Edwin Mullins presents his ideas on this painting, and Leonardo Kenneth Clark, from his “Looking at Pictures”, on “The Virgin and Child with St Anne”: Being used to the iconography of Italian painting, I can see that it is meant to represent the Virgin Mary, her mother, St Anne, and the Infant Christ; but could anything be further from historical probability? One need think only of a Rembrandt drawing of the same theme, simple, domestic, humanly touching, to realise that Leonardo has made no attempt to picture the scene as it might have happened. Of course the same would be true of Raphael or of any classical painter of the high Renaissance; but they would have transformed ordinary experience because they believed that sacred persons should be endowed with unusual physical perfection. Leonardo’s intention is metaphysical. His figures are peculiar because they have become symbols, and in order to interpret these I must first of all try to discover what put them into his mind and then see how they were transformed by the pressure of his philosophy. Before his time the best known representation of the Virgin with St Anne was the grave, gaunt picture by Masaccio in the Uffizi, in which St Anne stands directly behind her daughter like a ghost; and of about the same date are some more primitive versions of the subject, where a diminutive Virgin sits on St Anne’s lap like a ventriloquist’s doll. These pictures were certainly known to Leonardo, and I believe that something …
Video Rating: 4 / 5
Comments are closed.