The Death of Leonardo, Cow Tippers beware!

My new little gadget for my iGoogle homepage informed me:

“Artist Leonardo da Vinci died at Cloux, France” on this day in history.

Over the last few years, Leonardo’s work has been blemished with Dan Brown’s novel, The daVinci Code, and in many ways, Leonardo has experienced a sort of second death of his works in popular culture. Unlike the 1519 death, Leonardo’s work has suffered the indignity of fictional interpretation.

This would be equivalent of looking at a Thomas Kinkade painting, and finding the letter “N” somewhere, decry it as a some symbolic reference to a ritualistic cult bent on “taking over the world through the adequate use of cow-tipping”.

Anything you do or say is open to interpretation within the context of the viewers own mind. You can’t very well make everything Kosher or PC, or else all artistic expression fades, creativity itself dies, and the true artist becomes silent. But we must also remember that the very same contextual reference from our own minds is what makes our own artwork unique. (ie. No one else could have dreamed up the works of M.C. Escher in exactly the same way.)