Giorgio Vasari tells the story of how Leonardo set about seducing the Florentines anew and, writing nearly fifty years later, he still felt the echoes of the excitement aroused by a cartoon of Saint Anne and the Virgin, ‘delighted to witness the beauty of her child, who holds him tenderly in her lap, while with a modest glance downwards she notices Saint John as a little boy who is playing with a lamb’.1 The composition was so successful that, when the cartoon was finished, for two days artists and ordinary citizens flocked to Leonardo’s room to admire it in amazement: the intended effect was achieved at the first attempt.
Vasari’s account is not exactly precise in the details by which the cartoon should be identified, since a cartoon on this subject, drawn in charcoal with white chalk highlights, exists at the National Gallery, London (the Burlington House cartoon) [Plate 41]; but, although a young Saint John can be seen in it, there is no sign of any ‘lamb’, as in Vasari’s description. Instead a much more detailed description of an almost identical composition appears in a letter written by one of Isabella d’Este’s correspondents, who, at the duchess’s request, pursued the artist in an attempt to persuade him to paint a small picture for her, or at least to colour the portrait he had made one year earlier during his brief stay in Mantua. Pietro da Novellara, a learned theologian and vicar general of the Carmelites in Mantua, visited Leonardo in the lodgings that Leonardo had taken at the Annunziata with Salai and another collaborator, and he describes the scene he found there. The letter offered the duchess and later readers a lively, carefully observed and precise portrait of the conditions in which the artist was living in the spring of 1501 and of the subjects on which he was working:
Leonardo’s way of life is very changeable and uncertain, so he seems to live for each day as it comes. Since he has been in Florence, he has only made one sketch; it is a cartoon of a Christ child, about a year old, almost jumping out of his mother’s arms to seize hold of a lamb. The mother is in the act of rising from Saint Anne’s lap and holds the child back from the lamb, an innocent creature, which is a symbol of the Passion. Saint Anne, who is also partly rising from her seat, seems anxious to restrain her daughter from holding her son back from the lamb, which may symbolize the church, which would not hinder the Passion of Christ. These figures are as large as life, but are drawn on a small cartoon, because they are represented either seated or bending down, and one stands a little in front of the other, towards the left. And this sketch is not yet finished. He has done nothing else, except that two of his apprentices are painting portraits to which he sometimes adds a few touches. He is working hard at geometry and has lost all patience with his brush.2
The document is much more accurate than Vasari’s memory and allows us to identify the work as the preparatory cartoon for the painting of the Virgin with Child and Saint Anne, now in the Louvre, Paris [Plate 42]. The cartoon seen by Novellara has not survived, but the painting has; and the accurate description confirms that by this date Leonardo was working on a painting that, without major variations, he continued to re-elaborate until the end of his life. Some scholars believe that the cartoon described by Vasari was probably completed after the one that Novellara saw, while others believe that it was finished earlier. The hypothesis that the London cartoon was completed before the cartoon for the painting in the Louvre is frustrated by the chronology of events: if, in March 1501, soon after his arrival in Florence, Leonardo visited Tivoli and by April he had already finished the cartoon seen by Novellara, it is not clear when he would have had time to draw the cartoon now in London. It is easier to imagine that the London cartoon was made after the one seen by Novellara, and in this case it represents a variation that was subsequently abandoned. However, the issue is not easy to solve, and indeed even a third version of the composition might have existed – unless Vasari was confusing various sources of information, as he often did, by reporting the presence of a ‘lamb’ in the London cartoon while in fact the lamb had been seen not in a cartoon but in the painting that Leonardo completed later, several copies of which were in circulation during Vasari’s lifetime.
Saint Anne is a painting that, in spite of its exceptional quality, was for centuries ignored and attributed to Leonardo’s pupils by scholars who were too quick to follow the inaccurate and often unfounded information provided by Vasari, who affirmed that the master made only the cartoon now in London. There may be quite different explanations for the presence of several cartoons from the same period, all finished to such a high level. Leonardo was seeking a major commission in Florence, one that would re-establish his status as the city’s leading painter. Saint Anne was a subject very dear to the Florentines, especially during those years of the republic. The despotic podestà Gautier de Brienne, [known as] the duke of Athens, had been chased from the city on the feast day of Saint Anne on 26 July 1343, and from that date the citizens had dedicated a special cult to the saint who had protected their liberty.
