12 ★ FT Weekend 26 October/27 October 2019
The light
within
Leonardo | TheLouvre’s exhibition reveals
how the artist captured the dynamism of
both body and mind, writesRachel Spence
L
eonardo da Vinci contained
multitudes. A painter, scien-
tist, architect, poet and
engineer, he was the ultimate
polymath. Now, however, the
new exhibition at the Louvre wants to
reframe him. According to Vincent
Delieuvin and Louis Frank, the curators
of this 500th-anniversary exhibition,
the largest ever staged in the French
capital, Leonardo’s priority was always
painting. His other investigations
simply served to improve his grasp of
whathe described as the “science of
painting” due to that art’s ability to con-
vey the truth of the world better than
any other means.
That this mission does not entirely
succeed in no way detracts from the
splendour of the exhibition. Forget allMadonna” (1480-82), on loan from the
Hermitage, in which child and mother
spiral around each other as if wrapped
in a shimmering cocoon of love and mel-
ancholy, would have been impossible
without the silky, light-reflecting prop-
erties of the innovative pigments.
His determination to capture his sub-
jects in a state of becoming explains why
Leonardo worked so slowly and revised
so heavily. Although the original did not
travel from Florence, a reflectogram of
his “Adoration of the Magi”, which he
abandoned around 1482, shows numer-
ousalterations to the swirl of horses, sol-
diers and worshippers whose anxious
expressions suggest they are trapped in
a battle between despair and faith.
Given his passion for science, you
have to wonder if that was Leonardo’s
own war. If so, nowhere did he struggle
more elegantly than in the “Virgin of the
Rocks” (1483-84). Conceived for a
church in Milan, where Leonardo
moved in 1482, it shows Madonna,
Christ, St John the Baptist and an angel
in a rocky, flower-filled glade. The inten-
sity of the figures is played out through a
waltz of hands which bless, pray and
point towards the invisible miracle of
transcendence at their centre. Yet Leon-
ardo displays the botanicals — including
cyclamen, acanthus, St John’s Wort and
primrose — with meticulousness.
The Louvre explores Leonardo’s
empiricism in a section entitled “Sci-
ence” which brings together optical,
botanical, anatomical, architectural
and mathematical drawings and texts.
Here the studies of shadow, light and the
nature of binocular vision underscore
that Leonardo saw both art and science
as, essentially, ways of seeing.
Those powers of perception made
him unequalled as a portrait painter.
The exhibition is a rare opportunity to
witness Leonardo’s famous painting “La
Belle Ferronière” (1490-97) — possibly
a portrait of Lucrezia Crivelli, mistressof Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan —
alongside“The Mercenary” of 1475 by
the Sicilian painter Antonello da
Messina,a watchful lone wolf pinioned
against a black void.
I t ’s n o t h a r d t o b e l i eve t h a t
Antonello’s flinty soldier provided
inspiration for the suspicious personal-
ity that is La Belle Ferronière. With her
astute, guarded gaze, so at odds with the
feminine ribbons on her dress, she
reminds us that Leonardo always cred-
ited his female subjects with self-will
and intelligence.
He bestows similar autonomy on Isa-
bella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua, a
drawing of whom, made in 1500, is also
on show. A year after this work was
made, Isabella harassed Leonardo, who
was by then in Florence again, to send
her more pictures. The letter she
received in response, from a Florentine
who knew Leonardo, discloses that the
painter was distracted by mathematics
and “cannot abide the paintbrush”.
Such remarks undermine the cura-
tors’ thesis that painting was Leonardo’s
greater god. The works, too, beg to dif-
fer. The show closes with several late
masterpieces, including the National
Gallery’s cartoon in charcoal and chalk,
c1500, of the Virgin and her mother St
Anne accompanied by Christ and an
infant St John the Baptist.
The cartoon s every bit as majestic asi
its oil-based neighbours. Leonardo
evokes the women at a moment fo
heightened emotion — Mary restraining
her boy as he stretches towards the Pas-
sion, Anne pouring strength into her
daughter through her wise yes. Usinge
dark shading to deepen Anne’s gaze, and
pale highlightsfor Mary’s and Jesus’s
shoulders,it expresses the kaleidoscope
of emotion with the simplest of means.
Only oil, however, allowed Leonardo
to employsfumato. His signature tech-
nique of graduating tones so that his fig-
ures dissolve into their surroundings is
responsible for the hazy mystique of the
“Mona Lisa” — which has remained in
the Louvre’s permanent collection —
but also for his half-length portrait of St
John the Baptist. Started in 1508, but
still on Leonardo’s easel after he
departed for France in 1516, the seduct-
ive martyr writhes out of the darkness
in a glimmering chimera of golden skin
and mahogany curls, his finger pointing
us towards heaven even as his eyes warn
us to think twice.
