A Thousand Words
Leonardo's Madonna and Child with Saint Anne
by Mary Elizabeth Podles
The Madonna and Child with Saint Anne has long been regarded as a problem picture, not only for us but also for Leonardo. The iconography creates a fundamentally impossible visual dilemma: how to combine two adult figures and a small child into a dramatic and unified whole, giving each one equal weight and successfully conveying the theological concepts they traditionally stand for. Earlier solutions like Masaccio's (Figure 1) imposed a medieval hierarchy of scale and at best created interlocking generational boxes to form a kind of human trinity of Christ's human genesis. Such a static devotional image did not satisfy Leonardo, who sought always for drama and a deeper exploration of theological meaning.
Nor were his first attempts satisfactory, at least to him. In 1499 he designed and drew a version of the subject (Figure 2) with Mary seated in St. Anne's lap and holding the infant Jesus, who in turn embraces a young John the Baptist. This version was never actually painted. A second design was executed in 1501 and described in a letter by Pietro da Novellare: there, Jesus was shown grappling with a lamb while Mary restrains him and Anne looks on. That version also was never painted, and the drawing is now lost. Our version was probably begun around 1510. It may have been commissioned by Leonardo's patron, Louis XII of France, at the birth of his daughter. His wife, Anne de Bretagne, had suffered a string of miscarriages and stillbirths; St. Anne, her name saint, was also the patron saint of childbirth. Whatever the commission, the patron was doomed to disappointment. The painting, still unfinished, remained in Leonardo's possession at the time of his death in 1519.
Leonardo's final solution resembles the one described in 1501: Mary is seated in her mother's lap, reaching out to her son, who grasps the lamb by its ear and attempts to straddle it. The figures are arranged within a strong triangular shape, its base firmly set on the ground and rising to the apex at Anne's head. Inside this stable pyramid, however, things get a bit more complex. Leonardo knits together the various serpentine figures and their gazes into a lively spiral motion that the scholar Kenneth Clark likens to "some very complex machine, designed to rotate and to be placed on a rotating platform." Yet within the complexity there remains a dramatic unity and a balance, if an asymmetrical one, enlivened by its internal variety of gesture and movement.
Pietro da Novellare tells us that Leonardo spelled out the inherent drama he wished to convey: the lamb symbolizes the Passion; Jesus grasps it as if yearning for its fulfillment. The Virgin, from human concern for her son, tries to hold him back. Meanwhile, Anne, "who here symbolizes the Church, abides motionless, above and beyond the conflict between motherly love and divine love." Leonardo makes the previously iconic devotional image into an exploration of, and a place for meditation on, the Church's embrace of human compassion and divine
sacrifice.
The landscape background reinforces Anne's symbolizing the Church. The tree at the right, standing alone in the middle distance, may be a direct reference to St. Anne. In his book St. Anne and Renaissance Music: Devotion and Politics, Michael Alan Anderson cites an Office for St. Anne that compares the saint to a root that nourishes the whole tree. Note that the three feet, St. Anne's and one of Mary's, spread at the bottom of the picture like the roots of a tree. The office elaborates on the metaphor: the tree yields a branch (Mary) and the branch a fruit (Jesus).
Late in life Leonardo's private studies, recorded in his notebooks, shifted away from mechanics and engineering toward the natural world: he wanted to comprehend the whole of nature and the working of all its parts. A recent infrared examination of the painting revealed that Leonardo first painted the whole structure of the tree without foliage, and then painted the leaves over it. The mountains in the far background are only lightly painted, as if he had intended to finish them, too, but was interrupted by death. His last drawings inquired increasingly into geology and the formative processes that shaped the world. Here, the immobility and changelessness of stone are given meaning: echoing the blue-gray peaks of St. Anne's veil and sleeve, they stand for the eternal timelessness of the Church, which embraces and protects Mary and Jesus.
Cleaning Conundrum
Leonardo's painting has continued to pose problems until the present day. Until 2010, the painting was covered with a layer of discolored varnish and areas of overpaint and repair. The decision to clean the picture sparked controversy and resulted in the abrupt resignation of two advisors to the conservators. Speculation arose that the panel was being over-cleaned and parts of Leonardo's own handiwork removed.
Cleaning a painting is always a delicate affair. Varnish, originally applied to brighten a painting's surface, yellows with time and dulls the painter's contrasts of tone. Any change to a painting's two-dimensional surface changes the artist's illusion of three dimensions. Therefore, to restore it, conservators must remove the old varnish without disturbing any of the paint. Leonardo achieved his minute gradations of tone, and thus his illusion of sculptural form and subtlety of expression, by laying down many, many layers of translucent oil paint, often over the course of years. This produces the effect we call sfumato, literally, "vanished in smoke," that accounts for St. Anne's veiled expression and the Mona Lisa's smile. It is difficult—some say impossible—for the conservator's swab to distinguish between the last layer of varnish and the first of paint, particularly since Leonardo may actually have used varnish as a paint medium in the last layers.
For better or worse, the cleaning was accomplished, and curators at the Louvre assembled many materials related to the composition and execution of The Madonna and Child with St. Anne. The resulting exhibition comprisedan extraordinary 130 documents, notations, sketches, scribblings, and drawings, all bearing testimony to the processes and workings of a beautiful mind.
Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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