You can’t eat your cake and save the planet too.
The Mona Lisa was the victim of an apparent environmentalist attack on May 29, when a man disguised in a wig and lipstick smeared cake on the famous painting after jumping the guardrails in front of it and trying to break the bulletproof glass that protects it, according to a tweet from a witness on the scene.
As the police dragged the man away, he yelled in French his rationale for the attack.
“Think of the Earth! There are people who are destroying the Earth! Think about it. Artists tell you: think of the Earth. That’s why I did this,” he said, according to the Associated Press.
Needless to say, there are very few causes, if any, that would warrant the desecration of an important artistic and historical artifact. Even if the attacker were justified in his actions, however, the Mona Lisa is the wrong target.
Its creator, Leonardo da Vinci, had a strong appreciation for the environment, and his written and painted works brought that love of nature into the mainstream.
Leonardo was “a man who has surely been overlooked by our modern environmental [non-governmental organizations] as their possible patron,” writes Polish scholar Nina Witoszek.
“Though human ingenuity may make various inventions, . . . it will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than nature does; because in her inventions nothing is superfluous,” Witoszek quotes Leonardo as writing in his notebooks.
He practiced this appreciation for the environment in his daily life, eating a vegetarian diet, which, some researchers believe, may have contributed to the stroke that killed him.
On another level, he nourished a change in artistic beliefs about nature. Painters of the Middle Ages saw the environment simply as a backdrop for the human events that they depicted, but the artists of the Renaissance transformed it, Witoszek writes, into “an exuberant, mutable pattern: sometimes representing reason that holds the community together.”
Leonardo participated in this shift of attitudes through such works as the Madonna of the Rocks, which stages the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary in a grotto, and the Virgin and Child with St. Anne, in which Jesus’s Mother and grandmother try to stop him from hurting a lamb.
He also humanized nature through his written works, writing that “the earth has a spirit of growth, and its flesh is the soil; its bones are the successive strata of the rocks which form the mountains; its cartilage is the tifa stone; its blood the spring and the rivers.”
For Witoszek, his paintings and metaphors that anthropomorphize the natural world reveal Leonardo’s identity as “an individual for whom partnership with, and care for human and natural environment, was the foundation of wisdom and the art of survival.”
Leonardo’s wisdom should guide any conservationist movement. He established throughout his life a belief that man and nature are not only alike, but also that their fates are inextricably linked, a credo for lovers of the environment.
This is a legacy that modern-day environmentalists should honor, not smear cake over.