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Gallery 6
The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne
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Read about the works in this gallery, or view images from the exhibition (see below). |
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Shortly after Leonardo returned to Florence after an absence of nearly seventeen years, he seems to have instantly regained fame by exhibiting a monumental cartoon of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and a Lamb. According to Giorgio Vasari's biography of Leonardo (Florence, 1568), for two days in 1500/1501 crowds came to admire Leonardo's cartoon in his private quarters at the convent of Santissima Annunziata. While this cartoon has not survived, leading to considerable debate regarding Leonardo's versions of the composition, the studies exhibited here appear to conform to the artist's ideas of 1504–8 and later, as they were developed in connection with the monumental cartoon for the Virgin and Child with Saints Anne and John the Baptist (National Gallery, London) and the painting of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and a Lamb (Musée du Louvre, Paris).
Leonardo's refined treatment of surface in some of his late drawings seems firmly grounded in his exacting scientific methods. About 1490–92 he had begun to study the physical properties of light and the gradations of shadows, describing their qualities, quantities, positioning, and shapes. In notes dating from 1512–15 he explored the effects of direct, diffused, restricted, and subdued light and recorded the motion of shadows with respect to moving or stationary light sources; he distinguished "simple derived shadows" from "compound derived shadows." To this research, he also integrated his theories on the perspective of color, aerial perspective, and the perspective of disappearance. Such findings seem to have stimulated his use of highly experimental pictorial drawing techniques, particularly in the studies for the Louvre painting of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne from 1508–12, of which a number are shown here.
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