by Martin Kemp
The Louvre painting’s origins may lie in two Madonnas that Leonardo promised to bring from Florence to Milan when he entered the service of Louis XII in 1507–8. Leonardo wrote to Charles II d’Amboise, governor of Milan, that he intended “to bring . . . two pictures of . . . Our Lady of two different sizes, which have in my own time been brought to completion for our own most Christian King, or for whomsoever Your Lordship pleases.” A year earlier, Charles had told the Florentine government that Leonardo was obliged to make a painted “panel” for the king. Louis’s wife was Anne of Brittany, and a painting featuring St. Anne would have been very appropriate.
A “Madonna and Child set in the lap of St. Anne” was seen in Leonardo’s residence near Amboise in 1517 by Antonio de Beatis, who was one of the secretaries to the visiting cardinal of Aragon. What is probably the same painting features in the Salaì list in 1525 as a “painting of St. Anne.” It seems that King Louis XII never received his picture. A painting of the subject was later recorded in Francis I’s chapel not long after Leonardo’s death. It appears that one of the cartoons also entered the French royal collection.
There is no direct evidence to determine when the painting was begun and when it was finished. There is a consensus that it is the last of his major paintings, and we might reasonably assume that it was only finished when Leonardo was in France after 1516.
The painting is the most formally and emotionally fluent of the various St. Anne compositions, based on a series of interwoven curves and a diagonal chain of tender glances. The tone of the imagery is perfectly captured by the contemporary poet Girolamo Casio, who was a friend of Boltraffio, Leonardo’s leading pupil:
On the St. Anne Leonardo Vinci is painting, who holds in her arms Mary the Virgin, who does not want her Son to mount the lamb.
Ecce Agnus Dei [behold the lamb of God], said John,
Who entered and departed the womb of Mary
Only to guide with his holy life
Our feet to the celestial sacrifice.
Of the immaculate Lamb he would seize and cries
To make himself a sacrifice for the world.
His mother restrains him for she does not wish
To see her son’s destruction and her own.
St. Anne, as one who knew
That Jesus was clad in our human veil
To cancel the sin of Adam and Eve,
Instructs her daughter with pious zeal,
Drawing her back from light thought,
That his immolation is ordained by Heaven.
The paint is applied with magical lightness in thin glazes that endow the forms (especially after the recent cleaning) with an extraordinary radiance. Leonardo retained more color in the shadows here than in his earlier Madonnas. The details are highly refined: the wriggling curls of the lamb’s soft coat; the beautifully observed rocks and colored pebbles below St. Anne’s feet; the elusive features of St. Anne, who enigmatically knows the secrets. . . . The plaits and veils of St. Anne’s headdress are studied with melting delicacy in a black chalk drawing at Windsor, opposite, top left. Her features in the drawing are as much inferred as described, inviting our emotional engagement.
The painting’s landscape, which signals the body of the earth as in the Mona Lisa, floats evanescently in the background, the mountains bleached by bright mists and caressed by mobile waters. We know that Leonardo paid much attention to aerial perspective and the blueness that resulted from moisture borne in the air. The tall tree, even though its greenness has decayed to brown, testifies to how he analyzed the appearance of leaves, clusters of leaves, and branches at different distances from the viewer. For Leonardo, no part of any picture could be treated casually. Every visual effect had to be reconstructed on the basis of his study of how nature looks and how it works.
He stressed that the painter must observe how different cloths behave when draped over limbs and under the pressure of folding. Heavier cloths fall into longer and rounder curves, as in the skirts of St. Anne and the Virgin. Thin cloths such as silks and muslins fold more sharply into smaller and more angular folds. The upper layer of diaphanous material over the Virgin’s arms compresses into a series of concentric ripples with defined crests.
Study for Head of St. Anne, c. 1508–10.
Study for the Drapery of the Virgin, c. 1508–10.
The effects of the drapery over the Virgin’s legs have been compromised over time by the deterioration and bleaching of the blue lapis lazuli, one of the most expensive but the least predictable of pigments. A drawing in the Louvre, above right, allows us to envisage the drapery’s original appearance. The mixed medium—black chalk, washes of black and brown ink applied with a brush, and white heightening—defies our ability to tell precisely how it was applied. The effect is almost stippled. The result has an elemental force, like folded strata in the body of the earth.
The conviction of the parts and the whole of the painting so disarms us that we forget the inherent implausibility of the subject and setting. The weightlessness of Leonardo’s touch and the rhythmic buoyancy of his composition set aside questions about how the mobile weight of Mary’s body could be comfortably sustained on her mother’s lap. Leonardo is a supreme magician of the science of art.
88. Study of Two Distant Mountain Ranges
c. 1511, Windsor, Royal Library, 12410
This is one of a series of atmospheric studies of distant mountains in red chalk on red prepared paper. One can be dated definitely to December 1511, since it shows fires started in the Italian Alps by Swiss soldiers who were fighting against the French at the behest of Pope Julius II as part of the Holy League. We know that Leonardo made at least one journey to explore “the chain of the Alps,” and climbed to a high vantage point to test how visibility was affected by altitude.
