Part II
Chapter 2
Leonardo And The Ineffable
The Salvator Mundi is an uncompromisingly spiritual painting on a very conventional theme. We tend to forget that Leonardo’s main employment as a painter was to produce devotional images that convey Christian messages. Of the twenty or so paintings in which he played the prime role, thirteen portray figures with whom we are acquainted in the Bible. Our picture of the modern Leonardo as a man of engineering, science, and rational thought has led us away from considering him as an artist of spiritual subject matter.
There has been a tendency to view him as a heretic or even as overtly anti-religious. The clearest early expression of Leonardo the heretic came in the first edition of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists in 1550. Vasari wrote that Leonardo’s ‘philosophising on natural things’ such as ‘the motions of the heavens, the course of the moon and passage of the sun’ led him to ‘form in his mind a concept so heretic that he didn’t approach any religion, seemingly considering it far more important to be a philosopher than a Christian’.1 Vasari was almost certainly referring to the outer folios of the Codex Leicester, then owned by the sculptor Guglielmo della Porta, whom he knew.2 This account was dropped from the second edition in 1568, probably after direct representations by Francesco Melzi, Leonardo’s aristocratic pupil and keeper of his master’s flame. In more recent times, the idea that Leonardo cunningly placed heretical messages in paintings such as the Last Supper and Virgin of the Rocks has become fashionable in some of the more sensationalist literature on Leonardo. The heresies involve seeing Mary Magdalene as Christ’s bride and the mother of his child, and revering St John the Baptist as more important than Christ. Although Dan Brown’s interpretations in the Da Vinci Code have gained little or no traction in the specialist literature on Leonardo or Renaissance art, they have coloured the public view to a notable degree.3
There is nothing in Leonardo’s documented life, in particular his dealings with the commissioners of religious paintings, that speaks of doctrinal conflict. Any arguments that did arise were about slow delivery. He fitted comfortably into the religious institutions of his time. He seems to have resided in the monastery of Santissima Annunziata on his return to Florence in 1500. Under the patronage of Giuliano de’ Medici he lived in the Vatican from 1513 to 1516. And when he drew up his will it was cast in entirely orthodox terms, with its provision for ‘three high masses’ and ‘30 Gregorian low masses’ to be said in three churches in Amboise. He did run into some passing difficulties with his dissections, but he could count on powerful protectors inside and outside the church. Had the full extent of his views on the ancient history of the earth in the Codex Leicester become public knowledge, he could have run into problems, but this did not happen. Leonardo the heretical outsider does not correspond to the Leonardo we can document in his own period.
Above all, if we look at Leonardo’s religious paintings afresh, particularly in the light of the re-appearance of the Salvator Mundi, asking how they work in devotional terms, we will gain a picture of an artist who devoted profound attention to how spiritual dimensions might be expressed through an art that aspired to represent nature in all its glory. We also have a few important statements by Leonardo about human knowledge and the nature of divinity.
An important dimension to Leonardo’s engagement with the divine is his access to sacred texts and those of a broadly religious nature. His booklists provide the most direct testimony to his reading. On two occasions, Leonardo listed books that he owned.4 The earlier, comprising thirty-seven or thirty-eight books and contained in the Codex Atlanticus, seems to date from the early 1490s. The later one is in the second of the two codices in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid and is dateable to 1503–4. The later list specifically records ninety-eight items locked in a chest, with eighteen others held in a box in the monastery of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. This was the monastery in which Leonardo banked his money, and it was in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova that he undertook his best-documented human dissection in the winter of 1507–8.
We do not know what occasioned his making the lists. We cannot assume that either is a complete inventory of the books that Leonardo owned. The listed books were probably those he placed in storage. There are notable absences. It is impossible to think that he did not own any of Dante’s writings, with which he was acquainted in considerable detail, or Alberti’s seminal treatise, On Painting, which is an implicit point of reference in his art theory. Whatever their status, the lists do indicate his possession of a library that was considerable for someone trained as an artist. His claim to be an uomo sanza lettere (a man without letters) was a useful rhetorical stance when he was confronted by learned men, but does not correspond to reality. He was an avid self-educator.
The selection of religious texts is not extensive but includes, most importantly, an Italian Bible, probably the 1490 translation by Niccoló Malermi, a book on the Passion of Christ, another on the Temptation, and an Italian collection of Psalms. He owned a life of St. Ambrose (the patron saint of Milan), and two books by St Augustine, On the City of God and a collection of the saint’s sermons. There are strong traces of Augustine’s ideas in Leonardo’s thought. We also find an anonymous set of sermons, the works of St Bernard of Siena, a book on the Temple of Solomon, a collection of doctrines, and a tract on St Margaret. The list includes the Chronicle of St Isidore of Seville, which contains a succinct outline of world history from Creation to the year 664, a total of over 5,800 years. There are also books by Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages. The list hardly constitutes a theological reference library, but it is not that of an irreligious man and there is no hint of heresy. Additionally, as someone trained in the studio of a major Renaissance artist, he would have acquired a wide-ranging knowledge of religious iconography, including the lives of the saints. It is difficult to think that he did not know or own The Golden Legend, Jacobus da Voragine’s hugely popular compilation of the saints’ activities. And, as a constant point of reference, there was always Dante’s Divina commedia, with its universal treasury of theology, divine revelation, human stories, and the sciences of nature.
