The Soul of Leonardo da Vinci

A symposium in celebration of the quincentenary of Leonardo’s death with Hanna Arie-Gaifman, Jonathan Berger, Howard Morgan, Michael Kubovy, Israel Nelken, Barbara Tversky, Timothy Weaver, and Robert Zwijnenberg 

Underlying Leonardo’s seemingly superhuman feats of intellect and art was an uninhibited desire to ask questions and seek answers to everything from the mundane ("What is a sneeze?") to the sublime ("Where is the soul?") questions explored in Stanford composer Jonathan Berger’s new work Leonardo, given its world premiere on April 6, 2019 at 92Y. In the Symposium that follows, great artists and thinkers reflect on da Vinci’s acute awareness of human perception, and his obsessive desire to visually capture his observations and ideas. We will hear about Leonardo’s ability to conceptualize complexity (Zwijnenberg), his method of thinking through drawing (Tversky), his intuitions on art and aesthetics (Kubovy and Nelken), and experience how da Vinci’s obsessive search for understanding finds itself in humor (Morgan), science, and art (Weaver). | Co-Produced by the 92nd Street Y and Stanford University’s Symposium on Music and the Brain.