In Steiner's reading, the seeker of the Renaissance: the first painter to chase by outward vision the knowledge of Nature that earlier ages once felt from within.
Leonardo da Vinci in Anthroposophy is read by Rudolf Steiner as the seeker, the first artist who replaced the older feeling for Nature with a conscious understanding of it. In his Dornach art-history lectures of 1916 (GA 292), Steiner places Leonardo (1452-1519) at the dawn of the fifth post-Atlantean age, a soul with a Janus head turned at once to the old world and the new. Where the Greek sculptor knew the human form from within, through the forces Anthroposophy calls etheric, Leonardo had lost that inner sight and pursued the same knowledge by outward vision instead. He followed faces for days to learn how the inner being works into the outer form. The Last Supper in Milan and the unresting search behind the Mona Lisa are the fruits of that questing spirit.
Leonardo da Vinci stands, for Steiner, at a turning-point of the soul. The Greek artist had carved the body out of an inner perception of its forming forces. By Leonardo's century that inner sight had faded, and a different power had to wake in its place: the will to grasp the world by looking. Leonardo became the man of that will, an engineer, anatomist, and painter who would track a single face for days until it grew transparent to him.
In Steiner's Own Words
Now Leonardo was the first who endeavoured in a wider sense to add to this feeling of Nature, a conscious understanding of Nature. Because it was no longer given to him, as to the men of former ages, to trace from within outward the forces that are at work in man, he tried to know these things by contemplation from without. He tried to know by outward vision what could no longer be made known by inward feeling. An understanding of Nature as against a feeling for Nature: this is what distinguishes Leonardo da Vinci from Francis of Assisi, and this determines the whole constitution of his spirit. He was all out to understand.
What it Means Today
To read Leonardo this way is to stop treating the sketchbooks and the dissections as a curiosity beside the paintings. They are the search itself. Steiner sets Leonardo against Francis of Assisi on purpose: the saint of Assisi felt his way into Nature through love, while Leonardo, born only two centuries later, could no longer reach it that way and had to win it back by the patient eye. That shift, from a knowledge felt within to a knowledge looked at from without, is the same step modern science took. Leonardo is the hinge.
You can stand inside the consequence in Milan. The Last Supper on the refectory wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie, painted between 1495 and 1498, does not show twelve types arranged for a sacred formula. It shows twelve men in the instant a word lands, each face a separate study of shock, doubt, or grief, and yet the whole holds as one composition of light. The Mona Lisa carries the other pole of the same temperament: a face pursued past portraiture into a question that will not resolve. This is what Thalira names the seeker's signature, the refusal to let a thing stay a surface.
The Goetheanum's Section for the Visual Arts in Dornach, the institution Steiner founded, keeps working in exactly Leonardo's direction, reading a painter's forming forces rather than only their finished style. For a contemporary viewer the practice is simple and demanding. Stand before a Leonardo and do not ask what it depicts. Ask what was sought.
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