When curators and conservators examined Leonardo's The Virgin of the Rocks, they hoped to find an underdrawing. What they did not expect to find was a completely different design, hidden under the paint.
Conservators at the Gallery used a technique called infrared reflectography to look through the layers of paint and reveal details of the preliminary drawings underneath.
Leonardo, The Virgin of the Rocks, 1491 - 1508
The first part of the painting they focused on was the Virgin's head, but what sprang out were the face and hand of another figure. Leonardo had evidently started on one picture, and then abandoned it for the existing one.
Discovering the hidden drawing
The hidden drawing is of a kneeling woman (presumably the Virgin Mary) with her face in near profile and one hand across her breast.
In fact, two sets of underdrawings were found - one for the abandoned picture (Composition A) and another for the current one (Composition B). These have given art historians a new insight into Leonardo's working technique.
In order to obtain the clearest possible image of the hidden design, the Gallery contacted an expert team in Florence through the EU-ARTECH project.
Intensive collaborative study yielded spectacular images of Leonardo's concealed drawing beneath the paint layers.
Why da Vinci changed his mind
The Virgin of the Rocks was painted for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in Milan. This is actually the second version of the painting. Leonardo probably sold the first version (now in the Louvre, Paris) to a private client when the Confraternity failed to offer him a sufficiently generous bonus.
The argument was patched up, and this new discovery suggests that Leonardo began work on a new composition, but then changed his mind, and reproduced his original composition.
Leonardo's first idea (Composition A) shows a figure in a rocky landscape. The top of her head is clearly visible, and so is her left hand which she holds across her breast. Her other arm and hand are stretched out to the left, and are more sketchily drawn with several alterations.
The lower half of her body is not visible, but judging from the position of her head, she was certainly kneeling. In the background, rocks and plants are loosely sketched in.
The composition was probably intended to be a picture of the Virgin adoring the Christ Child, although there is no sign of the baby. Perhaps he was drawn with something that doesn't show up in infrared, or perhaps Leonardo abandoned the composition before starting him.
Joining the dots
The underdrawings reveal information about Leonardo's working methods. Did he draw freehand on to the panel, or did he transfer a preparatory drawing or 'cartoon' on to the surface? If so, how? The answer seems to be that he did a bit of both.
The head in Composition A has been drawn on in short, overlapping strokes of paint (or ink), so that at first glance, they look like continuous lines. What this suggests is that Leonardo was painting over existing marks - perhaps joining the dots having copied a design onto the panel using pouncing.
The right arm, the draperies and the landscape are dashed in with a fatter brush, and are clearly freehand. Alterations are visible as Leonardo tried out slightly different positions for the arm.
What this suggests is that Leonardo did not use a single cartoon which outlined the entire composition. Rather he used one or more cartoons for certain sections of the composition, and combined this with improvised drawing.
Experts at the gallery compared the drawing of the hidden head with another of Leonardo's paintings. The figure of St Philip in Leonardo's famous 'Last Supper' in Milan also has a hand across his breast.
The figure faces the other way, and is about twice the size of the National Gallery underdrawing. However, if reduced in size and reversed, the head in Composition A fits over it with extraordinary precision. This suggests that Leonardo must have used the same drawing as a basis for Composition A and Saint Philip, and that he must have had a method of scaling his drawings up and down.
Who did the original drawings?
The underdrawing of the existing 'Virgin of the Rocks' (Composition B) also throws up a few mysteries.
As with the earlier underdrawing, the style appears sketchy and spontaneous in some parts, rigorously controlled in others.
It suggests that Leonardo used cartoons of single figures (or more likely, of individual heads and hands) rather than a cartoon for the entire composition, and then made some alterations freehand.
What is strange is that while Leonardo's underdrawing is not an exact copy of the earlier, Louvre painting, the finished painting reverts to the earlier work in several details.
For instance, the underdrawing shows locks of hair curling down below the right cheek of the angel - something not present in the Louvre version. In the finished work, however, these curls have not been painted in.
This may indicate that Leonardo's assistants, who helped complete the painting, found it quicker and easier to copy the composition of the existing Louvre version, rather than interpret the new elements Leonardo had sketched in.
It has long been held that an overstretched Leonardo delegated part of the painting to assistants - the question was always how much.
While the existence of these underdrawings doesn't entirely solve that mystery, it does show that the first designs were almost certainly in Leonardo's own hand.
Source: www.nationalgallery.org.uk
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment