The work reflects on the comparative method that distinguishes the production of Leonardo
da Vinci, whose multifaceted ingenuity finds practical application in his ability to
bring together apparently extraneous faculties and applications in coherent logical units,
according to an approach that fully embodies the aspiration to the characteristic syncretism
of his time.
In the analysis of the man and the work, I have traced a useful medium to connect three
forms of expression which can be considered themselves as media, vehicles of “images”
that have been belatedly recognized and formalized: fashion, painting and cinema, completely
autonomous fields, although interconnected within underground strata, being
sources of endless analytical and interpretative ideas.
The title should also be understood in an analogical and comparative sense: Leonardo’s
“plots” are the traits of his personality and refer to the allegorical narratives that run
through his canvases and to the interwoven motifs that the artist drew throughout his
life, as if they were the leitmotif of his entire sensitive experience. The plots are also those
of fashion, its stories and its fabrics which tell, including the cinematographic plots as well,
the constituent values of an era.
The first part of this article relates to the “universal genius” and the great Russian film
director Sergei M. Ejzenštejn, who passionately studied Leonardo’s work, drawing inspiration
from the master’s pictorial compositions for the shots of his films. Linked by surprising
attitudinal and character connections, Ejzenštejn and Leonardo were both set designers
and ‘costume designers’, as well as artists capable to revolutionize the concept of the image.
The second part focuses on the years Leonardo spent at the sumptuous court of Ludovico il
Moro (1482 – 1499), the beating heart of a Milan which at the end of the 15th century was
experiencing an extraordinary economic and cultural boom.
In what today we would call the “Milano da bere” (literally, “Milan to drink”, an expression
that in Italian indicates Milan’s rich and lively social life in the 1980s), a cultural capital
that found its main form of expression in appearances and in the seductive artefacts of
fashion, Leonardo, a refined connoisseur of fabrics, now urged on by patrons and by direct
contact with Milan’s luxury factories, practiced his skills in matters of clothing, developing
ingenious machines for the textile sector and real paper patterns for clothes destined to
enrich the sumptuous Sforza wardrobe.