Escher, da Vinci: Two masterminds meet at one N.C. museum

You might stand in front of Piet Mondrian’s simple geometric paintings and think, “If only I had come up with this idea, I could have done this.”

You might even pause before Van Gogh’s sunflowers and tell yourself, “If I really knew how to handle paint, and if I’d looked at this vase at the same hour of the same day....”

But see the works of Leonardo da Vinci and M.C. Escher – a double marvel on display through Jan. 17 at N.C. Museum of Art – and you say nothing. You realize within five minutes at each exhibit that no one ever would, ever could perceive or depict the world in quite the same way.

The museum had committed to its massive exhibit “The Worlds of M.C. Escher” when administrators realized they could also get on the mini-tour of Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester. “Nobody turns down Leonardo!” says curator of European art David Steel.

Da Vinci’s Codex Leicester, so called because the Earl of Leicester owned it in the 18th century, traveled to Raleigh – the only place it will appear on the East Coast – after visits in Phoenix and Minnesota. The NCMA created “The Worlds of M.C. Escher,” a 130-piece retrospective and the largest Escher exhibit ever shown in North America.

They juxtapose geniuses half a millennium apart, poster boys for the now-popular STEAM curriculum in schools. That stands for science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics, and both men used all five to realize their visions.

“I was working on the Escher show when Leonardo dropped into our lap,” says Steel. “I kept seeing connections between the two artists; I think Escher is the most Leonardo-esque (of modern artists), not only in terms of what interested him but in using art to understand the underlying order of things.

“I always consider art a doorway into the great room of the world. It connects with just about everything: math, physics, ideas of infinity, concepts that are abstract to most of us, though not to mathematicians. Escher makes those ideas understandable.”

Art linked across time

The two exhibits complement each other beautifully, one visually plain and one visually extravagant.

The Codex Leicester (which Bill Gates now owns) consists of three dozen manuscript pages preserved between glass, illustrated with da Vinci’s tiny drawings and written right to left with the letters reversed.

Why right to left? Steel doesn’t think it was done to hide ideas from an unwelcoming Catholic Church, which might simply have held a mirror to the paper to read it. Left-handed Leonardo would’ve dragged his sleeve through fresh ink if he wrote conventionally, smearing the pages. By starting at the right margin – which is where the illustrations are – the pages remained clean.

You enter this exhibit through a metal detector, after emptying your bag or pocket of sharp objects (pens included), lotions, lipsticks and anything that might deface the glass. Lights in the Codex room remain low, so patrons tend to whisper. The reverent atmosphere suits the event somehow.

A quote at the entrance comes from Escher: “When you read his notes, you can hear him speaking like a lonely, wise and melancholy great man ... I seem to recognize the same silent wondering as my own.”

Da Vinci reportedly left 14,000 pages of notes, half of which survived him; his small, angular handwriting casts a spell, even if you don’t read Latin or Italian. In this Codex, the only manuscript by da Vinci now kept in North America, the author contemplates water.

Astronomy, hydrodynamics, engineering, meteorology and paleontology all figure into this exhibit. He speculates why seashells can be found on mountaintops and why water changes with the phases of the moon. He contemplates how water can be used to preserve life – to irrigate fields and sustain a populace – or take it away, undermining an enemy’s position on a battlefield. (Leonardo lived through multiple wars.)

You can read enlarged versions of the notes on two scopes at the end of the room, which turn the writing around the conventional way and/or translate it to English. Studying the pages starts you speculating whether Leonardo was, in one way, the most solitary brainiac of the Renaissance. Whom could he have bounced ideas off, shared deep thoughts with, asked for help? Were intellect measured in height, most contemporaries wouldn’t have come up to his knees.

From real to surreal

To leave Leonardo for Escher is to abandon an intensely detailed reality for an intensely detailed unreality, to move from an artist who has been universally respected for 600 years to one who has yet to get respect, 43 years after his death in 1972.

He never had a major retrospective in Great Britain until this summer. When the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., mounted an exhibit in 1998 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith sniffed, “Escher’s work tends to be viewed, at best, as art for beginners, an esthetic first love, like the poetry of Khalil Gibran or Pachelbel’s Canon, that is soon outgrown.” The nearly 400,000 people who attended might have disagreed.

Steel, himself a math-physics major once upon a time, certainly would. He has been an Escher fan for 45 years, since tacking up one of his posters on a bedroom wall in 10th grade.

“Escher didn’t care about the art world,” says Steel. “He was out of touch with cubism and abstract expressionism and other movements of his time. So the art world didn’t care about him. He’s also the only great artist who was exclusively a printmaker, so most people know him through images in books.

“If you just look at books, you say, ‘Oh, that’s really cool.’ When you see prints in person, his technique is astonishing. It’s flawless. He carves these intricate designs into wood and prints from the woodblock. I can still see something today and ask, ‘How did he do that?’ ”

Confronted by this array of riches, you’ll ask not just “How?” but “Why?”

“Band of Union” shows the heads of a man and a woman, depicted as if on rinds from an apple or orange linked at the bottom. Is Escher revealing a physical connection by conjuring the double helix of DNA? Because the heads float in the cosmos, is he also suggesting a spiritual angle?

The fascinating “Double Planetoid” shows two interlocking tetrahedrons drifting through outer space. Humans who have transformed their territory into a city inhabit one; the other remains in a state of nature, with sheep and dinosaurs wandering around. Neither side ever sees the other, leaving us to ponder Escher’s belief that we fail to notice essential things.

Sometimes he’s beautifully literal, as in the early drawing of his father on his deathbed, thin hairs askew. Sometimes he’s fantastical: The “Trees Near Arnhem” stretch from the right side of a drawing down a hill and into the distance in perfect symmetry, until the composition looks like the back of a marching dragon.

Often he’s fascinated by repeating patterns that interlock – his famous birds, lizards or fish – or metamorphose into something else over the width of a huge print. He amused himself on flat surfaces by turning two dimensions into three and back again; his iconic “Drawing Hands” consists of two hands emerging from a piece of paper, each “creating” the other with a pen.

Escher remains most famous for his impossible yet logical-seeming pieces: waterfalls that flow uphill, monks who walk eternally upstairs in “Ascending and Descending” – and pass monks walking the other way on the same steps – or the familiar “Relativity,” where gravity has quit and people move through contradictory dimensions in the same plane.

Take your time, folks

“Look at ‘Belvedere,’ ” says Steel, thinking of the famous print of a building whose top stories face in different directions. “There’s a little detail: A guy is in prison in the basement, and if you look at the window of the cell, it’s impossible that the bars could have been put in that way. (The museum constructed a model of this building in pieces; look through a special lens nearby, and they seem to join together.)

“You have to spend time with these prints. I tell people, ‘Take a run through the show, but come back and spend time with 10 or 20 that you really like.’ We live in a world of five-second gratification; we get frustrated if Google doesn’t come up on our computer right away. Here we try to show people the pleasure of slowing down and looking more carefully.”

Da Vinci understood. He said, “Look at walls splashed with a number of stains, or stones of various mixed colors.... You can see resemblances to a number of landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, great plains, valleys and hills.... Also you can see battles, and lively postures of strange figures, expressions on faces, costumes and an infinite number of things, which you can reduce to good integrated form. (These walls and stones act) like the sound of bells, in whose pealing you can find every name and word that you can imagine.”

Most of us never hear those bells. Da Vinci and Escher did and transformed the sounds to art.

This story was originally published November 20, 2015 at 2:05 PM with the headline "Escher, da Vinci: Two masterminds meet at one N.C. museum."