FACT, OPINION AND DA VINCI

Long ago now, in my student days, I dipped into a copy of Freud’s Leonardo that I had picked up in Oxfam.  For those who don’t know it – it was never one of Freud’s successes – the key to it is the painting of The Virgin and Saint Anne (Mary’s mother).

            Freud recalls that Leonardo had a dream about a childhood incident in which he was frightened by a bird putting its tail in his mouth.   Freud sees the bird in the picture. Where others might see a fold in a robe, Freud sees an upside down vulture, its tail towards the infant Christ’s mouth.  The tail, of course, is also a nipple and a penis; hence Leonardo’s Oedipus complex, homosexuality and so on.

            In fact, the real-life bird in question had been a hawk, not a vulture, and Freud’s interpretation was discounted on the grounds of inaccurate data, unless we are to make every painting as subjective as a Rorscshach ink blot.  But regardless of this, the whole thing seemed to me when I read it – and still seems to me now – to be nonsense. Apart from the evidence of the black-chalk drapery study - which really looks like some one trying to get the folds of the fabric right, rather than some one trying to sneak in a phallic bird – the shape of the robe is determined by the theme of the painting:  Christ trying to pull himself towards the lamb (sacrificial victim – ie himself) and Mary trying to pull him away from it (ie from his fate). “A rose is a rose is a rose,” as Gertrude Stein said, and in this instance a robe is a robe is a robe. 

 

 
 
 

 I’m not much good at interpreting pictures, never having had any training in the skill.  For a lot of my youth, when I looked at any picture that was not an illustration in a book, I was more concerned with how it looked – form, texture, colour – than with what it might mean: given that it was usually about some person or event I had never heard of. 

            My encounter with The Virgin of The Rocks in The National Gallery was of this ilk.  I knew it must be good, since it was by  Leonardo, and I liked the rocks, which reminded me of seaside caves I had seen as a child; and which served as background to the pretty girl, the two rather repulsive male babies, and the fourth figure of indeterminate sex who made up the rest of the picture.  What they were all doing posed among the rocks was beyond me, but I was going through a period of puzzlement at the time and did not really expect the world to make sense.   Obscure paintings, and the poetry of T S   Eliot, merely reinforced the general incomprehensibility of things. 

            I suppose I never gave the painting another serious thought until startled into doing so by reading The Da Vinci Code.  Brown’s interpretation of the picture, and its sister in The Louvre, seemed to me quite as problematic as the more obvious nonsense of seeing Mary Magdalene in The Last Supper. 

            As it happened, I had acquired – second hand, as with my Freud – a book about Leonardo’s paintings.  I offer Brown’s thoughts from Chapter 32, along with those of Frank Zöllner – at the time of writing his book, Professor of Medieval and Modern Art History in the University of Leipzig - and let the two accounts speak for themselves.

            I would, however, make just one observation.  Nowadays, we make rather a thing of  saying that one viewpoint is a good as another.  This is laudable in terms of letting everyone have their say, but may it not be the case that getting one’s data wrong – which baby is which, for example; or the sex of the group that commissioned the picture: things that are matters of ascertainable fact rather than opinion – may have a bearing on the validity of one’s interpretation?


Virgin of the Rocks: Louvre Version

Dan Brown

Da Vinci’s original commission for Madonna of the Rocks had come from an organization known as the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, which wanted a painting for the centrepiece of an altar triptych in their church of San Francesco in Milan. The nuns gave Leonardo specific dimensions, and the desired theme for the painting - the Virgin Mary, baby John the Baptist, Uriel and Baby Jesus sheltering in a cave.  Although Da Vinci did as they requested, when he delivered the work, the group reacted with horror. He had filled the painting with explosive and disturbing details.

The painting showed a blue-robed Virgin Mary sitting with her arm around an infant child, presumably Baby Jesus. Opposite Mary sat Uriel, also with an infant, presumably baby John the Baptist. Oddly, though, rather than the usual Jesus-blessing-John scenario, it was baby John who was blessing Jesus... and Jesus was submitting to his authority! More troubling still, Mary was holding one hand high above the head of infant John and making a decidedly threatening gesture - her fingers looking like eagle's talons, gripping an invisible head. Finally, the most obvious and frightening image: Just below Mary's curled fingers, Uriel was making a cutting gesture with his hand - as if slicing the neck of the invisible head gripped by Mary's claw-like hand.

