The Individual, Their Creativity and the Poetics

Abstract

The story of Leonardo’s Spoons is about the engagement of the individual with the prevailing conventions. The new artist learns the mechanics, the experienced artist has achieved an instinctive sense of the desired harmony. Da Vinci is above the basics; he uses his understanding of them to transcend them, to create the sublime. The individual can transcend the mechanical conventions when he or she no longer needs to refer to them consciously, though now they form his or her dispositions, and therefore the very basis for the judgements of that individual. My interpretation here is based on creativity theory, which relies on an understanding of the interaction of field, domain and individual to explain the generation of new and novel work.

Leonardo da Vinci devised a system of little spoons with which different colors were to be used, thus creating a kind of mechanical harmony. One of his pupils, after trying in vain to use this system, in despair asked one of his colleagues how the master himself used the invention. The colleague replied: “The master never uses it at all.”

(Wassily Kandinsky [1912] 1966, 54)¹