The great thrust of Leonardo’s intellectual endeavours was not towards the understanding of theological niceties. His territory was the natural world, exploring it through direct experience of its visible and tangible ‘effects’ and deducing the mathematical ‘causes’ that governed the properties and behaviours of all things. Direct observation was the key: ‘Things in the mind which have not passed through sense are vain and can produce no truth which is not condemned’.5 Our method to obtain knowledge on earth must be founded on the principle that ‘Nature begins with the cause, and ends with the experience; we must follow the opposite course, that is beginning, as I said before, with experience and from this investigate the reason’.6
Leonardo’s remorseless concentration on effect and cause in nature does not mean that he excluded divine agency. Indeed, all the manifold effects and causes were manifestations of divine order, and it was through their understanding that humans could become acquainted with the majesty of God’s creative mind. It was the ineffable God who had designed the universal clockwork of the cosmos and, as the motive power behind the ‘prime mover’, set it in motion: ‘O admirable justice of thine, prime mover; you have not willed that any force should lack the order or quality of its necessary effects’.7 Writing about the wonderful optical device of the human eye, in which he envisaged that all incoming rays passed through a single point, he was moved to rapturous praise:
O marvellous necessity … O mighty process. Here the figures, here the colours, here all the images of the parts of the universe are reduced to a point; and what point is so marvellous? O marvellous, O stupendous necessity. You constrain by your laws all effects to participate in their causes in the briefest possible way. These are miracles … Forms already vanished, infused in so small a space, it can regenerate and reconstitute by its dilation.8
‘Necessity’ was the principle that governed the perfect fittingness of form and function in the observable world. The ‘prime mover’ was the active agent that decreed obedience to natural laws of time, space, and motion. Beyond the observable world lay God’s mind, the essence of which was ineffable—outside the physical constitution of the finite universe and definitively beyond the direct comprehension of the human intellect. This stance corresponded to an important train in mediaeval thought, in which reason and revelation, science and faith, stood in a separate but complimentary relation to each other. Leonardo stands towards the extreme of separation in his unwillingness to confront theological questions, but his advocacy of a form of ‘double truth’ fitted into highly a respectable tradition, which he would have known not least via Albertus Magnus, the doctor universalis of the thirteenth century, whose writings on natural philosophy featured in Leonardo’s library.
On more than one occasion Leonardo explained why the scope of his own intellectual investigations stopped short at the divine. Once he used a nice physical illustration based on the concentric spheres of earth, water, air, and fire: ‘Water percussed by water makes circles around the point of percussion; as over longer distances the voice in the air; and even longer in the fire; and longer still the mind in the universe; but because it [the mind] is finite it does not extend to infinity’.9
He stated on his own behalf that he did not intend ‘to write or give information of those things of which the human mind is incapable and which cannot be proved by an instance of nature’.10 Accordingly, he left matters pertaining to ‘the definition of the soul … to the minds of friars, fathers of the people, who by inspiration possess the secrets. I let be the sacred writings, for they are the supreme truth’.11 He coruscates those who ‘want to encapsulate the mind of God, in which the universe is encompassed, weighing it and mincing it into infinite parts, as if they had to anatomise it’.12
There are also a few fragmentary statements in his notebooks that seem to be sincere expressions of belief: ‘I obey you Lord, firstly for the love I justifiably bear for you; secondarily because you can abbreviate or prolong the lives of men’.13 And, ‘Our body is subordinate to heaven, and heaven to the spirit’.14 There is no indication that such declarations are ironic.
If we turn to Leonardo’s major religious paintings with these points in mind, we can readily see that they are devoted to the explication of the visible world through causes and effects. What is less obvious is that they are also devoted to the evocation of the ineffable, using what is visible to imply the presence of the invisible. The main mechanism he used is what I am calling the ‘calm centre’. To some extent, the calm centre is a commonplace of Italian Renaissance art. In the very many compositions involving the Virgin and her son, she is typically calm and central, expressing her deep degree of spiritual knowingness with stoic resolve in the face of the agonies she is to suffer with the Passion of Christ. Even in the dramatic event of the Annunciation, the Virgin typically reacts with restraint. Leonardo specifically criticised an over-animated Annunciation:
I saw one day an angel who looked, in his act of Annunciation, as if he were to chase Our Lady from her room with movements which displayed as much offensiveness as you might show to your vilest enemy. Our Lady looked as if she would, in desperation, throw herself from a window.15
Which painting did he have in mind? Botticelli’s Annunciation in the Uffizi is unusually vigorous in movement, but it hardly measures up to Leonardo’s strictures. Was it perhaps a live performance by actors?
