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

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

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.)

Leonardo's most direct influences were Dante's personification of Beatrice, truth and beauty incarnated into the beloved, who, once after 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 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.

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.

Because it's time, today!

All best,

Max


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