The improbable medium of red-on-red was chosen to reduce the tonal contrast between the drawing and the ground, in order to convey the loss of distinctness of even huge mountains viewed in the distance. Leonardo knew, of course, that mountains look increasingly blue as they are seen farther away—and he formulated rules for their increasing blueness—but here he was dealing with the loss of definition of the mountains’ contours, as well as light and shade, rather than color. He noted that forms with dark shadows are more visible at a distance than those under full light.
In addition to using linear perspective, he noted, the painter can create an illusion of depth using “another perspective, which we call aerial, because through variations in the air we are made aware of the different distances. . . . And if you wish in painting to make one thing appear more distant than another you should represent the air as rather dense.”
Those paintings from the Mona Lisa onward that contain landscapes exploit very similar panoramas of mountains, and he clearly sensed that they possessed an elemental beauty that spoke eloquently of the “body of the earth” and the passage of time. The veiled beauty of distant mountains, as in the late St. Anne on page 160, stands in sharp contrast to the violence of their creation during huge uplifts and collapses in the earth’s crust—as Leonardo well knew. The majesty of mountains in his hands was both lyrical and terrible.
“The improbable medium of red-on-red was chosen to reduce the tonal contrast between the drawing and the ground, in order to convey the loss of distinctness of even huge mountains viewed in the distance.”
89. Studies of the Light of the Sun on the Moon and Earth
c. 1508, Collection of Bill Gates, Codex Leicester, 2r
The main concern of the Codex Leicester is water in the body of the earth and the huge transformations that this body had undergone over time. The earliest folios deal with the relationship of light from the sun on the earth and with the moon, which seems to be a separate topic, but Leonardo was arguing that the seas of the earth play a vital role in reflected light on the moon.
Each page is densely written, with subsidiary illustrations, as in this second folio that illustrates the optical cause of the lumen ciner
eum, the “ashen light” in the shaded part of the moon. The main diagram shows the sun on the right illuminating the moon at an angle such that only a crescent of moonlight is visible from the earth. Nonetheless, he observed that the dark portion of the moon exhibits a glimmer of light. He explained this as resulting from “earth-light” reflected off the seas and impinging on the moon.
The small but meticulous drawing in the lower right shows this glimmer, and he further explained that the “ashen light” looks darker where it borders on the luminous crescent and lighter where it abuts the “blackness of the void.” We can confirm this for ourselves, by following Leonardo’s instructions: “If you want to see how the shady part of the moon is brighter than the background against which it is seen, cover the eye with the hand . . . , covering the [bright crescent of the moon].” This account of the subjective role of the eye in a scientific observation is very remarkable.
In this and related pages in the codex, he radically argued that the moon is essentially like the earth, and is not a perfect heavenly body: “The moon is clothed with its own elements, that is water, air, and fire and thus it sustains itself . . . in that space, as does our earth with its elements.” Thus, the moon has seas, lands, and mountains of its own.
90. Ventricles of the Brain Injected with Wax
c. 1507–10, Windsor, Royal Library, 19127r
Leonardo had earlier accepted the traditional format for the ventricles as three more or less spherical containers joined along a horizontal axis (see page 75). Here he injected the ventricles with wax to see their actual shape.
His notes instruct the investigator to “make two vent-holes in the horns of the great ventricles, and to insert molten wax with a syringe, making a hole in the ventricle of the memory. . . . Then when the wax has set, remove the [substance of] the brain and you will see the shape of the ventricles. But first put narrow tubes into the vents so that the air which is in these ventricles can escape.” This method is taken from the technique for making solid casts in bronze, which he would have first seen in Verrocchio’s workshop.
In the very slight sketch on the right of the page, it seems as if sight is alone in passing to what Leonardo termed the imprensiva (“receptor of impressions”), while the other senses pass to what he now called the fourth ventricle. As in previous studies, he was striving to endow sight with a privileged location as the superior sense.
Below the schematized image at the lower right, he wrote, “the ventricle a is at the end of the spine where all the nerves that give the sense of touch come together. We can tell that the sense of touch operates in this ventricle, seeing that Nature works in all things in the shortest possible time and manner.”
The sectioned brain on the top left and the view from below in the center of the page were seemingly made from a human specimen, whereas the rete mirabile (the fine network of blood vessels) on the bottom of the page is based on vertebrate anatomy, perhaps that of an ox. Leonardo was synthesizing his observations.
His radical reshaping of the ventricles does not affect his conception of how they function. In the see-through diagram in the upper left, the anterior ventricle is labeled imprensiva, the central one acts as the senso comune (confluence of the senses), and the compartment at the end contains memoria (memory).
91. Bones and Muscles of the Shoulder and Neck, with a Wire Diagram
c. 1510, Windsor, Royal Library, 19003r
“In this winter of 1510,” Leonardo optimistically wrote toward the end of that year, “I hope to expedite all this anatomy.” Around this time he conducted his most brilliant researches into the machinery of the human body. He sought for a functional explanation of every anatomical feature as bearing witness to the perfection of natural design: “Although human ingenuity makes various inventions corresponding by means of various machines to the same end [as nature], it will never discover any inventions more beautiful, more appropriate or direct than nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.”
