Читать книгу The da Vinci Legacy - Jean-Pierre Isbouts - Страница 19

Notwithstanding the popularity of the Leda motif, the work that exerted the greatest influence on the associates of Leonardo’s studio is The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. In this painting, Leonardo’s lifelong meditation on the mystery of motherhood and the theme of the Madonna finds its culmination. Though hardly known today, Saint Anne was a prominent figure in the Middle Ages. She does not appear in the canonical Gospels, but she is described in various apocryphal writings, beginning with the 2nd-­century Protoevangelium of James, where she is introduced as the mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus. During the Middle Ages, which made little or no distinction between canonical and noncanonical writings, she was as revered as a cardinal figure of the Holy Family.

This was particularly true in Florence, since it was on the feast day of St. Anne—July 26, 1343—that the city had risen in revolt against Gautier VI, Count of Brienne, restoring itself as a republic in the process. That moment in history gained further significance in 1494, when the city ousted another dynasty, that of the Medicis, and again returned to its republican roots. As Vincent Delieuvin has noted, the veneration of St. Anne then increased in the years that followed.22

The question that has bedeviled scholars is: why did Leonardo undertake such a monumental work, and for whom?23 One theory holds that the Saint Anne began as a commission from Louis XII, who as we saw had married his predecessor’s widow, Anne of Brittany, in order to retain France’s claim on the duchy of Brittany. Naturally, St. Anne was the queen’s patron saint. Given the close contacts between Leonardo and the French court at the time—Leonardo was working on a Madonna of the Yarnwinder for Florimon Robertet, one of the king’s counselors—it seems feasible that Louis would turn to the most famous artist in his orbit to commission a painting for his queen. Another theory suggests that the Saint Anne stemmed directly from Leonardo’s 1501 stay at the Servite monastery in Florence where, as Vasari writes, “he made a cartoon showing a Madonna and a St. Anne, with a Christ.”24

Leonardo da Vinci, Study for St. Anne, ca. 1505–1508

Whatever the case may be, the idea of a group portrait of Anne, her daughter Mary, and the infant Jesus would have appealed to Leonardo because of its psychological complexity. It overlays one maternal bond over another, creating an unprecedented level of emotional depth, in both an aesthetic and a theological sense. Authors on Leonardo don’t often refer to Leonardo’s interest in theological concepts, since most are content to perpetuate the stereotype of the artist as a scientific maverick, a dyed-in-the-wool empirical secularist rejecting all Church dogma. That is, perhaps, an unconscious projection of our own ideas about the separation of church and state, and of faith and science. But that would be a mistake. While the Renaissance certainly empowered individuals to explore the world beyond the restrictions of Christian doctrine, that does not mean that they felt less attached to Christian ideas.

More important, an artist in the Renaissance was expected to be intimately familiar with the Catholic repertoire if he was to receive any commissions from either the Church or private patrons; both were likely to want sacred scenes. In 1492, just three years before Leonardo’s Milan studio began gearing up for the Last Supper fresco, the Dominican friar Michele da Carcano summarized the essential purpose of sacred art, which artists were expected to serve, as follows:

First, on account of the ignorance of simple people, so that those who are not able to read the scriptures can yet learn by seeing the sacraments of our salvation and faith in pictures . . . .

Second, on account of our emotional complacency; so that men who are not aroused to devotion when they hear about this histories of the Saints may at least be moved when they see them, as if actually present, in pictures. For our feelings are aroused by things seen, more than by things heard.

Third, on account of our unreliable memories . . . . Many people cannot remember in their memories what they hear, but they do remember if they see images.25

In other words, a painter was expected to be fully informed about the devotional quality of a given motif, as well as the traditional iconography by which each of the figures was to be depicted, so that the largely illiterate faithful could recognize the character and understand the role he or she played in the story. Thus, an artist such as Leonardo couldn’t simply be guided by his imagination—or invention, as the Renaissance called it—as a modern artist would today. He needed to respect established conventions about the way these sacred scenes were to be portrayed: to both instruct the faithful and instill piety in the beholder.

