Mikhail Anikin
The State Hermitage Museum, Russia
What impresses most in Leonardo Da Vinci’s works is their transcendental qualities, the empyreal light, which the maitre manages to capture and enclose in the painting frame. Da Vinci is unequalled in the Western world in the level of supersubstantial cosmos comprehension. In Russia, only Andrei Rublev, Theophanes the Greek and Dionysius reached similar level. Leonardo continued Rublev’s line in some aspects, managing to instill the empyreal light of icon in the western art and introduce it to international spectators.
It is safe to say that Leonardo Da Vinci is primarily interesting as a spiritually great figure.
Even his early works reveal his ingenuity as an artist, and in his last masterpieces Leonardo reaches a truly astounding level of enlightenment.
Is it possible that such a profundity is achieved by a conventional artist, who was not familiar with spiritual monachal practices? The answer is unambiguously negative. This is out of question just by the nature of things. The spiritual profundity can only be achieved as a result of strenuous exercise in prayer, comprehension of exceptional depth of the Holy Scripture, mastering of tacit prayer and getting acquainted with prayer practices of the Mount Athos and hesychasm.
The paper briefly presents the contents of author’s monograph “On Hidden Fables and Undermeanings in the European Fine Arts”, published in 2011, Dmitri Bulanin publishing house, Saint Petersburg and is dedicated to revealing hesychastic basis of Leonardo’s creation.