Such is his potency, St John seems to
have sprung fully formed on to the
wood. Yet the reflectogram reveals that
Leonardo made myriad pentimenti,
including changes to his hair and left
arm while certain light transitions,
according to the curators, suggest the
painting was unfinished when Leonardo
died in France in 1519. According to his
biographer, Giorgio Vasari, King Fran-
cois I was at his bedside. He deserved
nothing less.To February 24, louvre.frClockwise from main:
The Head of a Woman,
also known as ‘La
Scapigliata’ (c1501-10);
study for ‘The Virgin
and Child with Saint
Anne’,(c1507-10);
‘Portrait of a Musician’
(1485); ‘La Belle
Ferronière, (c1490-97);
‘Virgin of the Rocks’
(c1483-94); study for ‘The
Battle of Anghiari’ (1504)
Musée du Louvre/Michel Urtado;
De Agostini; Museum of Fine Arts Budapest,the brouhaha around the “Salvator
Mundi” (it’s not here and shows no sign
of arriving) and the distasteful politics
between France and Italythat soured
various loans — the show is an unmiss-
able cornucopia of paintings, sculpture,
drawings and notebooks. The Louvre
has assembled 11 paintings — six loans,
to add to its own holdings of five — out of
the artist’s tiny surviving output: only
15-20 paintings are attributed to him,
and many are too fragile to travel.
These are accompanied by reflecto-
grams (an image of an under-drawing
beneath the surface of the paint) of
many paintings — some of which aren’t
present — which reveal Leonardo’s early
versions, corrections andpentimenti.
A startling, theatrical opening cen-
tres not on a work by Leonardo but a
sculpture by his master Andrea del
Verrocchio, “The Incredulity of St
Thomas” (1467-83). Lit to perfection
and framed in a hemisphere of draw-
ings of drapery by master and appren-
tice set off by dove-grey walls, the
bronze figures of Christ and the saint
dance in shafts of light that glance off
their robes, hands and faces.
Born in 1452 in the town of Vinci nearFlorence, Leonardo joined the work-
shop of Verrocchio, then one of Italy’s
finest sculptors, at the age of just 12.
Taking inspiration from his master’s
light effects, Leonardo — wholater
noted that “every opaque body is sur-
rounded, and its surface clothed, in
shadow and light” — developed his gift
for chiaroscuro by painting tempera
studiesthat he modelled on clay figures
covered with cloth dipped in liquid clay.
In an example such as “Drapery Jabach
IV” (1473-77), the sumptuous skirts of
the kneeling figure shine with mercurial
luminosity, while the creases of shadow
are as crisply articulated as marble.
By the late 1470s, Leonardo had
opened his own studio in Florence. A
gathering of drawings, reflectograms
and the painting known as the “Benois
Madonna” illuminate the momenthe
embracedcomponimento inculto —intui-
tive or rough composition — to discover
the hidden truth of his subjects.
The technique, which involved draw-
ing and redrawing his lines with a flow-
ing, spontaneous boldness untethered
to classical correctness, is at its most
beguiling in three drawings (1478-80)
that explore the figures of Madonna and
Child as they grapple with a cat.
In one, the cat twists its neck in a fran-
tic and improbable 180-degreeturn
from the toddler. In another, all three
bodies are so entangled that the image is
condensed to an illegible thicket of wiryblack strokes. But the overall impres-
sion, thanks to Leonardo’s athletic,
repetitive mark-making, conveys the
scene’s squirming, furious physicality
more effectively than any photograph.
The drawings, undoubtedly based on
the artist’s own observations, testify to
his belief in the eye as the “chief means”
of “understanding... the infinite works
of Nature”. What Leonardo saw was not
a world crystallised in a state of Platonic
perfection but an Aristotelian realm in
which, as he put it, “motion is the cause
of all life”. His awareness that the world
existed in a state of ever-changing rela-
tions — which prefigures contemporary
quantum theory — underpins the aston-
ishing vitality that sets Leonardo’s
paintings apart from those of his Renais-
sance peers.
In this pursuit of dynamism, Leon-
ardo found an ally in the new medium of
oil. The fluidity of his “BenoisWhat Leonardo saw
was an Aristotelian
realm in which ‘motionis the cause of all life’
An astonishing vitality
sets Leonardo’s paintings
apart from those of hisRenaissance peers
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