In the most expressive subject from the life of Christ, the Crucifixion, his extreme suffering is generally rendered in Italian Renaissance art in a decorous manner, and even when Christ features as the Man of Sorrows, the mood is one of pathos rather than agonizing pain. What Leonardo does is to take this commonplace and to endow it with a new emotional cogency—just as he did with other commonplaces of devotional art.
The first clear indication of his revolutionary intent was the great unfinished panel painting of the Adoration of the Magi in 1480–1, undertaken shortly before he left Florence for Milan.16 The ostensibly simple subject of the three wise men’s visit to the manger at Bethlehem had been developed by Florentine artists into a subject of processional pageantry befitting three kings, in keeping with the actual street processions organized in the city on the day of Epiphany by the prestigious Compagnia dei Magi, a lay confraternity based in San Marco.17 The Compagnia was much favoured by the Medici, and Cosimo’s private chapel in the Palazzo Medici was frescoed with a sumptuous procession of the Magi by Benozzo Gozzoli. The exemplary panel painting was the great tondo by Fra Angelico (finished by Filippo Lippi) owned by the Medici, perhaps commissioned for the birth of Giuliano in 1453. It was once in the Cook Collection with the Salvator (Fig. 2.1). The three lonely travellers of the Bible are now accompanied by a colourful throng of followers who react with quiet reverence and occasional surprise. The ruined architecture signals the birth of the new order from the old, also signalled by the semi-naked ‘natives’ in the background who are more overtly disconcerted by the turn of events.
Fig. 2.1Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, Adoration of the Magi, Washington, National Gallery.
Leonardo’s Adoration (Fig. 2.2) is clearly inspired by Fra Angelico’s beautiful painting, but transforms its celebratory mood. Apart from St Joseph, portrayed unflatteringly asleep in the group to the left of the Virgin, and the two interlocutors at the lateral margins of the composition, all the participants react with urgent emotional intensity to the advent of the infant Messiah. Set in a shadowy arc of turbulent motion, the witnesses express uncomfortable awe. The reactions range from hollow-cheeked torment to youthful incomprehension. The bald man in the group to the right of the Virgin shares the spiritual angst of the unfinished St Jerome, in which the saint beats his breast with a rock to purge his pagan tendencies. The background of the Adoration, with its fragmentary architecture peopled by agitated men, women, and beasts, continues this theme of emotional disruption. This leaves the Virgin and the blessing Jesus alone as the undisturbed centre at the apex of a stable and light-toned pyramid. There is just a hint of a restrained smile as she watches her son reaching out to grasp the finial of the chalice containing the king’s gift. There is no evidence at this early stage that Leonardo has formulated his ideas about the limits of human knowledge, but the picture testifies that he has found a new way to characterize the spiritual otherness of the Virgin and Child within a scene of diverse worldly activities. The baby’s gesture of blessing exudes the calm tone of spiritual reassurance that was to become central in the Salvator.
Fig. 2.2Adoration of the Magi, Florence, Uffizi.
In his later Madonnas Leonardo infallibly retained the knowing calmness of the Virgin, even in the face of premonitions of her son’s eventual sacrifice. In the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, Christ’s clear-eyed and active embrace of the cruciform distaff is accompanied by the Virgin’s quiet acquiescence. Her hovering hand, first seen in the Virgin of the Rocks, here signals reluctant awareness rather intervention. By the time of the Louvre painting of the Virgin, Child, St Anne and a Lamb (Fig. 2.3), Leonardo had cultivated the restrained smile that he reserved for those who know the secrets.18 Is it possible that the reactions of the older and younger women are subtly differentiated? There is perhaps something lighter about the Virgin’s smile as she disengages Jesus from his play with the lamb. We may sense a comparable differentiation in the heads of the Virgin and St Anne in the Burlington House Cartoon (Fig. 2.4), in which the Virgin’s innocent pleasure is complimented by a special kind of internalized knowingness in the face of St Anne. This differentiation was certainly sensed by the Bolognese poet and adventurer Girolamo Casio, writing about Leonardo’s composition,
Fig. 2.3Virgin, Child, St Anne and a Lamb, Paris, Louvre.
Fig. 2.4The Virgin, Child and St Anne, detail from ‘The Burlington House Cartoon’, London, National Gallery.
Of the immaculate Lamb, he would seize and cries
To make himself a sacrifice for the world.
His mother restrains him for she does not wish
To see her son’s destruction and her own.
