every muscle responsible for the motions of the face, particularly the smile, learning he applied to the infamous grin of the Mona Lisa, along with just about every other major muscle group.  He mapped the nerves and the circulatory system, though he was wrong in his conclusions about how blood flowed from the heart.  He was also the first to depict the fetus actually in the womb in an image that is strikingly accurate except for some slight inconsistencies in the shape because he relied on animals for reference and achingly beautiful, as if we were witnessing the dawn of life itself or the birth of an angel.  He also proposed a mechanism for the opening and closing of the aortic valve that was subject to debate until the 1960s, when he was finally proven correct.  His lifelong studies of rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water allowed him to correctly perceive that the valve was closed by the pressure of the blood, not any muscle.  The body was far from all he studied as well, as the visitor suggested.  His work on light and optics correctly determined why the sky is blue.  His work on geology produced observations about how layers of sediment compile and erode, and how that is reflected in the age of the Earth that generally holds to this day.  If Da Vinci had published even a small portion, he would have beaten his contemporaries by hundreds of years, but instead he published absolutely none of it, nothing at all, writing and illustrating tens of thousands of pages, seemingly for his own amusement.

One cannot help but wonder why.  Consider that Beethoven kept notebooks as well, known to never be seen without something to jot down whatever musical ideas were in his head, careful not to miss a single note.  The opening sequence for the Ninth Symphony, for example, was written years before the full composition, the bars scratched out on a page.  In some cases, he could carve ideas into a tree or simply with a stick in the dirt when he didn’t have a pen and paper.  He claimed to be able to enter an almost trancelike state he referred to as “raptus,” where he became separated from the world around him, as if he could hear the music of the spheres.  “A true artist has no pride,” he wrote.  “Unfortunately, he sees that art has no limits; he senses darkly how far he is from the goal; and while he is admired by others; he mourns that he has not yet arrived to the point where his better genius shines as an example like the distant sun.”  We might imagine both Da Vinci and Beethoven, separated by their craft, their appearance, and more than two hundred years in time, were united in this.  Both sought fame and fortune, redefining what it means to be a public artist, but were individually motivated by the stirrings within each of them, things we might say are separate from their artistic drive.  Whether music, art, or ideas, both were filled to overflowing and their notebooks were the only way to avoid drowning in their own heads, channeling their creativity into something physical and tangible, even if what they sought to represent can perhaps best be described as “the tremblings of the soul.”

Da Vinci, however, was content with simply doing the hard work of creating for himself.  Indeed, many of his most famous paintings including the Mona Lisa he kept to himself while he was alive and never delivered them to the public.  Art historians have noted that some he continued working on for years, adding a few brush strokes or even replacing whole sections, never believing anything was finished to his satisfaction.  Perhaps he understood that there was always more to know and hence always something left to perfect, or perhaps he was simply content with his public persona as a great artist and inventor, a fixture at court, and didn’t feel the need to publish or perish as they say.  Beethoven was also known as a perfectionist, frequently tweaking works right before they were performed and in at least one instance, failing to complete the overture for an opera, replacing it with an older piece for the first performance.  Still, he must’ve believed there was a time to simply let it go, to publish and forget – or recycle into some later work – and let the public decide.  Certainly, he did it for money, but Da Vinci would have been wealthier had he published as well.  At the risk of amateur psychoanalysis, one cannot help but think the difference could be due to their relative comfort in their own skin.  Beethoven was short, stocky, and dark for the era in a Vienna almost purely white.  A man no one described as courtly, who had trouble consummating relationships with women outside of prostitutes, and who viewed his music as a statement of his worth.  He would be judged by his masterpieces, not his shabby clothes, poor manners at times, or rundown living space.  Beethoven’s father was also an abusive drunk who drove the family near to ruin.  Lastly, Beethoven was isolated by his deafness, music being the only way he could communicate clearly, transforming him into the type of person in principle who continually had something to prove, both to himself and the world at large.  Da Vinci, however, was a much more social man, well-dressed and well-versed in etiquette.  He traveled with a troupe of admirers and, though illegitimate, he came from an established family and benefited from his father’s interest in his career.  He was a homosexual, but had more luck in love than Beethoven ever would.  He too had something to prove, especially in his spat with Michelangelo, who seemed more Beethoven in comparison, but didn’t feel the constant pressure to show his worth because his worth shined every time he entered the room, clear for all to see with or without a new painting to show off. 

We can never know for sure, and perhaps we shouldn’t care, instead putting our trust in the art over the artist, thankful that we have both Da Vinci’s notebooks, or at least a significant portion of them, and Beethoven’s works, not worrying about the reasons they each had for creating or withholding them.  The works, after all, are timeless.  The minds behind them, all too human.