<nettime> The Leonardo da Vinci Plan for Immediate World Peace -- updated

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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7 April 2026



What if the Mona Lisa is an encrypted, rapid-release plan for world peace?

It sure would be worth a look.  And in actual fact, that's probably what it is.

Leonardo lived in a time of imminent Europe-Islam annihilation, same as us.  He wanted a creed 
people could agree on and make peace.  Yes, Europe-Islam peace, including the satellites and colonies 
of both (former or otherwise) and even neighbors further out.  So he needed a visual image, one which 
"all people can understand no matter their language."  That's code for both sides of the war.

What is the credo, the devotion, the meditation he created to make peace possible?

Well it's like Ave Maria a little bit, an icon to revere, and somewhat maternal, but non-denominational 
and non-sectarian, open indeed to all faiths on the basis of De Pace Fidei.  It's Experience as such, which 
we all have.  Esperienza in Italian, it was sacred already to Dante (in Paradiso I and II) as well as Roger Bacon 
in Opus Majus, and would remain sacred to Cervantes, Montaigne, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Galileo for damn 
sure, and almost every person of conscience thereafter: Thomas Browne, Hume, Blake, Hamilton, Keats, Pater, 
Proust, Joyce, Dewey, Jung, and Tokarczuk, through to our present day of "artisanal epistemology" like that of 
Pamela Smith and Adam Fix, and mindfulness neuroscience like Varela's.  (Forgot Thoreau and Emerson, they're 
key, Emerson wrote his "Experience" while translating Dante in 1851.)  Martin Jay's 2005 "Songs of Experience" covers the waterfront.  

Leonardo's most direct influence was Dante's personification of Beatrice, truth and beauty incarnated into 
the beloved, who, once her respect is earned, removes her veil to bestow her smile and gaze on the 
devotee, or as one might say, the disciple.  Also there is Matteo Palmieri, who in his mid-1400's Florentine work 
"City of Life" called Esperienza "the teacher of all things" including peace.

Taken together, Dante and Palmieri explain how Leonardo could say he was "a disciple of Experience," and that 
she was the "one true maestra," the "common mother of all the sciences and arts," who was wrongly accused by 
the authorities but was the only chance of sustainable peace through wisdom.  His balcony portrait, La Gioconda 
or La Joconde, even includes by metaphor the garment of technology and the bridge of its history, a pointing 
gesture that denotes the unfinishable nature of the relationship, and the smile of tranquility it shares with 
Buddhist statuary, the archaic Greek kouros, every kind teacher, and the shapeshifter or culture-hero trickster 
figures of pre-ancient times.  The dance of the composition as well as its neckline embroidery are profoundly
 influenced by Sufism and Arab experimental science.  (This idea was unfortunately never thought of or proposed until 2019, but is getting more well known.)

But there's no time left for all these details.  We must act today and communicate this important plan to all parties 
in the present hostilities.

That's why the painting was designed to be so popular, indeed universal: so that when most needed it would be 
able to appear and make a difference right away.  The design is perfect for every language that has a word for 
"experience," and most do.  It's the only path to peace, because Machiavelli is just arms races and wars of 
annihilation in an endless hopeless tangled quest to be king of the hill.  The design was made to supersede Machiavelli.  

The rapid release is this: Just match Leonardo's writings (try Wikiquote) that personify Esperienza to the painting.  
It takes less than five minutes.  Ken Burns posted about it to his Twitter-X account, in a half hour video.

More than enough time to hit the deadline.

So get after it yo!  Full guidance can be found at Leonardo.info/is-everyone-a-leonardo, scroll down for interview 
with Ken Burns, PDF transcript free on request.  Or find the video also on Ken's personal Twitter-X account, at:
https://x.com/KenBurns/status/1882501532677284042 .  

Because it's time, today!

All best,

Max


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