Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1491–1508, oil on panel, 189.5 x 120 cm (The National Gallery, London). Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re in the National Gallery in London, and we’re looking at the second version by Leonardo da Vinci of “The Virgin of the Rocks”.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:13] There’s another version in Paris. This, they think, is the second version, perhaps some of it completed by Leonardo’s assistants, and we should remember when we read that that’s how artists worked.
Dr. Zucker: [0:25] That was normal.
Dr. Harris: [0:26] It was not a big deal. They had a workshop, they had assistants. Assistants sometimes helped to complete the work of a painting. The idea, of course, is that the work of a painting is really not the actual painting but it’s also the idea.
Dr. Zucker: [0:38] Especially important for Leonardo. So, why is [it] that there are two versions, and why such a long period for this painting? It was started in 1491, it wasn’t finished until 1508. You can actually argue that it was never finished.
Dr. Harris: [0:51] The commission was started. Leonardo was promised a bonus when he completed it. But the bonus that he got didn’t live up to what he expected. And he…
Dr. Zucker: [1:00] He sold it to somebody else, right? [laughs]
Dr. Harris: [1:01] He apparently gave the painting to someone else. Then he had to work on a second version. That’s what this is. “The Virgin of the Rocks” is an interesting subject because, for me, I normally think about Mary seated on a throne in heaven.
[1:13] Here we have another way of presenting Mary, which is Mary seated on the ground as a type of image of Mary called the Madonna of Humility, showing Mary’s humility seated on the ground.
Dr. Zucker: [1:25] Also means that the natural world has become a kind of throne or is more exalted than it would have previously been understood. In other words, I think in the Renaissance nature itself is given a kind of respect and a kind of attention. But that’s quite a landscape. This is not just a meadow as we might see in a Rafael.
[1:42] Maybe we should actually just focus for a moment on who everybody is and what’s going on here. We have the Virgin Mary, who’s the primary figure and really functions at the top of that pyramid of figures. She’s embracing with her right arm a child, a baby — the slightly larger of the two and slightly older of the two.
[2:01] That would be John the Baptist, who in turn is praying to the figure that is in turn blessing him. That is the Christ Child. Then over to the right is an archangel.
Dr. Harris: [2:10] We can barely make out her wings behind her. Mary’s gestures and the position of her body are incredibly graceful. She tilts her head to the right, shifts her shoulders over. Her hips move in the other direction. The way the right arm reaches out, the left hand comes forward, the position of her body is very complex. To me, that’s really the signal we’re in the High Renaissance.
[2:35] Of course, that’s what Leonardo develops, is this new High Renaissance style where we have bodies that move very gracefully in very complex ways, and compositions which are unified, as you said — this one where all the figures make up the shape of a pyramid.
Dr. Zucker: [2:50] It’s interesting. As I’m looking at it, it seems as if Mary’s hand on John’s shoulder is actually a fairly stern one, almost as if she’s directing John to Christ. Look at the painting virtuosity here. Look at the way in which her other hand, her left hand, is foreshortened. It seems to encapsulate the space that Christ exists in, but is in no way directing him.
[3:11] Then of course there’s that angel, which looks on with a kind of beauty and a kind of elegance that is breathtaking.
Dr. Harris: [3:17] That speaks of the divine and this heavenly space that they occupy. You’re right, if you think about it the way you just described it, which is that Mary’s sort of ushering John toward Christ and Christ existing in a space unto himself in a extra-divine realm within this divine realm. It really helps to make sense of those gestures.
Dr. Zucker: [3:40] Remember that in the foreground is a very still body of water, which can have a double reference, both to Mary’s purity — that undisturbed water — but at the same time, a foreshadowing of the baptism of Christ by John many years later. Of course, this is an apocryphal story of their meeting as they both flee the Massacre of the Innocents.
Dr. Harris: [4:01] We know that this was commissioned by the…
Dr. Zucker: [4:04] Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception.
Dr. Harris: [4:07] In Milan.
Dr. Zucker: [4:08] That may have a sort of secondary set of references, referring to her purity again and the way in which this painting seems to really emphasize that. You’ve got the purity of the water, you’ve got the protected garden, all metaphors. Then you’ve got that flash of yellow across her waist, which really draws attention.
[4:22] The fact that all these figures and their faces and their arms are all surrounding that oddly empty central space.
Dr. Harris: [4:29] And revolve around that space of her womb.
Dr. Zucker: [4:32] The atmospheric perspective is gorgeous.
