Leonardo at the National Gallery LAURA GASCOIGNE
Sacred and sublime
The National Gallery’s newly opened groundbreaking exhibition of the paintings and drawings by the Renaissance master explores how he conveyed reality and beauty. Most of all, it shows how Leonardo expressed what is usually beyond expression – the divine and the eternal
con tempo” – “take your time”. Leonardo relished Renaissance riddles, and this one makes a fitting motto for a painter whose output was so small that the collection of nine paintings, with 50 related drawings, now on show at the National Gallery counts as a landmark exhibition. And two of the nine are versions of the same image. From now until 5 February, Leonardo’s
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two versions of The Virgin of the Rocks are sharing a room for perhaps the first time in their history. Sitting on a bench between the two – the first, on loan from the Louvre, completed around 1485; the second, from the National’s own collection, finished in 1508 – I experienced the same feeling I had two months ago in front of Leonardo’s Last Supper in Milan: the sensation that he had somehow stopped the clocks. Perhaps because of his refusal to submit to time, the work Leonardo left behind appears to transcend it. The Last Supper and The Virgin of the
Rocks both belong to his most productive period as a painter, the 18 years covered by the exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan”. The 30-year- old artist had arrived in the city in 1482 with a 10-point letter of self-introduction to the future Duke of Milan, Ludovico Maria Sforza, in which – aware that Milan was more famous for its military might than its culture – he devoted the first nine points to his talents for military engineering and the last, as if by the way, to the claim that in painting he could “do any kind of work as well as any man, who- ever he be”. So it was not entirely Ludovico’s fault that he took a few years to appreciate the cultural value of his Florentine visitor, and when he did he gave him a commission worthy of his genius, to paint a mural of The Last Supper (1495-98) for the refectory of the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Before Ludovico put Leonardo on the Sforza payroll, the young Florentine had to
4 | THE TABLET | 12 November 2011
Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks, about 1491/2 - 99 and 1506-1508. National Gallery, London
make his own way, and one of his first free- lance commissions was from Milan’s recently formed Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception for their new chapel attached to the Church of San Francesco Grande. The contract signed by Leonardo in 1483 was for a panel painting of the Virgin and Child between two angels and two prophets – the painting that became The Virgin of the Rocks. If it became the subject of a long-running row it is hardly surprising, as the finished picture has little to do with the original brief: there’s only one angel, and the single prophet is an infant John the Baptist. For Leonardo, children had dynamic possibilities that could not be extracted from aged prophets.
mong drawings of clocks and clockwork in one of Leonardo’s notebooks from the 1490s is a rebus of a falcon captioned “fal
The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception had only been established by Sixtus IV five years earlier, and the iconog- raphy was still in development. Leonardo probably felt that he had carte blanche to interpret it according to his imagination, and what appealed to his philosophical mind was the mystery of the Virgin’s exis- tence having been planned before Creation, out of time. Of the Old Testament texts used for the offices of the new feast day, the one closest to his image is Proverbs 8:23-5 on the origins of Wisdom: “Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth … before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth”. If Mary’s existence was planned before time, went Leonardo’s reasoning, she belonged in a primordial landscape. So instead of placing his Immaculate Virgin in the safe man- made environment of a hortus conclusus, he marooned her in a geological wilderness on the edge of what looks suspiciously like ravine, the sort of place you wouldn’t ven- ture without climbing equipment, let alone with two small children – plus one Sherpa angel, whose steadying hand is the only thing stopping the Infant Jesus from slip-
ping sideways off the ledge he is perched on. Leonardo’s other surprising decision was to plunge his image of purity into shadow. Though elements of his composition are bor- rowed from conventional imagery of the Virgin of Mercy and the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the lighting – and the architecture – come from the Nativity tradition. The two pictures seem to be set at different times of day: the golden light of the earlier painting evokes evening, with the sun going down behind the pillar of stone on the right and a night mist rising off the distant water; the sil- very tones of the later version suggest dawn, with shafts of light from the rising sun on the left turning the water a luminous blue. The figures in both pictures, however, are myste- riously lit by an otherworldly source over our left shoulders. The colours of version two are clearer and cooler – the red of the angel’s
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