Leonardo’s Challenge
When a Carmelite cleric from Mantua, Fra Pietro da Novellara, visited Leonardo’s studio at the Santissima Annunziata in Florence in 1501, he was rather disappointed. Instead of seeing Leonardo at work on a range of projects, the master, he wrote, “had only made one sketch, and nothing else.”
But that was an understatement, for the “sketch” was actually a magnificent preparatory drawing, or “cartoon” as such a drawing is known, for a painting that would become Leonardo’s greatest masterpiece. “It is,” the good Father continued, “a cartoon of a child Christ, about a year old, almost jumping out of his mother’s arms to seize hold of a lamb.” Mary herself, he continued, “is in the act of rising from St. Anne’s lap, and holds back the child from the lamb.”
Such a triple portrait was very popular in early Renaissance Europe, known as the “Saint Anne Trinity.” It conveyed the theological idea of a seamless, divinely ordained line from Saint Anne to Mary, and from Mary to Jesus. But why would Leonardo be attracted to such a motif? The answer is simple: throughout his career, Leonardo was fascinated with the theme of motherhood, as exemplified by the Madonna. The Saint Anne is that motif in duplicate: it overlays one maternal bond over another, creating an unprecedented level of complexity — both in an aesthetic and in a theological/allegorical sense.
That complexity appealed to Leonardo’s intellect. But the Saint Anne Trinity represented a difficult aesthetic problem as well. Placing three figures in a dynamic cycle of movement and emotion posed a major challenge; but as we know, Leonardo positively thrived on such challenges. In the Virgin of the Rocks, for example, the solution involved placing the three figures in a pyramidal scheme, relying on gesture to constitute the principal meaning. But the Virgin of the Rocks lacks any obvious emotional attachment between the figures.
The Saint Anne was an opportunity to rectify this. For one, all three figures share a unique powerful connection — maternity, the strongest human bond imaginable. As a result, Leonardo’s ultimate solution is simply breathtaking.
Given the sheer effort that Leonardo poured into his large cartoon for a Saint Anne painting, it is difficult to imagine that this was not a commissioned work, as some have proposed. It’s also rather implausible to think that the project was completely divorced from whatever Leonardo was supposed to be doing for the Servite friars, since they were paying for Leonardo’s upkeep — and that of his entourage — at the Santissima Annunziata all through these months.
According to Vasari, Leonardo “kept them waiting a long time” before finally showing a life-size cartoon. The maestro may have figured that all would be forgiven once the friars saw a fully executed rendering, confident that its sheer beauty would placate them. And as Vasari tells us, that’s exactly what happened. As soon as Leonardo finished his full-length design, using wash and silverpoint to render the drawing in painterly detail, his hosts were overwhelmed. Not only were they overwhelmed, but they enthusiastically organized a “public exhibit” of the finished drawing, which had people lining up around the block — perhaps the first public exhibition of a work by Leonardo da Vinci: “When it was finished, men and women, young and old, continued for two days to flock for a sight of it to the room where it was, as if to a solemn festival, in order to gaze at the marvels of Leonardo, which caused all those people to be amazed.”
Unfortunately, this particular cartoon has not survived. What has survived is what we believe is an earlier cartoon, namely, the famous full-size drawing of Saint Anne, Mary, Jesus and John (the Burlington Cartoon), which today has pride of place at the National Gallery in London For more about the story, please visit www.YoungLeonardo.net and http://themonalisamyth.com/.
