THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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in the clouds. It is a perfect dreamland, although in the line of extension of multi­layered reality. This is not Bruges or Maastricht or Lyon, or whatever other cityscapes
of the time people have come up with; on the contrary, the perspective displays a Gothic ideal city without walls, in the apse of infinity. Soon there was also room for
the veduta of nature, in Piero della Francesca, with the new value of the horizon in the Renaissance; but Leonardo da Vinci provided the full, open original for the
dream value of perspective. Distance with mysterious colour creates in Leonardo a space in which sculpture ends, only fight is divided, into almost unknown objects.
The ‘Virgin of the Rocks’ displays cavernous darkness, Gothically jagged edges and ridges, but the grotto breaks up, and the eye wanders without transition into a
secluded river valley. The figures in his ‘St Anne, The Virgin and the Infant Christ with a Lamb’ are strictly arranged into a pyramid, but the landscape behind them
turns into a wildly broken mountain massif, it is half haze, half solid, an indeterminable other world of clearly laid­out objects. This distant character completely
penetrates the portrait of the Mona Lisa herself; through the dream of the background, corporeality is admittedly gained for the figure in the foreground, yet at the same
time also lost again. For Mona Lisa herself repeats the form of the landscape in the rippling of her gown, the dream­heaviness of the background in her eyelids, the
congealed, uncanny, paradoxically opaque ether in her smile. The landscape is here as important as the figure, is a related, if not the same hieroglyph. In the spirit of
Leonardo's philosophically expressed conception of the world: ‘Every part has a tendency to be united with its whole again in order to escape imperfection. And it is
necessary to know that this very wish is precisely the quintessence, companion of nature, and man is the model of the whole world’. The distant landscape is likewise
called Mona Lisa and is her — a fantastically jagged mountain labyrinth in the softest light, with lakes, pale fields, and rivers between it. Mona Lisa gazes from there,
and she also gazes towards this distance, towards its outspread or entire mystery, in a greenish­blue, smoky light.
But where everything is smoky from the start, how is it possible to look into the distance? This is achieved by the dark ground, out of which the picture is painted, itself
defamiliarizing things. And by the light in which they stand itself coming, and being reflected, as if from sheer background. Thus Rembrandt,the most powerful painter of
distant gleam which is mirrored in nearness, even leaves Saskia half in darkness, and the man with the golden helmet wears its metal as light only gathering, indeed
leading down into the dark. The brilliant patches in Rembrandt