01-11-2011 - Traces, n. 10

ART
london


LEONARDO’s Version
Now showing: the greatest exhibition on Leonardo Da Vinci ever organized, together with the monumental literary work of one of the major experts of this controversial artist. For the first time, the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks are displayed together, along with their “secret,” which, during the Renaissance, marked the start of a new way of looking at the Virgin Mary.  

by Luca Fiore

You have never seen an exhibition with only pictures by Leonardo da Vinci. Why? It’s simple. In the past 70 years, no one has managed to organize one. This year, London’s National Gallery has managed it. From November 9th to February 5th, it proposes a review of the Italian genius’ Milanese years, entitled, “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan.” The list of loans is breathtaking. The two versions of Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks, belonging to the National Gallery and the Louvre, are shown together for the first time. An event of this kind could be the occasion for an update on the research on one of the crucial nodes of the history of Renaissance art. Alongside the exhibition, one of the greatest experts on Leonardo, Professor Alessandro Ballarin, from Padua, has published a monumental work (four volumes–1, 392 pages of text and 1, 389 pages of photographs) entitled, “Leonardo in Milan.” Ballarin worked on this book over the past 15 years, sifting through the few documents available to historians and proposing new scenarios and solutions to many questions still open but, above all, proposing interpretations of works that no one up to now dared to analyze. The example of the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks, around which the whole London exhibition gravitates, is emblematic. Ballarin is not in fact in agreement with what the curators of the English exhibition maintain about the history of the two works and proposes a totally new interpretation.
According to the London experts, the version of the Virgin of the Rocks preserved in the Louvre was the first to be made. Painted between 1483 and 1486, in their view it was painted for the oratory of the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in the Franciscan church of San Francesco in Milan (near what is now the Catholic University, and demolished in the early 1800s). After an argument over payment, Leonardo is said to have sold this version and successively (around 1490) painted what is now in the National Gallery to replace that in the oratory of the Confraternity. Leonardo had recourse to the Milan Tribunal claiming that the Confraternity had not finalized payment for the work. According to the documents of the time, the Confraternity maintained that payment was not finalized because the work was not considered completed. But if this were the case, how could Leonardo have sold an unfinished work? And then, if the second version was to replace the first in the complex altarpiece of San Francesco, why are the two panels of different sizes? Lastly, why would the artist have decided to alter the composition of the second version instead of making an exact copy?

The well and the fons. Ballarin says, “The first panel, that of the Louvre, was not in fact painted for San Francesco, but is a work painted during the first years of his sojourn in Milan. It would have been a ‘calling card’ for his new patron, Ludovico il Moro, destined for the apse in the palatine chapel of San Gottardo in Corte, the church that can still be found behind Milan’s Palazzo Reale. This church had been built by Ludovico’s uncle, Azzone Visconti, and its original structure was a replica, in the apse, of the octagonal plan of the baptistery of San Giovanni ad Fontes (for males, where Ambrose baptized Augustine) and had been sacrificed for the building of the new Duomo. It would seem, then, that Azzone’s intention was for San Gottardo to become a new Ecclesia Fontis.”
At the same time, though, the Church was dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, a cult spread in Italy and particularly in Milan by the Franciscans. An altarpiece for that church would therefore have been required to combine the theme of the Immaculate Conception with that of the Baptism of Jesus. The Louvre version of the Virgin of the Rocks would therefore correspond to these complex requirements.
As it was, Leonardo chose to begin from ancient apocryphal prophecies about the life of the Baptist, which tell that, on their return from Egypt, Jesus and Our Lady went to see their cousin, John, who had taken refuge from Herod’s persecution in a cave that opened miraculously thanks to the prayers of Elizabeth. It was a cave that allowed those inside to see out without being seen. In fact, in Leonardo’s painting we get a glimpse of the countryside with the Jordan passing though. The apocryphal stories say that on that occasion, Jesus revealed to John both their destinies. The angel holds Jesus near the edge of a well and, at the same time, looking towards us, guides our attention with his finger pointed towards the Baptist who is embraced by the Virgin. Ballarin says, “In the foreground, the well alludes to the fons, to the baptismal font, to the promise of the Baptism of Christ in the waters of the Jordan; the Virgin’s hand is raised above her Son’s head as a sign of protection in His destiny of the Passion. ...The Virgin is she who adopts her Son’s precursor, but also she who fears for the fate of her Son, and who lives, in the meeting of the two children, the premonition of her Son’s Passion, thanks to which salvation will be restored to the world. She presides over the meeting, promotes it; she knows the divine plan, she is its instrument; she is she who knows. I want to say that in this painting, the Virgin is assigned a central role in the fulfilling of the divine plan, in the redemption of mankind through the incarnation and the sacrifice of Christ.”

The dispute. Nothing of its kind had been seen before–not in Florence, nor in Milan. This image has a coloring wholly Franciscan, unthinkable without taking into account the new sensitivity for the Marian cult, fruit of the intense dispute between the Friars Minor–led by Francesco della Rovere, General of the order and later Pope by the name of Sixtus IV–and the Dominicans, so as to affirm the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady. Milan was one of the hot spots in this dispute. Once again, Ballarin says, “We could say that Leonardo intended to mean the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, her nature as a creature conceived immaculately, through the role God gave her of Co-redemptrix–what today’s Franciscan theologians would call the privilege of co-redemption, that is, of the Virgin’s cooperation in Christ’s salvific work, as the proof of her being conceived without original sin.”
Only if we grasp these theological implications can we understand the interest of the Milanese Franciscans in an image like that of the Louvre. Thus, it is highly probable that, having grasped the genius of the first Virgin of the Rocks–which for us today seems obscure because we no longer share the sensitivity of Leonardo’s contemporaries–the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception decided to commission from Leonardo a new painting that, starting off from the structure of the first would concentrate only on the theme they had at heart. At that point, all Leonardo had to do was to purge that first, acrobatic iconographic engineering of direct references to the theme of Baptism. In the panel preserved at the National Gallery, therefore, there is no trace of the well in the foreground, or the angel’s finger pointing to St. John. Jesus, the Baptist, the angel, and the Virgin here form a sort of pyramid that has its fulcrum in the figure of Mary, imposing and mature, different from the frail little girl of the first version. “The Virgin of Leonardo,” writes Ballarin, “determined in her gestures, sure of her own action, but frail in her feelings, is truly the announcement, the Baptism, of a new era in Mariology, opened, in different ways and times, by two Franciscans, John Duns Scotus and Francesco Della Rovere.” The Paduan scholar goes as far as to say that if the Middle Ages was a Christological period, above all in the 13th and 14th centuries, then the first part of the Renaissance was all for Our Lady. Perhaps, even though they were difficult years, Mary went to take up a more and more significant role as Mother of the Christian People.