For Leonardo, however, the theme of the St. Anne Trinity represented another, even greater challenge. Placing three figures in a dynamic cycle of movement and emotion was always difficult, as illustrated by the complexity of the Virgin of the Rocks. In that case, Leonardo’s solution was to place the figures in a loose, pyramidal composition, in which gestures and poses inferred a relationship among them. The problem was that this robbed the figures of any close emotional attachment to one another.

The Saint Anne was perhaps an opportunity to rectify this. Unlike the characters in the Virgin of the Rocks, here were three figures who shared a unique and powerful connection—that of mother and child, the strongest human bond imaginable, across two generations. The challenge was how to exploit the intense emotional power of this relationship. This is vividly illustrated in a series of studies showing how Leonardo grappled with various solutions, placing his figures this way or that way, moving ever closer to the optimal configuration.

Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist (the Burlington House Cartoon), ca. 1499–1500

Among these designs was a life-size cartoon that Leonardo executed for the Servite friars in Florence, lovingly drawn with wash and silverpoint to give the drawing a highly realistic finish. The monks were deeply taken with this work. They were so pleased that they organized a public exhibit of the finished drawing, which had people lining up around the block—perhaps the first public exhibition of a work by Leonardo da Vinci:

When it was finished, men and women, young and old, continued for two days to flock for a sight of it to the room where it was, as if to a solemn festival, in order to gaze at the marvels of Leonardo, which caused all those people to be amazed.26

Bernardino Luini, The Holy Family with Saint Anne and the Infant John the Baptist, ca. 1509–1515

It is hard to imagine such a public display if the Servite friars had not been happy with Leonardo’s final design, or felt that the terms of their contract had not been met.

Unfortunately, this particular cartoon has not survived. What has survived is what most historians believe is an earlier cartoon—the famous full-size drawing which today has pride of place at the National Gallery in London.

Francesco Melzi (?), The Trinity of Saint Anne (the Hammer Saint Anne), ca. 1508–1513

Known to scholars as the Burlington House Cartoon, it shows the three figures in a horizontal composition, with the addition of a fourth—John the Baptist as a young child. As part of this configuration, Mary is seated on St. Anne’s right leg, while holding the child Jesus in her arms. Jesus bends forward to bless the young John the Baptist, who crouches next to St. Anne. This suggests a counterclockwise flow of allegorical narrative: Jesus identifies his cousin John as the one who will announce him as the Messiah. Mary’s response is ambiguous; is she holding or restraining Jesus? Clearly, she wants to protect her young child from the Passion that John is destined to prophesy. Her mother Anne, however, turns to her and points to heaven, reminding her that this is God’s will; though she too anticipates the terrible suffering that is to come, she urges her daughter to submit to God’s plan.

The cartoon is a magnificent, highly finished work; a perfect painting in monochrome, executed in chalk and wash with highlights in white chalk. The face of Mary is as lovely as any of Leonardo’s portraits of women. Its painterly quality must have appealed to Leonardo’s pupils, for at least one of his followers, Bernardino Luini, then executed a painting based on the cartoon. Luini, one of Leonardo’s most accomplished Leonardeschi, followed the principal composition closely, particularly in the fine rendering of Mary’s head. But he also added the figure of Joseph, perhaps in an attempt to balance the composition with a figure on the right.

And yet, Leonardo himself was not satisfied with the solution. Soon he went back and revisited the idea from scratch, ultimately arriving at a very different and more vertical solution, as documented by Fra Pietro da Novellara, a prominent Carmelite cleric from Mantua who visited Leonardo’s studio in Florence in 1501.