Frank Zöllner

Leonardo portrayed the Virgin Mary together with the infant St. John, Christ and an angel either in, or in front of, a rocky grotto - hence the title by which we know it today, the Virgin of the Rocks. The very youthful Mary, in a dark blue garment, is sitting or kneeling almost exactly in the centre of the composition. She is gazing gently down towards the infant St. John who is engaged in prayer; she has her right hand around his shoulders, while her left hand is raised protec­tively above the figure of Jesus. To one side of the scene is an angel, most prob­ably Uriel who - in the Paris version at least - gazes out of the picture with a quiet smile, establishing contact with the viewer. With his right hand, as John's guardian angel, Uriel is pointing towards the child whose hands are clasped in prayer, with his left hand he is supporting the infant Jesus sitting in front of him, who is also turned towards John, raising one hand in blessing. Thus the figures are interconnected by a rich pattern of glances and gestures, with the viewer drawn into the whole by the figure of the angel.

 

In both versions of the Virgin of the Rocks it seems that the rocky, stony ground falls away sharply in the foreground. This immediately makes it clear that the location is somehow distant and secluded, and this is further emphasised by the wildly rugged rock formations in the middle and background. In several places we can see through to water and a mountain landscape shrouded in light and mist. In addition, in the Paris version, there is a broad area of blue sky closing off the top of the composition. The radiance of the background, the shimmering of the water and the plants here and there soften the inhospitable atmosphere of the rocky loca­tion. This effect is continued in the light entering in the left foreground. Some of these elements may be read as religious symbols: the water and the pearls and the crystal which are used to fasten Mary's robe may all be taken as symbols of her purity. This in itself would make the connection with the Immaculate Conception of Mary, to whom the chapel of the Virgin of the Rocks was dedicated. The rock formations may possibly also be read in terms of Marian symbolism, alluding to similar topoi in prayers to the Virgin - and the same may well also apply to the later painting of the Virgin and Child with St. Anne. The Mother of God was regarded as the rock, not cleft by human hand, and the inhospitable stone formations, eroded by natural forces might therefore be interpreted as a metaphor for Mary, pointing to her unexpected fertility.  In addition, the cleft rock was regarded as a safe refuge for the infant St. John and Christ.

      In Leonardo's painting for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, the infant St. John clearly has a particular role, and indeed his presence in the iconog­raphy of the painting is unusual. A meeting between John and Christ as infants is rare. No such meeting is recorded in the Bible itself, only in the so-called Books of the Apocrypha, These contain accounts of the flight into Egypt including descriptions of Mary and Jesus apparently meeting John in the wilderness. It is possible that the figures and the rather barren surrounding in Leonardo's painting go back to these accounts. The deeper meaning of this masterly portrayal of the meeting between John and Christ in hostile surroundings derives directly from the religious convictions of those commissioning the work. The Franciscan monks who commissioned the altar retable and the Virgin of the Rocks felt specially close to Christ, St. Francis and John the Baptist. Thus they would have identified with the infant St. John worshipping Christ but also being blessed by Christ and in the care of the Virgin Mary. So, in this work the Confraternity was doubly present, as it were: once facing the picture as they performed their acts of worship and devo­tion, and once in the picture itself in the figure of St. John that had particular meaning for them. Moreover, Mary's hand and a section of her robe envelop John, showing that the child and, by implication, the Confraternity is under Mary's pro­tection. The motif of protection is depicted both in Mary's robe round the child and in the location itself, for the rocky surroundings can be read as a metaphor for a safe haven. This might also explain the intense effort Leonardo put into the portrayal of the rocky background and the garments. Mary's robe is almost monu­mental in its dimensions and - certainly in the Paris version - seems to match Uriel's seemingly billowing garment. Similarly the surrounding landscape appears to be sheltering the figures in the foreground.
     The harmonious composition and the masterly design of the Virgin of the Rocks of course give no hint of the irksome legal disputes that Leonardo and his two col­leagues had to weather shortly after the work was completed. There was a bitterly complex disagreement about payment: the artists threatened to sell the work to an art-lover who had clearly offered them more than the Confraternity was prepared to pay. It was probably this dispute which led to the making of the second version of the Virgin of the Rocks - the version which is on view today in London and which in fact adorned the monks' chapel in San Francesco Grande in Milan during the 16th century. The older version was most likely quickly acquired by an art-lover, possibly Ludovico Sforza, who then gave the picture either to the Emperor Maximilian or the King of France.