Leibniz Chronicle Of A Lost Painting

During the sittings for the painting, an intense dialogue opens between the painter and Leibniz: he speaks of the world, of the harmony of the monads, of the infinitesimal calculus with which he tries to grasp the infinitely small and the unity of the whole; she replies that the canvas lives by the time of the pigment, of the earth, of the becoming of the image. In the end the portrait remains lost—as if the image could not hold presence, as if the essence of a person escaped the gaze alone. In this space suspended between truth and appearance, between the will to represent and the impossibility of the perfect portrait, the film explores the relationship between thought, art, presence, and sensibility.

Edgar Reitz’s film presents itself as a work in which cinema reflects on itself—and at the same time as a meditation on being, becoming, time, and the image. What we witness is not simply a costumed biography of the philosopher Leibniz, but a tight confrontation: between the thought of representation and the sensibility that inhabits it, between the rigor of infinitesimal calculus and the irreducibility of the person.

Leibniz, a universal philosopher, famous for the doctrine that we live in “the best of all possible worlds,” and a pioneer of infinitesimal calculus—which investigates the infinitely small to bring to light the infinitely large—here becomes not only the object but the interlocutor of art. His philosophical universe suggests an order in which every monad reflects the entire universe, in which every infinitesimal motion has effects on the whole. In the film this thought becomes a meta-language: the canvas, the painting, the film image become “monads” that attempt to reflect the whole person, but inevitably betray him through their partiality. He says, in the key dialogue scene, that on the surface of a canvas “there is no time”—because painting seems to freeze the moment, but does not grasp becoming. The painter, on the contrary, observes that there is indeed time in the canvas: the time of life shared in the studio, the time of the earth that generated the pigments, the time of the experience that preceded that sitting, and she adds that there is time even in a still life, for the same reasons mentioned. Striking is Leibniz’s face immersed in reflection, as the artist begins her own reflections.

This gap between the philosopher’s vision and the artist’s becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of the perfect portrait: because a human being is not a mere object to be fixed, but a subject in flux, a thought that changes, a sensibility that shifts. Just as infinitesimal calculus claims to grasp continuous change through the infinitely small, the portrait claims to capture essence through the slightest variation—yet that essence remains irreducible to a pose, to an image.

In the film the aesthetic dimension is strongly felt as existential experience: not mere decoration, not pure ornament, but sensibility that opens onto being. The woman artist—emblem of a gaze “other” than official power—puts forth an idea of beauty that does not stop at “cutting a fine figure,” but makes visible the presence of a thought, of a life, of a time. Beautiful is the gesture that does not hide effort, doubt, waiting. Beautiful is the face that asks and listens, that silence which weighs more than a word.

The painter’s sensibility—isolated from the circle of painters for reasons of gender, yet united with the philosopher in the search—resonates with the idea that true art dwells in the interstice between form and the formless, between the light that paints and the shadow that reveals. Reitz favors measured framings, an intimate kammerspiel, in which light traces bodies, faces, and spaces with restraint.

The dialogues between Leibniz and the painter form the emotional and intellectual core of the film. These are not biographical banalities, but a true dialectic on the portrait, on the real and the represented. He, with the rationality typical of the philosopher-mathematician, defends a view of painting as ideal surface rather than as story. She replies that everything is contained in the image: the time we have shared, the earth that generated the pigment, the pose, the light, the silence. And she adds: if we had not thought about the pose, if we had not lived through that day, if that table, that shadow, that neck had not been there—the painting would be different.

This is a theme that runs through the film: can a portrait “represent” the person? The film answers that no, not absolutely, because a person is a becoming, a set of monads in relation, not a static image. And yet the portrait can point, evoke, suggest. It can be a monad that reflects the subject’s universe, but it does not exhaust it.

Linking Leibniz’s philosophy—which asserts that we live in “the best of all possible worlds”—the film suggests that art and thought have a teleological function: they aim to free potential, to bring forth the reason embodied in sensibility. This is not naive optimism: the film does not ignore history, does not cancel tragedy, but suggests that beauty and truth are born in relation, in openness, in the recognition of the other. Thus the painter, excluded from the male circle, becomes a symbol of the possibility that the best art and thought can also come from the margins. The lost portrait—the vanished painting—becomes a metaphor for the imperfection of memory, the ephemerality of the image, the fleetingness of time.

The film is as intellectual as it is sensory: a hypnotic invitation to reflect and at the same time to feel. Formal rigor does not remove warmth, the distance of philosophy does not exclude passion, the precision of calculation does not annul beauty. Few films today dare so much: to grapple with thought, history, art, and sensibility in a single cinematic frame. It is a work that celebrates the presence of time within the image, and at the same time its irreversibility.

Reitz’s film has succeeded, both magically and logically, in making visible what seems invisible: the relation between being and appearance, between idea and form, between the infinitesimal calculus of existence and the fullness of human sensibility. Yet a residue remains, a margin of distance—for as Leibniz would have acknowledged, nothing is ever perfect, but perhaps in this tension lies the most authentic beauty.
 Unmissable.