In this new version, Mary is still seated on St. Anne’s lap, but as studies from around 1506 indicate, Jesus has now slipped off her lap and is crouching next to Anne, holding a lamb. This forces Mary to bend forward, just as Jesus turns his head to meet her gaze. Mary appears to try to restrain her child from embracing the lamb, since it is the symbol of the great sacrifice that awaits him. Anne, meanwhile, neither restrains nor corrects her daughter; she simply contemplates the scene, torn between her love for her daughter and her knowledge of God’s plan. But her mysterious, Mona Lisa–like smile reveals her knowledge of the ultimate outcome: the salvation of humankind. The same bittersweet smile has begun to form on Mary’s lips: she too knows that her son’s sacrifice as the Paschal Lamb is necessary for humanity to be redeemed.

Leonardo da Vinci, The The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Louvre version), ca. 1507–1515

Where once the composition was static, the new arrangement is filled with a circular flow of movement, each gesture a response, a reaction to another. This dynamic was instantly grasped by our perceptive eyewitness, Fra Pietro, who wrote:

It shows an infant Christ of about one-year old almost escaping from the arms of his mother. He has got hold of a lamb and seems to be squeezing it. The mother, almost rising herself from the lap of St. Anne, holds on to the child in order to draw him away from the lamb, which signifies the Passion. Saint Anne is rising somewhat from her seat; it seems she wants to restrain her daughter from trying to separate the child from the lamb, which perhaps symbolizes the Church’s desire that the Passion should not be prevented from running its course.27 (Italics ours.)

Since the first copy of this new composition dates from 1508, it is plausible to suggest that Leonardo did not make considerable progress on the Saint Anne until his second Milanese period. At least three copies by Leonardeschi were then made between 1508 and 1513 alone.

Unknown artist (Salaì?), Trinity of St. Anne, after an original by Leonardo da Vinci (Uffizi version), 1520–1525

The first of the three, previously attributed to Salaì but probably by Melzi, is now in the Hammer Museum at UCLA in Los Angeles, though currently exhibited in the J. Paul Getty Museum. Infrared reflectogram photography has revealed numerous modifications, known as “pentimenti,” which strongly suggest that the copy was made under Leonardo’s supervision.28 The second Saint Anne copy, by an unknown artist, is now in the Prado Museum in Madrid, while the third is currently in a private collection in Paris. A fourth copy, now in the Uffizi in Florence, was made during Leonardo’s subsequent stay in Rome, arguably between 1514 and 1516.

Of these, the Hammer copy, which is in excellent condition, best captures the evolution of Leonardo’s Saint Anne at that time. The painting abounds with the type of delicate detail that by now had become one of the hallmarks of Leonardo’s style, including the lovely cluster of “columbines, anemones and wild strawberries” in the foreground.29

And yet, Leonardo was not yet finished with his own Saint Anne. He continued to work on it, first in Milan and subsequently in Rome, in search of the perfect solution.30 That solution is what we see in the Louvre painting of the Saint Anne today. Whereas the Hammer copy was still framed by lush foliage and trees on either side, Leonardo’s final version retains only one solitary tree at right, perhaps as an allegorical reference to the Tree of Jesse, which in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke connects Jesus to the House of King David. The anemones and wild strawberries are gone, as are the sandals on Mary’s and Anne’s feet; in the final composition, all are barefoot, perhaps to stress their saintly character.

These modifications liberate the scene from the fussy detail of its surroundings, and serve to enhance its monumental presence. It is as if these three figures are suspended on the boundary between earth and heaven—an idea reinforced by the contrast between the earth tones of the foreground, and the ephemeral, shimmering treatment of the background.

This did not prevent Leonardo’s “intermediate” version, painted by Melzi, from spawning several other copies by Leonardeschi. One version, now in a private collection in Paris, hews very closely to the Hammer painting. Another copy is believed to have belonged to the Marquis Giovan Francesco Serra, duke of Milan in the mid-17th century, before it was purchased by King Philip IV of Spain. Today, it forms part of the collection of the Prado in Madrid.

