gown now tones in with the Virgin’s blue – and Leonardo has introduced other small changes. The angel no longer points an enig- matic finger, St John the Baptist carries his traditional reed cross with banderole, and the saints have halos – perhaps the finishing touches demanded by the confraternity and finally added by Leonardo 25 years after sign- ing the contract. If the confraternity was unappreciative of
Leonardo’s revolutionary vision, others were not. Ten years into the contract Leonardo was in a position to renegotiate it, on the grounds that another buyer was interested and that his price had gone up to 100 ducats from the 25 agreed. The rival buyer may have bought version one, necessitating its replacement by version two. By the time Leonardo returned to Florence after the fall of Milan in 1499 to the French, his reputation was such that, according to Vasari, a cartoon put on show by the Servite monks of the Santissima Annunziata attracted pilgrims “as one goes to solemn festivals”. No one quarrelled now with the vision of an artist whose genius, everyone agreed, was “a gift of God”.
G
ift or not, Leonardo worked at it. A compositional sketch for The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist
(1499-1500) – very likely the cartoon men- tioned by Vasari – is an inky tangle of revisions from which he has somehow miraculously released the figures. The artist’s task, in his opinion, was to refine the base matter of human observation into divinely harmonious idealised forms. Drawings from life for the beautiful Madonna Litta (1491-95) and Madonna of the Yarnwinder (c. 1499) show how he effected these transformations. But there is one image in the show for which he chose not to use a human model. While a sketch exists for a sleeve of the recently rediscovered Salvator Mundi (c. 1499, repro- duced on our cover this week), the Saviour’s haunting face is modelled on the legendary Mandylion of Edessa in Genoa, believed to bear the imprint of the Holy Face. It was probably a commission from the French King Louis XII, who had just added Genoa to his possessions. Although Leonardo prided himself on being a “disciple of experience”, there were times when experience ceded to faith. The heretical tendencies he was later suspected of are hard to credit. Standing before the miracle of his Last Supper – of which a full-scale near-con- temporary copy is on show, with all the surviving sketches, in the gallery’s Sunley Room – it’s impossible to see him as a pre- cursor of Richard Dawkins. Leonardo was a rationalist who believed that reason was divine. His one recorded profession of faith was pragmatic: “I obey thee, Lord, first because of the love which with reason I ought to bear thee; secondly because thou knowest how to shorten or prolong the lives of men.” He knew that before he could take his time, he had to be granted it.
■Laura Gascoigne is The Tablet’s art critic.
DAVID BLAIR
‘Far-sighted members of the regime know that Young Persia cannot be kept in chains forever’
Diplomats who specialise in the Middle East are paid to spot the next great crisis. A few years ago, any Western foreign ministry would have named Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the possibility of a pre-emptive strike by America or Israel as the most dangerous looming confrontation in the region. Then came the turmoil of the Arab Spring and Iran’s nuclear programme dropped down the international agenda to the point where it almost disappeared from view. That changed with a vengeance this week when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published a new report on Iran. This product of years of investigation came close to accusing Iran bluntly of a covert effort to build a nuclear weapon. Officially, Tehran maintains that its nuclear programme is nothing more than a peaceful venture designed to generate electricity. The IAEA has always been cautious about contradicting this claim. In the finest traditions of diplomacy, the new report stops short of finding Iran guilty of deception, while presenting evidence that the regime’s true purpose is to acquire the ultimate weapon. The Israeli press is already full of stories suggesting that Benjamin Netanyahu’s Government is debating whether to launch a military strike to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities before they are capable of producing a bomb. Left unspoken is the vital question: how much time remains before the threshold is crossed? If the clock is ticking on Iran becoming a nuclear-armed power, how long before the military option is redundant? The question of timing is crucial, but here the conventional wisdom goes astray. Most media coverage assumes that as Iran nears nuclear capability, Israel and the Western powers draw closer to an agonising dilemma: bomb Iran or watch Iran get the bomb? Seen from the perspective of
Tehran’s regime, however, the question of timing looks very different. The clock may well be ticking down to the point where they
achieve nuclear capability, but the minute hands are also moving towards the end of their rule or – more likely – the onset of reforms that would alter Iran’s foreign and domestic policies. Some two-thirds of Iran’s 70 million people are under the age of 30 and the country’s population doubles every 25 years. These culturally Westernised millions growever more numerous, while the ossified elite that seized power in the revolution of 1979 becomes depleted and isolated. True, the regime managed to crush mass protests after the rigged presidential contest of 2009. But its more far-sighted members know that Young Persia, represented by the millions who marched against Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent re-election, cannot be kept in chains forever. So two clocks are ticking inside
Iran: one carries the label “nuclear programme”, while another device, usually unnoticed, is marked: “social and political change”. In truth, no one can tell which clock is ticking faster, but the real policy of Western governments is to slow down the former and advance the latter. Quietly, this approach has been strikingly successful. We now know that in 2010, Iran’s most important nuclear facility was infected with the Stuxnet computer virus, the most destructive instrument of its kind. The uranium enrichment plant at Natanz was duly reduced to a shambles. Iran’s scientists have spent most of the last 18 months or so clearing up the mess. This triumph for covert action – no one knows which intelligence agency was responsible, but most observers give the credit to Israel – was the biggest single reason for the temporary disappearance of Iran’s nuclear programme from the international agenda.
While the hands of the nuclear clock were frozen the countdown to political change continued. Ahmadinejad will leave office in 2013 at the end of his second and final term. Meanwhile, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the 72-year-old Supreme Leader, is known to be seriously ill. No one can tell his exact condition, but nature could remove him from the scene at any stage. So the two men at the apex of
Iran’s power structure may both disappear before long. If so, a window might open for Tehran to settle its differences with the rest of the world. The clock counting down to that outcome could well be moving faster than any other.
■ David Blair is chief foreign correspondent of The Daily Telegraph.
12 November 2011 | THE TABLET | 5
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