SOURCE: “The Weight of Words: Leonardo da Vinci and the Anxiety of Language,” in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 3, Summer 1991, pp. 277-84.

In the following essay, Rodini focuses on Leonardo's fascination with both the potential and the limitations of language, stressing that “Leonardo shared with his contemporaries the notion that language defines culture and the individual, and that our humanity resides in our capacity to articulate or to concretize abstractions.”

All language, if you examine it scrupulously and pick its components apart deliberately, turns out to be made of the same loose texture.¹

In an important book published in 1987 by Princeton University Press and entitled, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance, Richard Waswo considers at length the significance of language and language acts in the European Renaissance. He argues that “one of the principal defining energies of the entire Renaissance” was the “intoxicating and terrifying possibility of making meaning...