A changeling from the high Renaissance

It would be a mistake to look in the Benois Madonna for the charm and freshness of the Annunciation. Rather, we must think of it as a changeling from the high Renaissance, an immature sample of that intellectual, classical style which Leonardo was to evolve while painting the Last Supper. How near he came to this style as early as 1480 we can see by comparing the drapery of the Madonna's right leg and thigh with the studies of drapery made for the Louvre Virgin and St Anne about thirty years later. The general scheme is exactly the same, and there can be no doubt that Leonardo in the most mature and complex of all his works used as a point of departure this design of his youth. From the historical point of view, therefore, there is much to admire in the Benois Madonna. The composition, which has an air of perfect naturalness and simplicity, is actually remarkably original, since it is based on an ideal of diagonal recession practically untried in painting before Leonardo. Even the absence of ornament, the contempt for mere decoration which is one of its least attractive qualities, is a presage of the austere and elevated style which was to become fashionable some forty years later.

For all these reasons the Benois Madonna is a great advance on the Madonna with the vase of flowers at Munich; but it suffers from many of the same defects. The condition is almost equally bad in a less obvious way. Under the discoloured varnish it is covered with small stippled touches which deprive it of all transparency of handling. The Virgin's teeth, for example, are so entirely obscured by dirt that one distinguished critic, judging from a photograph, wrote of her as toothless. As the eye gradually penetrates these obstructive layers, her whole head takes on some of the vitality of the original drawings, and it is possible that the deadness which I have just referred to is partly due to condition. But parts of the composition can never have been happy: the baby was always monstrous and the drapery of the sleeve laboured. Finally, the one redeeming feature of the Munich picture, the landscape seen through a window, is absent from the background of the Benois Madonna. The window itself, lacking a central transom, is ugly enough, and without a landscape it is really painful. No doubt a landscape once existed and has been overpainted,with the result that a large patch of light sky puts the Virgin's face out of tone and destroys the unity of focus--the very mistake which Leonardo so skilfully avoided in the portrait of Ginevra Benci.

It is possible to reconstruct at least two more pictures of the Virgin and Child dating from this period. One of these, the Virgin almost in profile, well known from the Madonna Litta in the Hermitage, which is either a copy or a ruined original, is discussed in my next chapter. The other is known to us from a drawing on the famous sheet at Windsor which also contains some of the earliest of those characteristic profiles, the pretty boy and the toothless Roman warrior, which were always to be the first scribbles to flow from Leonardo's pen. The Virgin is represented half kneeling on her left knee, holding the Child on her right, with the infant St John standing close beside her. The drawing is very summary, but we know that it represents something like Leonardo's final version of the subject, as the group of the Virgin and Child is reproduced almost exactly in a picture by Andrea da Salerno at Naples. This proves that Leonardo carried the idea much further than a sketch, perhaps to a painting, certainly to a cartoon. And what an immensely influential composition it was! Mr Berenson has shown that it is probably the earliest representation of the Virgin and Child to include the infant St John, and even if earlier instances could be found, it is certain that the use Leonardo has made of this iconographic motive is in the highest degree original. He has discovered the secret of that pyramidal composition which became an academic dogma of the high Renaissance; for the infant St John, standing beside the seated Virgin, gives just that weight and balance to the base of the pyramid which the Virgin and Child alone would otherwise have lacked. Having invented this motive and used it once, Leonardo abandoned it, with all its permutations and combinations, to be worked out by Raphael. The Belle Jardinière, Madonna with the Goldfinch, Madonna of the Meadows and the Esterhazy Madonna are variations on a theme by Leonardo: which, as any musician knows, does not make them less beautiful or personal.

"One picture of this period remains to be discussed, the small Annunciation in the Louvre. It is a work of unusual perfection. Unlike the Annunciation in the Uffizi, it is composed with complete mastery of spatial intervals. The handling is precise but sensitive, and some passages, such as the angel's wing, show real penetration. In fact, we can praise it more unreservedly than any other of Leonardo's works of this period, and having done so, it may seem paradoxical to doubt its authenticity. It is now certain, however, that the Louvre picture is part of the predella of an altar-piece in the Cathedral of Pistoja, documented as a Verrocchio and executed by Lorenzo di Credi; and a small panel has appeared representing San Donato of Arezzo and a tax-collector which has no great charm, but is manifestly part of the same predera. The Louvre Annunciation is thus in the position of a beautiful orphan who is suddenly discovered to have a number of undesirable relations.