Leonardo da Vinci: "The Virgin and Child with St Anne"

Edwin Mullins presents his ideas on this painting, and Leonardo

Kenneth Clark, from his "Looking at Pictures", on "The Virgin and Child with St Anne":

Being used to the iconography of Italian painting, I can see that it is meant to represent the Virgin Mary, her mother, St Anne, and the Infant Christ; but could anything be further from historical probability? One need think only of a Rembrandt drawing of the same theme, simple, domestic, humanly touching, to realise that Leonardo has made no attempt to picture the scene as it might have happened. Of course the same would be true of Raphael or of any classical painter of the high Renaissance; but they would have transformed ordinary experience because they believed that sacred persons should be endowed with unusual physical perfection. Leonardo's intention is metaphysical. His figures are peculiar because they have become symbols, and in order to interpret these I must first of all try to discover what put them into his mind and then see how they were transformed by the pressure of his philosophy.

Before his time the best known representation of the Virgin with St Anne was the grave, gaunt picture by Masaccio in the Uffizi, in which St Anne stands directly behind her daughter like a ghost; and of about the same date are some more primitive versions of the subject, where a diminutive Virgin sits on St Anne's lap like a ventriloquist's doll. These pictures were certainly known to Leonardo, and I believe that something uncanny in the overshadowing presence of St Anne struck deep into his imagination. He saw her as an informing spirit, a doppelganger, a control; in fact as something very close to his idea of an angel. The subject fascinated him, but the old stiff iconography was doubly unacceptable; it lacked that sense of movement which for thirty years had been the chief aim of Florentine art; and it failed to express his feeling of continuous involvement between mother and daughter. To achieve these qualities he engaged in the most sustained and resolute struggle with form of his whole career.

I remember that the Virgin with St Anne was painted at a period in his life when his mind was absorbed by three scientific studies, anatomy, geology and the movement of water. The movement of water symbolised for him the relentless continuum of natural force; anatomy the complexity of life and its power of renewal; and from his geological studies he had formed the concept that the whole world was breathing and renewing itself like a living organism. In one of his manuscripts he says: 'The earth has a spirit of growth. Its flesh is the soil, its bones the stratifications of the rock which forms the mountains, its blood the springs of water; and the increase and decrease of blood in the pulses is represented in the earth by the ebb and flow of the sea.'

Everything in nature, even the solid seeming earth, was in a state of flux. But the source and centre of this continuous energy remained mysterious to him. He could only symbolise it by this ideal construction, in which forms, themselves suggestive of further lives, flow in and out of one another with inexhaustible energy; and at the apex of this vital pyramid is the head of Leonardo's angel familiar, smiling, half with love for human creatures and half with the knowledge of a vital secret which they can never possess.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Leonardo
• da
• Vinci
• Virgin
• St
• Anne
• Art
• Renaissance
• Painting
• Pittura
• Italiana
• Italy
• Louvre

[jgalindoch]

Thanks this is a great video!

[30inventionman]

That is hauntingly beautiful, I agree.

[huynhminhtri]

@KVNWSHRE5 , thanks , bro !

[KVNWSHRE5]

@huynhminhtri It is certain he was homosexual he was charged with sodomy when he was young but never was caught due to evidence and his love for Salai and Francesco Melzi. Not to mention there are two drawing one showing Salai's ------ and male strippers.

[KVNWSHRE5]

@ScrappyDooYah It is unknown now. During the raid of Germany, Amboise was attacked and the coffins including da Vinci's tomb was melted down to bullets and thus Leonardo's body was mixed in with other bodies.

[huynhminhtri]

I think Da Vinci was a  gay !

[ScrappyDooYah]

Where is he buried? Where is his Grave?