Thus the widespread interest in the composition accounts for this choice of theme. It is no coincidence that Michelangelo made at least two important drawings on a similar topic during the same period [Plate 43]. It is impossible to date these drawings precisely, but, on the basis of an unjustifiably strained approach that assigns every iconographical innovation to Leonardo (even if the only work that we know for sure was copied by one artist from the other is David, which Michelangelo carved and Leonardo copied in a drawing before reusing it later as Hercules), Michelangelo’s drawings of Saint Anne have been arbitrarily dated to the months after Leonardo had completed the cartoon (or cartoons), in order to confirm the older artist’s influence over the younger one. Leonardo’s influence over Michelangelo was first imagined by the critics and then ‘proved’ through the arbitrary dating of sketches, although this alleged influence does not fit with Michelangelo’s desire to challenge Leonardo right from the moment of the latter’s return to the city.
The disdainful originality that emanates from Michelangelo’s every gesture is confirmed precisely by these drawings, which are completely different in tone from those of the older master. Where Leonardo essentially resolves the intertwined pose of the figures using a deep shadow that allows the overlap to be imagined but conceals the incongruous nature of Mary’s and Saint Anne’s positions, Michelangelo aims to resolve the anatomical poses of their bodies. This incongruity would not have been lost on Michelangelo, given that the Virgin could never have sat on her mother’s lap in that manner, particularly because there was not enough room for her legs. At all events, what is certain is that Michelangelo and Leonardo worked in the early years of the sixteenth century on a composition with an identical subject matter, but Leonardo, well aware of how slow he was and how difficult he found it to finish a painting rapidly, went to enormous efforts to complete the cartoon so thoroughly that it could be seen as a finished work and therefore could arouse his fellow citizens’ admiration. The operation was successful in every respect, and the life-size cartoon was so extraordinary that, if there had been even the hint of a challenge between the two artists at this stage, Leonardo would certainly have been the winner of this first round.
The subject of the cartoon on which Leonardo was working in April 1501 is expertly interpreted by Pietro da Novellara, who provides a concise and exemplary testimony of how a religious work of art might be perceived by contemporaries and of the subtlety with which the artist attuned his compositions to the degree of understanding they were likely to elicit. At the same time, in an attempt to stem the excessively liberal interpretation that had been in vogue in Renaissance art for some years, Novellara’s letter confirms that artistic compositions were still expected to be understood with simplicity and immediacy by those who looked at a work of art. In the Burlington House cartoon the Christ child makes a gesture of blessing towards the young Saint John that had already appeared in The Virgin of the Rocks, but here the composition seems suspended in a delicate counterpoise of balances and weights, reminiscent of a complex industrial machine.
Mary, seated on Saint Anne’s lap (although her upper body is further away than it would have been in reality), lifts her left leg to balance the effort of lifting the child as he leans forward towards his cousin. Straining to accompany that gesture, Mary leans forward imperceptibly and moves her right shoulder in the opposite direction, to her left knee. The light that picks out Mary’s shoulder and knee helps to create the impression of a balanced, effortless movement. The Christ child who caresses his cousin’s face with his left hand and turns it towards the blessing is an innovation that moves the viewer through the naturalness of that affectionate gesture. Saint Anne, satisfied by the accomplishment of his destiny as martyr and redeemer of the church, which she represents, turns to Mary with a reassuring smile, pointing with her left hand to the heavens, where all their destinies have been decided.