Dr. Harris: [4:35] Well, and the darkness of the painting is striking, especially as you look around at other Renaissance paintings. This is a technique that Leonardo developed called sfumato, which means a kind of smoky haziness where figures seem to emerge from the darkness of the background.
[4:48] They don’t have any of those hard lines around them. I think this is also part of that High Renaissance softness and grace.
Dr. Zucker: [4:56] There’s a kind of accuracy to the anatomy of the figures, to the botanical specimens, and even to the geology here that I think also reminds us that Leonardo was not just a painter, but was somebody who understood the natural world, was fascinated [by] and studied the natural world, and painting was one part of that series of professions.
Dr. Harris: [5:15] Leonardo took that to an extreme, but that was also true of so many Renaissance artists that interest in anatomy and science, although Leonardo is the quintessential Renaissance man.
[5:25] [music]
Left: Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1483–86, oil on panel, 199 x 122 cm (Musée du Louvre); right: Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1491–1508, oil on panel, 189.5 x 120 cm (The National Gallery, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
There are two versions of Leonardo‘s Virgin of the Rocks (the version in the Louvre was painted first). These two paintings are a good place to start to define the qualities of the new style of the High Renaissance. Leonardo painted both in Milan, where he had moved from Florence.
Normally when we have seen Mary and Christ (in, for example, paintings by Fra Filippo Lippi and Giotto), Mary has been enthroned as the queen of heaven. Here, in contrast, we see Mary seated on the ground. This type of representation of Mary is referred to as the Madonna of Humility.
Mary, St. John, Christ and an angel (detail), Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1491–1508, oil on panel, 189.5 x 120 cm (The National Gallery, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Fra Filippo Lippi, Madonna and Child with two Angels, c. 1460–1465, tempera on panel, 95 x 63.5 cm (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence)
Mary has her right arm around the infant St. John the Baptist who is making a gesture of prayer to the Christ child. The Christ child in turn blesses St. John. Mary’s left hand hovers protectively over the head of her son while an angel looks out and points to St. John. The figures are all located in a fabulous and mystical landscape with rivers that seem to lead nowhere and bizarre rock formations that recall the Dolomite mountains of northeastern Italy. In the foreground, we see carefully observed and precisely rendered plants and flowers.
We immediately notice Mary’s ideal beauty and the graceful way in which she moves, features typical of the High Renaissance.
This is the first time that an Italian renaissance artist has completely abandoned halos. Fra Filippo Lippi reduced the halo to a narrow ring around Mary’s head. Clearly the unreal, symbolic nature of the halo was antithetical to the realism of the Renaissance. It was, in a way, a necessary holdover from the Middle Ages: how else to indicate a figure’s divinity?
But Leonardo found another way to indicate divinity—by giving the figures ideal beauty and grace. After all, we would never mistake Leonardo’s group of figures for an ordinary picnic—the way the Lippi’s painting of the Madonna and Child with Angels almost looks like a family portrait. With Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks, we are clearly looking at a mystical vision of Mary, Christ, John the Baptist, and an angel in heaven.
Implied pyramid, Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1483–86, oil on panel, 199 x 122 cm (The National Gallery, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The unified composition
We can see that Leonardo grouped the figures together within a geometric shape of a pyramid (a pyramid instead of triangle because Leonardo is concerned with creating an illusion of space—and a pyramid is three-dimensional). He also has the figures gesturing and looking at each other. Both of these innovations serve to unify the composition. This is an important difference from paintings of the Early Renaissance where the figures often looked more separate from one another.
Left: Andrea del Verrocchio (with Leonardo), Baptism of Christ, 1470–75, oil and tempera on panel, 180 x 152 cm (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; photo: Pixel8tor); right: Angels (detail), Andrea del Verrocchio (with Leonardo), Baptism of Christ, 1470–75, oil and tempera on panel, 180 x 152 cm (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; photo: Pixel8tor)
Another way to think about this is to look at the angel that Leonardo painted in this work by his teacher Verrocchio. Leonardo’s angel has a more complex pose. Things that artists were just learning how to do in the Early Renaissance (like contrapposto) are now easy for the artists of the High Renaissance.
As a result, artists of the High Renaissance can do more with the body—make it more complex, more elegant, and more graceful. Similarly, the compositions of the paintings of the High Renaissance are more complex and sophisticated than the compositions of the Early Renaissance—figures interact with gestures and glances, and are often interwoven and set within the shape of a pyramid.
