Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin of the Rocks, 1483-85, oil on panel, 199 x 122 cm., Musée du Louvre, Paris
Leonardo had only recently arrived in Milan when in 1483 he was given the opportunity to realize in a painting the thoughts he had been formulating privately about art and life. The resultant picture was a watershed in his career, and in Western art.
The commission was for an altarpiece depicting ‘Our Lady with her son and the angels’ for a newly consecrated chapel dedicated to the Immaculate Conception. At this time, Lombard tradition for altarpiece decoration was characterized by ample gilding and figures arranged declamatorily on relatively flat backgrounds. Leonardo’s so-called Virgin of the Rocks, which he finished a year and a half later, was different in kind: animated figures interacting in a richly detailed, highly naturalistic, rocky environment of great depth.
Central perspective and the three-dimensional rendering of space were old discoveries; what Leonardo did here was to immerse his figures in their environment more fully than anyone had done before. The characters seem free to act not just as individuals, but in relation to each other — their body language, facial expressions and eye lines suggest complex interaction. The picture has a kind of spatial and psychological coherence that would come to inform Western art down to the modern era when cubism started dissolving rationally defined space, opening the door to abstraction.
The painting, which normally hangs in the Grande Galerie at the Louvre, is currently and extraordinarily on view in the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci — Painter at the Court of Milan at the National Gallery in London. For the first time ever, it shares a room with that museum’s own, later version of the same subject. Continue reading ‘The Miracle in Milan’
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The Week
Detail of the Prado Mona Lisa copy
The week in review
Running late as usual, it’s a new week, but what? This weekend the great Leonardo show at the National Gallery in London closed and I regret not having had time to post something more detailed than my Weekendavisen review from back in November while it was still open, but that’s how it goes. Suffice it to say that it was a fantastic opportunity to learn about Leonardo and his workshop, as well as the bizarrely skewed presentation the artist’s mega stardom tends to result in.
The curators’ position seemed to be that there was a strong separation between Leonardo himself and his assistants, and as noted in my review that he executed the London Virgin of the Rocks himself, while comparison with its Paris counterpart quite clearly suggested otherwise. The same goes for the recently resurfaced Salvator Mundi. If the show’s attributions were to be believed, Leonardo must have painted in about five different styles in his later Milanese years, with results of quite remarkably varying quality, much of it lesser than his earlier works such as the Cecilia Gallerani (again, see my review). What the show did, however, was to exhibit a lot of works by his assistants and associates — Giovanni Boltraffio, Francesco Napoletano, Marco d’Oggiono, and others — and thus to offer the attentive viewer the opportunity to make up his or her own mind as to whom did what and in what constellations. I’m sure insights gleaned from this rare gathering of masterworks will reverberate strongly in the literature for years to come, even if strong interests will continue to work against the deattribution — or assignment in part to the workshop — of revered works.
Preeminent Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp suggests as much in his pointed critique of the exhibition. Although the piece seems more than a little grouchy and continues to champion the pretty but bizarre “Bella principessa” drawing, the autograph nature of which — though he claims to have unearthed incontrovertible evidence — still seems hard fully to accept, it makes a strong point on how much extraneous context matters in the contemporary evaluation of Leonardo.
Also interesting is the discovery at the Prado of what after cleaning has turned out apparently to be a contemporary copy of the Mona Lisa, which in its clarity reveals details that the dirty and much darkened original hide from us today. This announcement comes only a couple months after the publication in the Burlington Magazine of what has turned out to be a major painting, previously thought lost, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the same museum.
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