Indeed, the source for most copies of the Saint Anne that we have today is not Leonardo’s Louvre original, but Melzi’s Hammer copy! A 2012 exhibit at the Louvre identified no fewer than thirteen derivative versions of this painting.31 One reason, perhaps, is that after Leonardo took the original Saint Anne with him to France, the Hammer copy was the closest thing to Leonardo’s vision that Italy possessed. The work was exhibited in the Church of Santa Maria presso San Celso in Milan, and soon gained a reputation as an autograph work by the hand of Leonardo himself, rather than a copy. This explains why it served as the model for so many copies, painted by Leonardeschi as well as other artists throughout the 16th and 17th centuries.

One key example is the fine painting now in the Uffizi in Florence, dated around 1510–1525, and most often attributed to Salaì. Though largely faithful to the Hammer copy, it shows Mary and Anne barefoot, as in the Louvre version, which may suggest that Salaì updated the motif after Leonardo finished his final version.

The Saint Anne was perhaps the last major work that Leonardo developed while he was still operating a flourishing studio. After his departure to Rome in 1513, and subsequently to France in 1516, his followers went their separate ways, many settling in towns throughout Lombardy. In doing so, would they remain faithful to Leonardo’s style? Would they continue to be Leonardeschi?

8 Giorgio Vasari, “Lionardo da Vinci,” in Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti; 1568 Edition.

2. The Legacy of Leonardo’s Studio

9 Serge Bramly, Leonardo: The Artist and the Man, p. 106. Leonardo later described this technique in his Treatise on Painting.

10 Peter Burke, The Italian Reanaissance: Culture and Society in Italy, p. 69.

11 Manuscript MS C, fol.15 r., Institut de France.

12 Jean Paul Richter, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, 1883, p. 439.

13 Paolo Giovio, “The Life of Leonardo,” in P. Barocchi (Ed.), Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento. Milan and Naples: 1961, pp. 20–21.

14 Libro di Pittura, in manuscript A, folio 113, Institut de France.

15 Frank Zöllner, “Leonardo’s Portrait of Mona Lisa del Giocondo,” in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 121 (1993), pp. 115–138.

16 Stanley Feldman, Mona Lisa: Leonardo’s Earlier Version, p. 66.

17 For more information about the Battle of Anghiari project, see the new study by Margherita Melani, The Fascination of the Unfinished Work: The Battle of Anghiari. CB Edizioni, 2012.

18 Adding further to the mystery surrounding the Anghiari project, the Tavola Doria copy was stolen in 1940 and only recently emerged in a Japanese collection; as announced on December 3, 2012, the painting will now be exhibited in Japan and Italy on a rotating basis.

19 The king, says Vasari, “tried by any possible means to discover whether there were architects who, with cross-stays of wood and iron, might have been able to make it so secure that it might be transported safely; but the fact that it was painted on a wall robbed his Majesty of his desire, and so the picture remained with the Milanese.”

20 It took some doing, however, to release Leonardo from his obligation to complete the Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria in Florence. There now followed an increasingly acrimonious exchange of letters between Soderini, the Florentine gonfaloniere, and the new governor of Milan, Charles d’Amboise, acting on instructions of the French king, to release Leonardo from his obligations in Florence. Soderini fired off a letter on October 9, all but accusing Leonardo of bad faith. “He received a large sum of money and has only made a small beginning on the great work he was commissioned to carry out,” the gonfaloniere charged, adding that “we do not wish further delays to be asked for on his behalf, for his work is supposed to satisfy the citizens of this city.” Any more delay, he charged, would “expose ourselves to serious damage.” Louis XII then took the extraordinary step to write a letter to the gonfaloniere, personally. “Very dear and close friends,” the king began, “As we have need of Master Leonardo da Vinci, painter to your city of Florence, and intend to make him do something for us with his own hand, and as we shall soon, God helping us, to be in Milan, we beg you, as affectionately as we can, to be good enough to allow the said Leonardo to work for us such a time as may enable him to carry out the work we intend him to do.” This may be the first time in history that a demand for a painter prompted what amounted to a political crisis between two heads of state. Of course, when confronted with the might of France, Florence had no choice but to accede to the king’s wish.