Virgem das Rochas (La Vierge aux Rochers / Virgin of the Rocks) - Leonardo da Vinci
Museu do Louvre, Paris, França
Óleo sobre painel transferido para tela - 199x122 - 1483-1486
Leonardo’s emblematic
and complexly symbolic The Virgin of the Rocks celebrates the mystery of
Incarnation in portrayals of the Virgin Mary, Christ and Saint John the
Baptist. For the first time, these holy figures, bathed in a gentle light, are
set in rocky landscape. The many contemporary copies of the picture attest to
the immense popularity of this new vision of the theme.
The Louvre version of the picture was to have been the central
part of a polyptych which the Brotherhood of the Immaculate Conception
commissioned Leonardo and the de Predis brothers to paint for a chapel in the
church of San Francesco Grande in Milan in 1483. The other version, now in the
National Gallery in London and known to have formerly been in this chapel, and
several archive documents indicate that the Louvre painting was never installed
there. Its presence in the French royal collection is attested from1627, but
several clues suggest it may have been acquired much earlier.
The most convincing hypothesis is that the picture, painted
between 1483 and 1486, did not meet with Leonardo’s clients’ full satisfaction,
which enabled Louis XII to acquire it around 1500−1503. The second, replacement
picture, now in London, may have been painted by Ambrogio de Predis under
Leonardo’s supervision between 1495 and 1508.
Comparison of the two versions of The Virgin of the Rocks
clearly shows the ambiguous iconography of the first, about which much has been
written. The identity of the figures may indeed appear unclear due to the
absence of attributes and the pre-eminence of the infant Saint John, placed
alongside the Virgin Mary, indicated by the archangel Gabriel’s pointing finger
and Jesus’s sign of blessing. The desert in which the meeting between the two
immaculately conceived children is traditionally depicted has been replaced by
a supernatural rocky grotto, water and plants. The mystery of the Incarnation
is celebrated by the role of Mary and the precursor John, who in Florentine
tradition was one of Jesus’s childhood playmates and already aware of his
future sacrifice for mankind. This prefiguration of Christ’s Passion seems to
be echoed by the precipice on the edge of which the Infant Jesus is sitting and
the vegetation surrounding him (aconite, palms, iris).
The Virgin of the Rocks is the first picture Leonardo is known
to have produced in Milan and has stylistic similarities with works painted
towards the end of his stay in Florence such as The Adoration of the Magi
(Florence) and Saint Jerome (Rome), whose aesthetic concepts it develops. The
rigorously ordered pyramidal composition does not hinder the movement of the
figures, and the painstaking orchestration of their gestures (the
superimposition of hands and interplay of looks) takes on a new intensity in
the diffuse light which softens outlines without weakening the modeling of the
figures.
The figures’ natural poses and the omnipresence of the
predominantly mineral landscape are highly innovative compared to the affected
architecture and hieratic poses of the altarpieces of the period. Yet it was
not until 1501, when the cartoon of Saint Anne was first shown in Florence that
these principles were put into practice by other artists.
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