The first drawing on the sheet, the man seen in profile, displays the pectoralis major, the large breast muscle, separated in an exaggerated manner into separate bundles or fascicles, allowing a glimpse of the structures below. In the study of the man with a raised arm, the muscle becomes a series of bands to signify the main directions in which the muscle acts. This tendency to create “windows” in the upper layers reaches its climax in the diagram at the upper right in which all the muscles are reduced to wires. This technique shows the lines along which the contracting muscles pull on the levers of the bones. In a drawing of a leg (not shown) done around the same time as the opposite drawing, Leonardo explicitly states that he wants to construct a model from bones and metal wires.
The three drawings on the left of the sheet carry a strong sense of the dissected forms, as deeper structures are progressively disclosed. The drawing at the top, in which the trapezius has been severed at its point of insertion and hinged away, demonstrates a new technique in anatomical illustration. Leonardo exploited such separated or “exploded” forms in both his engineering and anatomical demonstrations. In his drawing of the vertebral column (not shown), he shows the first three cervical vertebrae separated from each other so that their individual shapes and articulations can be better understood. He argued that drawings that pay such attention to details of form and function will convey “true knowledge” in a way that verbal descriptions could never hope to emulate.
92. Studies of an Ox Heart, Its Major Vessels, and Its Aortic Valves
c. 1513, Windsor, Royal Library, 19073–19074v
93. Studies of a Tricuspid Valve, Vortices of Blood, and a Glass Model
c. 1513, Windsor, Royal Library, 19117v
After the series of anatomical demonstrations that synthesized what Leonardo had discovered about the vascular system of the “centenarian” (see page 133), he later returned to look in remarkable detail at the anatomy and working of the heart, using an ox heart as his prime source of information. This brilliant double sheet in pen and ink on blue paper, drawn with a great sense of organic grandeur, explores the blood supply to the heart itself and begins to look in detail at the three-cusp valves of the pulmonary vessels.
The two main drawings on the left page, showing auricles as well as ventricles, concentrate on the major vessels that originate from the heart. The pulmonary artery in the left drawing has been severed at its base and hinged back, while the other drawing, in which the heart has been rotated by 90 degrees, clearly displays the three fleshy cups of the valve that guards the entrance to the vessel.
Above those is a small drawing that shows how he intends to section the ventricles, which will be hinged back on either side of the septum. The septum itself was of major interest since it was supposedly penetrated by tiny pores that allowed the blending of the blood from either side of the heart.
The main drawings on the right page examine the blood supply to the exterior of the heart. He looks in some detail at the encircling coronary vessel, which he had diagnosed as having played a role in the “centenarian’s” death. In the four diagrammatic sketches to the bottom right, he began to think about the geometry of the valves of the pulmonary artery and aorta. He referred to them as “triplicated triangular doors” and said that “this opened doorway will be triangular.”
The pulmonary valves became the subject of one of his most remarkable pieces of scientific research, in which he analyzed organic form according to the principles of geometry. He realized that the valve is not operated by muscular action. He decided that it must be the format of the neck of the aorta and the resulting motion of the blood expelled from the heart that serves to close the valve, before the next thrust of pumped blood forces it open again.
Studies of a Tricuspid Valve, Vortices of Blood, and a Glass Model, c. 1513–16
A further drawing at Windsor, opposite, shows the heart opened up and the neck of a pulmonary vessel sectioned to show its flask-like shape. On the basis of what Leonardo
knew as a hydraulic engineer and theorist of water in motion, he reasoned that the blood in the progressively constricted vessel would turn back on itself in a vortex motion to close the valve. The primary vortices can be clearly seen, spiraling like ionic capitals in architecture, with small secondary vortices above.
Glass model of bull heart built by Morteza Gharib, professor of aeronautics and bioengineering at Caltech, 2002.
In the diagrams to the upper left he transformed the valve into a piece of stereometric geometry, thinking about how three cusps open more readily than two.
Even more remarkably, he signaled his intention in a drawing and note at the top right to build “a mold of plaster in order to blow thin glass inside . . . but first pour wax into the doorway of the bull’s heart so that you can see the true shape of this doorway.” Such model building was new in anatomical science.
Leonardo could not of course see what was happening inside the heart but was bringing his knowledge of the motion of fluids to bear on the problem in order to create a visual and physical model. Modern imaging techniques can see what Leonardo couldn’t. Morteza Gharib of Caltech built Leonardo’s glass model, shown at left, and was then able to use new technologies to realize an image of the flow that confirmed the validity of Leonardo’s deductions. Did Leonardo build the model on his own account? Looking at his drawings of flow in the valve, we may well think that he did.
“Leonardo could not of course see what was happening inside the heart but was bringing his knowledge of the motion of fluids to bear on the problem in order to create a visual and physical model.”
94. Sequences of Aliquot Numbers and Geometrical Studies of Areas
