Читать книгу The da Vinci Legacy - Jean-Pierre Isbouts - Страница 15

Like his teacher Verrocchio, Leonardo always emphasized the art of drawing as a principal teaching method in his workshop. A painting requires a long and laborious effort with an uneven outcome. A drawing could be sketched quickly, and then modified or improved upon with just a few strokes.

Virtually everything Leonardo did was informed by drawings: his observations of nature, his engineering designs, his anatomical studies, his ideas about composition, and lastly, his preparatory studies for paintings, including cartoons for alfresco murals. In short, drawings were the principal medium by which Leonardo communicated his artistic ideas to his followers. As we will see, they made good use of them. According to biographer and Medici physician Paolo Giovio, Leonardo went so far as to forbid his pupils, until twenty years of age, to “use a paintbrush or paints.” Instead, he made them “work with lead point to choose and reproduce diligently the excellent models of earlier works, to imitate with simple line drawings the force of nature, and outlines of bodies that present themselves to our eyes with a great variety of movement.” Thus, Giovio believed, Leonardo prevented his students from being “seduced by the brush and colors” before they learned to represent “the exact proportions of things.”13

Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of an Infant for the Saint Anne, ca. 1503–1507

In his Trattato della pittura or Treatise on Painting, which no doubt reflected the lessons taught in his workshop, Leonardo explained why drawing was so important. “First,” he instructs the reader, “copy the drawings of accomplished masters made directly from nature, and not practice drawings; follow this through with drawings of relief works alongside drawings taken from the same relief; then move on to drawing from life.”14

It is not always easy to determine the educational purpose of some of the drawings that Leonardo executed in the years when he ran his first Milanese studio. In many, he appears to be preoccupied with themes that appealed to him personally, rather than those that could be used to teach drawing to a beginning artist. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern some ideas that interested him throughout his career.

Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child with a Cat, ca.1478

One of these is his constant desire to inject life and spontaneity into the motif of the Madonna, which was highly popular in quattrocento Italy.

The clergy, led by the Dominican order, had begun to encourage families to create an area for private prayer in the home. Madonna portraits could serve as a natural focus of such devotional shrines. But the iconography of the Madonna had become rather stale and repetitive. It was dominated by the tradition of the Madonna Enthroned, which showed Mary as an austere heavenly figure, barely aware of the child Jesus on her lap.

From the very beginning of his career as an artist, starting in the workshop of Verrocchio, Leonardo looked for ways in which Mary and her child could be depicted in a more natural, more affecting way, eliciting empathy and love in the beholder. Starting around 1478, he produced a series of drawings portraying the theme of the infant Jesus and a cat. Having the child play with a cat, for example, could introduce the sense of playfulness and spontaneity that Leonardo was looking for. This, we should remember, was entirely without precedent. Neither in the New Testament nor in the rich literature of Christian Apocrypha—which carried the same authority in the Middle Ages as the canonical Gospels—do we hear of any interaction between Jesus and a cat.

Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Madonna of the Rose, ca. 1510

The drawings, including the Virgin and Child with a Cat from 1480, were then avidly studied and copied by Leonardo’s pupils and collaborators. We know this, because Leonardo’s studies later provided inspiration for a number of Madonna portraits by his former associates, including the Madonna of the Violets, executed between 1498 and 1500, and now attributed to Marco d’Oggiono. This work was much praised in the late 19th century, and confidently attributed to Leonardo himself, particularly because of its close resemblance to Mary in Virgin of the Rocks. That identification is no longer supported, but as late as 1949, David Alan Brown suggested that “the soft shadow and utmost refinement in the modeling of the Virgin’s head indicate Leonardo’s participation in this exquisite work.”

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Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Virgin and Child, 1497

Another example of the pervasive influence of Leonardo’s approach is Boltraffio’s Virgin and Child, also known as The Madonna of the Rose. Painted almost simultaneously with d’Oggiono’s work, it depicts Jesus reaching for a rose, symbol of his future Passion, while his mother tries to restrain him. The treatment of Mary appears to be indebted to the Lady with an Ermine, while the texture of her finely detailed red hair injects a distinct Northern look.

That d’Oggiono and Boltraffio were at this point the leading lights of Leonardo’s Milanese followers is also shown by several other paintings from this period. Each reveals the individual talents of the artists while also emphasizing their indebtedness to Leonardo. Key examples are the Young Christ, arguably painted by d’Oggiono around 1490, and Boltraffio’s Virgin and Child, completed in 1497 and now in Budapest.

Particularly in the latter, Boltraffio appears to have made a leap in compositional technique, compared to The Madonna of the Rose five years earlier. While the painting is animated by the same idea—mother and child moving in opposite directions, in order to imbue the scene with a lifelike, dynamic energy—the execution is far more confident and persuasive. In fact, the child now appears to be reaching for something or someone outside of our scope of view, adding a sense of mystery to the painting. The light is more controlled. The delicate, porcelain-like sfumato, or shading, is noticeably softer, made more dramatic by the dark background.

Another example of Leonardo’s influence is Marco d’Oggiono’s Girl with Cherries of 1494, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The painting reflects Leonardo’s fondness for depicting androgynous youth, while the cool patina of the skin resembles Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine.

Marco d’Oggiono, Girl with Cherries, ca. 1494

What this suggests is that Leonardo’s most prominent Leonardeschi at this stage, de Predis, d’Oggiono, and Boltraffio, increasingly relied on Leonardo’s drawings and paintings in the execution of their panels, even though they were now recognized as masters in their own right.