Leonardo Da Vinci's St Anne

The mother (he goes on to say), half rising from St Anne's lap, is taking the Child to draw it from the lamb that sacrificial animal, which signifies the passion. While St Anne, rising slightly from her seat, seems as if she would hold back her daughter, so that she would not separate the Child from the lamb, which perhaps signifies that the Church did not wish to prevent the Passion of Christ. These figures are life-size, but they are in a small cartoon because all are seated or bent, and each one is placed before the other, to the left.

Here is a very important motive and a clear description, which do not fit the Louvre picture. St Anne is not making any attempt to restrain the Virgin; and the figures are not placed before each other to the left, but to the right. Professor Suida has pointed out that a painting by Brescianino in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, which obviously derives from Leonardo, exactly fulfils all the conditions of Fra Pietro's description. The figures are placed before each other to the left, and are noticeably large in relation to the size of the canvas; and the St Anne is attempting to hold back her daughter. To this evidence I may add the fact, not mentioned by Suida, that a Leonardo drawing at Windsor strongly suggests the St Anne's head as we see it in the Brescianino. Further evidence is the small Raphael Holy Family with the Lamb which has always been recognised as having some connection with the Leonardo cartoon of 1501. It has no resemblance to either the Burlington House cartoon or the Louvre picture, but is closely related to the design of the Brescianino. I believe therefore that Suida is right, and that the cartoon of 1501 is only known to us in this indirect manner. According to Vasari the original was sent to France and it is not surprising that it is lost: only curious that we should know so few reminiscences of what was apparently one of Leonardo's most popular works, and unfortunate that our closest replica is by a painter so little able to interpret the spirit of Leonardo's design as a Raphaelesque Sienese. From Brescianino's copy we can hardly begin to criticise Leonardo's original, but we can say, I think, that it showed a more evolved design than the Burlington House cartoon. Iconographically, too, the introduction of the Lamb would suggest a later date. If this is correct, it confirms the old tradition quoted by Padre Resta that the Burlington House cartoon was executed in Milan before 1500. The existence of Luini's pictures in the Ambrosiana, which is taken from the cartoon, strengthens its connection with Milan. It could be dated between the completion of the Last Supper in 1497 and Leonardo's departure from Milan in 1499--two years, as we have seen, less fully occupied than usual.

By common consent the Burlington House cartoon is one of Leonardo's most beautiful works, and it is even excluded from Mr Berenson's anathema. "There is something truly Greek," he says, "about the gracious humanity of the ideals here embodied, and it is no less Greek as decoration. One can scarcely find draped figures contrived in a more plastic way without going back centuries to those female figures which once were clustered together on the gable of the Parthenon." Leonardo, with his love of mystery and agitation, was essentially un-Greek, and the classical elements in his work, like the geometrical, are a result of study, not predisposition. But in the cartoon the draperies have a breadth and flow remarkably similar to the group of Fates, and prove how deeply Leonardo's studies had enabled him to assimilate the classical tradition. The cartoon is also the one of his works which justifies the popular notion of his art. The shadowy, smiling heads, the tender mysterious glances, the pointing hand, and those two high-sounding devices, chiaroscuro and contraposto, all are present in their most acceptable form. This is therefore a convenient point at which to return to a question touched upon in our survey of the Trattato: the question of how far Leonardo's study of shadow and twisting movement led to a certain coldness and artificiality in his later work. We are brought to face the delicate problem of the paintertheorist.

If the theory is a true reflection of sensibility in intellectual terms, as was perspective to Piero della Francesca, it can give a painter's work an added tautness and coherency. If it is made the pretext for fantasy, as was perspective by Uccello or mannerism by El Greco, theory can actually liberate. But if, by imposing a self-created academism, it deadens the natural sensibility, as with how many painters from Raphael to Monet, it is disastrous. Leonardo, like Seurat, seems to tremble between the first and last possibility. His theories reflect his creative instincts, but by intellectual elaboration they are made dangerously stiff and pressing. For example, his love of twisting movement was an instinct, visible, as we have seen, in his earliest work; and becoming more pronounced as his sense of form becomes more liberated. His innumerable studies of waves, knots, and plaited hair were not done in pursuit of a theory, but in satisfaction of an appetite. But of this instinct he made a theory. "Always make the figure", he wrote, "so that the breast is not turned in the same direction as the head. Let the movement of the head and arms be easy and pleasing, with various turns and twists." So with chiaroscuro. He had never used the bright colours of the quattrocento. His early work is largely distinguishable by its mysterious twilit tones, "annihilating all that's made to a green thought in a green shade". But this instinct found confirmation in the scientific investigations into the nature of light and shade, and as a result, I think that Leonardo's theories of light and shade led him to push his chiaroscuro a little further than sensibility would otherwise have warranted. We shall see an example of this when we come to examine the second version of the Virgin of the Rocks. The Paris picture shows Leonardo's natural feeling for darkness in the general setting, but the figures themselves are lit by more or less diffused rays: in the London picture the light comes from a single source and is concentrated on the heads so that a large part of each is in shadow. The result is a loss of colour and transparency which reminds us disagreeably of Leonardo's followers; for whatever the effect of chiaroscuro and contraposto on Leonardo himself, on his imitators it was disastrous. He had provided them with a style, the true meaning of which they could not understand, and one which was peculiarly dangerous to mediocrities. A bad picture in the quattrocento style still has the merit of bright decorative colour; even its crudities may be a source of charm. A bad picture in the style of Leonardo is a horror of black shadows and squirming shapes.

These two devices had an influence far beyond Leonardo's own circle; and Vasari was right when he made them the turning point in the history of painting. The desire to lead the eye into the background by arranging the main lines diagonally to the picture plane and the theory that this movement should be achieved by smooth and continuous curves: these were to become essential qualities of Baroque. There was of course an important distinction between Leonardo and the Baroque painters. With him the movement is confined to the main group, which is detached from the background, like a piece of sculpture seen through a window; with the Baroque the diagonal serpentine movement is extended to the whole surface of the picture. But Correggio, who first conceived the true Baroque composition, never disguised his debt to Leonardo.