of San Francesco Grande. The commission came from the Confraternity of
the Immaculate Conception, and Leonardo was to paint the center panel.
This painting is the Madonna of the Rocks (begun in 1483).
The subject required was a Madonna and Child with angels, but Leonardo
created something more ambitious and less comprehensible—a kneeling
Madonna with the Christ Child, a single angel, and the child St. John the
Baptist. The Madonna kneeling on the ground—a Madonna of humility—
was not a new subject. Usually, the Madonna was shown adoring the
Christ Child, but in this painting, she looks at John with downcast eyes
and embraces him. John folds his hands in prayerful adoration of Jesus,
who raises his hand in blessing toward John. St. John the Baptist was the
prophet who proclaimed “there is the lamb of God” upon baptizing Jesus.
A non-canonical author added the story that the Holy Family, on the return
from Egypt, stayed with Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin, and that her young child,
John, recognized the divinity of the infant Jesus and adored him. This subject
is not found in painting before Leonardo.
Jesus is “crowned” by two hands: Mary’s left hand at the top, extended in a
gesture of benediction, and the angel’s hand, which points toward the infant
John. It seems as though John is the center of attention. The Madonna’s hand
protects him, the angel focuses on him, and the Christ Child blesses him. The
greater mystery of the painting may be its landscape setting. The ¿ gures are
in front of a dark grotto capped with sky above, which opens into the light in
the distance, but the area between the foreground and the distance looks like
an underground cavern. The modeling of the ¿ gures is subtle, a spreading
of light into dark so gradual that it seems as if a newly invented painting
tool, ¿ ner than a brush, must have been used to control this smoky, gliding
atmosphere. The effect is to slow down the tempo of our viewing.
The monumental ¿ gure group is stable and static, the landscape develops
slowly, and the gradation of light is dreamlike but controlled. This is an
original, yet ambiguous interpretation of the Madonna and Child. This
painting was still incomplete in 1506, though it was provisionally accepted
by the confraternity, and there is some debate about its subsequent history.
Leonardo had a restless imagination and often left works incomplete, and his
experimental techniques sometimes caused his ¿ nished works to deteriorate