On the other hand, eminent scholars of Leonardo, among others Robert Zwijnenberg and Carlo Vecce, have argued that the very singularities of his graphic and textual patterns reveal the intricate, open-ended dynamic of his thinking, and are not merely evocative from an aesthetic and poetic point of view. [8] 

I endorse their approach, which is grounded in intellectual history and implies no deconstructive convictions, no Death-of-the-Author theory, no psychological etiology. The incongruous and the personal, so I claim – mutatis mutandis, that which I have termed «discourse » within «narrative» in Leonardo’s pages – disclose strata that highlight, nuance, or challenge (sometimes, simultaneously) his explicit agendas. It is as such that the idiosyncrasies of Leonardo’s parataxis emerge as keys to the place of the anatomical project within the interlocking circles of his entire lifework . Moreover, it is as such that they throw light on the polisemic nature of his anatomical pursuits, on their discontents and uneasy self-reflexivity – much in accordance with early modern science of the body. [9]

Guarda se tu credi… This beautifully-transparent complex of nerves and ligaments, this écorché flesh, is in fact the sine-qua-non condition of music, the site of the music-producing touch which somehow involves the sense of hearing and the listening soul. Carlo Pedretti, as far as I can ascertain, was the only scholar who has realized the import of the remark in question, on which he has commented: «the hand is the theme that Leonardo sometimes deals with on the level of sensory impulses, thus opening an enquiry that eludes whatever faculty of analysis.» [10] However, Pedretti has overlooked the musical resonances of this interpolation, together with their significance for his own insight.

The organ (organo, organum, όργανον) was the musical instrument most charged with arcane allegorizations since early Christianity. [11] Due to its pneumatic components and polyphonic sound it came to represent the idea of music as cogent architectonics, and the cosmos as a harmony of unified variance. Despite constant oppositions to the introduction of musical instruments into the sacramental service, including the organ, it was instituted as the paradigmatic medium of Church music, and was considered throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as the allegory of the created cosmos and of God’s glory; of the Earthly Church and the Christian congregation; of the Holly Mass, and so on: «Ecclesia tonans» was how Rabanus Maurus defined the pneumatic organ. [12] Along this line, the organ was regarded as a general metaphor for the unity of the body and the soul (by Tertullian and Origen).