The composition is treated in almost obsessive detail. Its success relies on the delicate definition of the facial expressions, which marks yet another step forward in the language of an entirely psychological narration, acquired through the experience of The Last Supper in Milan. Yet, by comparison to that earlier work, an important novelty appears in the cartoon of Saint Anne – one that signals a turning point in Leonardo’s art: here, for the first time, we see both the standardization of physiognomies and their idealization. It is no coincidence that this further stage occurred in Florence, and in Michelangelo’s presence, since this was the artist who moved human physiognomy, in both sculpture and painting (as would be soon be seen in the Tondo Doni), decisively towards an ideal synthesis, which complemented the spirituality and universality of his work.
When working on The Last Supper in Milan, Leonardo sought out particular faces that could best express his ideas about the sentiments to be represented. He carefully selected real people for their physiognomy, and even for their hands. The streets of Milan became an open book, a huge catalogue from which he could select the physical appearances that would most closely convey the idea he had in mind. On reaching Florence, after a short stay in Tivoli, where he came face to face with the universality of classical sculpture, Leonardo embarked on a new path, quite different from naturalism, that would lead him towards an ideal representation capable of touching the spectator more intimately.3
Michelangelo must have been aware of this change, since he had arrived at this conclusion years earlier (both the Bacchus and the Pietà are significant examples of this idealistic rendering of the face). In his sculptures (and in the Tondo Doni, which can be dated to 1505), Michelangelo had developed a new form of idealism, which censured excessive physiognomic characterization, the search for imitative effects of nature, and preferred a universal idea of the human body that allowed him to narrate higher sentiments through the human being precisely because he distanced himself from the natural world. Nor could Leonardo readily disregard this research, owing to Michelangelo’s scientific studies, in particular his anatomical studies – because young Michelangelo had been a step ahead of Leonardo in this respect too: the younger artist could boast a perfect knowledge of the human body, and certainly a capacity to represent it that had never been achieved before, not even by Leonardo.
If the older artist was in Rome, as he seems to have been, he must have seen Michelangelo’s Pietà at Saint Peter’s, where he would have been astounded at the naturalistic and at the same time ideal perfection of the face of the Virgin and that of Christ. Also, if Leonardo had been impressed by the classical statues of Tivoli, he could not ignore the fact that Michelangelo had reached and surpassed those models in his Bacchus; moreover, Michelangelo was now working with a form of representation that was wonderfully in harmony yet also idealized, above all in its psychological expressions – which, rejecting the old medieval and fifteenth-century symbols, made sculpture approachable precisely because of its ideal energy, as in the case of David, whose pride was stamped on every inch of his face.
The radical change in the physiognomies painted by Leonardo occurred in Florence and, more precisely, in the cartoons for Saint Anne; therefore it is right to hypothesize that Leonardo was goaded by the confrontation with the younger, aggressive artist, with whom he had to compete for market and for primacy in the city. The stylistic change visible in the Burlington House cartoon built on the improved drawing technique achieved by Leonardo, who, already by the mid1490s, in Milan, had abandoned drawing in silverpoint in favour of a soft pencil [matita grassa], and this enabled him to produce softer shading, more in harmony with the elusiveness of light that was central to his optical studies. Many of the preparatory drawings for The Last Supper were made using a soft and shaded pencil. This then led to a breathless crescendo in the cartoon for Saint Anne, where Leonardo used shaded pencil in a wholly new and fully expressive manner.
The darkest tones and the blurred edges of the drawing are ideal for disguising the inconsistencies of unusual poses. The most awkward part of the composition, Mary’s left hip resting on Saint Anne’s legs, is cast into the deepest shadow, which hides the imprecise details of the pose but allows the successfully portrayed parts to merge in dreamlike softness: the arms, the child’s body with his raised hand, the faces of Mary and Saint Anne. There is no trace of dryness in the cartoon, thanks to the shaded pencil, and the figures are enveloped in a penumbra that softens the details while the highlights, by creating sudden shifts of tone, pick out the key elements of the narrative. Mary’s face is almost identical to that of Saint Anne, and her youth only emerges in the more vivid facial contours revealed by a stronger light. In order to produce that graceful gesture, the child’s body is unnaturally elongated as he sits on Mary’s lap, but this inconsistency is well hidden by the shadow in which Leonardo envelops his legs and hips, which are as sinuous as those of a siren.