The Six Knots (c. before 1521) – The Public Domain Review

In Peter Cornell’s 1987 novel: The Ways of Paradise: Selected Notes from a Lost Manuscriptwrites the elusive, nameless scholar-protagonist: “The labyrinthine knots of Leonardo da Vinci and Dürer without beginning or end can be seen as maps of the universe.” The knots he refers to are six compositions originally created as engravings, attributed to an equally mysterious ‘Academy of Leonardo da Vinci’ and later translated into woodcuts by the much better documented Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). Cornell’s scholar is obsessed with epistemological systems, and in his haphazard (or not?) series of notes one can detect a desire to unify disparate organizing schemes of human invention. Freud, etymology and pilgrimages are among his fixations. The nodes, each enclosed, regulated unending, are sucked into the web of the scientist’s separate knowledge systems.