St. Anne, as one who knew
That Jesus was clad in our human veil
To cancel the sin of Adam and Eve,
Instructs her daughter with pious zeal,
Drawing her back from light thought,
That his immolation is ordained by Heaven. 19
The perceptive poem by Casio, whose stylish portrait we will encounter later (Plate 15 and Fig. 9.2), shows that astute contemporaries were well aware that Leonardo was inviting the viewer to contemplate the spiritual motivations of the participants in his religious narratives. When the head of the Carmelites in Florence was reporting to Isabella d’Este in 1501, he was similarly alert to the narrative roles of St Anne and the Virgin. Pietro da Novellara informed the marchioness that,
Since he came to Florence he has done the drawing of a cartoon. He is portraying a Christ Child of about a year old who is almost slipping out of his Mother’s arms to take hold of a lamb, which he then appears to embrace. His Mother, half rising from the lap of St Anne takes hold of the Child to separate him from the lamb (a sacrificial animal) signifying the Passion. St. Anne, rising slightly from her seated position, appears to want to restrain her daughter from separating the Child from the lamb. She is perhaps intended to represent the Church, which would not have the Passion of Christ impeded.
Casio and Fra Pietro were in no doubt that Leonardo was inviting the viewer to bring their own readings to the enigmatically calm centres of his stage-managed dramas.
In the second of Leonardo’s large-scale compositions that ‘signify great things’, the Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan (Fig. 2.5), the role of the calm centre was strikingly consolidated. The spontaneous and unresolved agitation of the figures surrounding the Virgin in the Adoration has been orchestrated with rhetorical care in the astonished disciples who are struggling to absorb Christ’s pronouncements. Their reactions are all thought through, as the surviving drawings confirm. The knife-wielding Peter reacts with characteristic belligerence, while Judas starts back in guilty fear. St James the Greater throws his arms wide, as if signalling the Crucifixion, while the uncomprehending Thomas raises his doubting finger. Each disciple reacts in his own way. The static Christ, his hands outstretched towards the bread and wine that represent his body and blood, is tragically contemplative, his thoughts dwelling in the inner realm of his consciousness of what is to come.
Fig. 2.5The Last Supper, Milan, Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
We do not have a drawing by Leonardo for Christ, but a very beautiful, if battered, drawing in coloured chalks by a close follower gives a better idea than the damaged painting of how Christ’s expression was intended to work (Fig. 2.6). Alone of the participants, with the exception of the traditionally slumbering St John, Christ does not emphatically look at one of his neighbours. His eyes are downcast, almost closed, removing him psychologically from the overtly physical action and reaction of the disciples. The definition of his features is elusive and generalized, tinged by an underlying sadness at his impending betrayal. The contrast between the sharply characterized disciples and Christ did not escape Vasari, who even went as far as to assert that the head of Christ ‘was left unfinished since he did not think it was possible to convey the celestial divinity required for Christ’.20 Looking at what remains of Leonardo’s paint surface, it is better to say that Christ was left formally and emotionally indefinite rather than actually unfinished. His calm centrality is underscored by the framing window with its curved pediment, his pyramidal isolation, and his position at the convergent centre of the assertive perspective. All the other figures overlap each other. Christ alone is physically discrete from the other actors. No one is allowed to transgress his reserved space, even the spatially assertive St James. Christ is in effect alone, as he is to be in his coming sacrifice. Given the separateness of Christ, it does not take too much imagination to think that Leonardo could create a superb image of the Man of Sorrows or the Salvator Mundi.
Fig. 2.6After Leonardo, Head of Christ, Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera.
It was this spiritual motive of the enigmatic centre that Leonardo brought into portraiture after 1500. Before 1500 one of his portraits had smiled a little—the Cecilia Gallerani in Cracow—and one had looked directly at us—the early Ginevra de’ Benci in Washington—but none had done both together. The Mona Lisa broke the mould in a way that we no longer readily recognize as exceptionally daring. For a woman to look directly at us and to tease us with an enigmatic smile is exceptional and transcended the accepted limits of what a portrait could do. It became more than a portrait. It is clear that what began in 1503 as a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo developed into what I have called a ‘universal picture’. One side of the coin of its universality involved Leonardo’s visual sciences—light, shade, anatomy, psychology, the configurations of fluids and fine materials, geology and atmosphere. The other side spoke of the poetry of unrequited love for an ideal woman, the central theme in Italian poetry from the time of Dante.21 Although the tortures of love afflicted the worldly faculties of the lovesick men, the beloved ladies were typically transposed into a heavenly realm that was forever inaccessible. The archetype is Beatrice in the Divine Comedy, whom Dante encountered passingly before her early death. The primary and irresistible agents of love are the lady’s unbearably sweet smile and the unsustainable radiance of her eyes:
The image of her when she starts to smile
breaks out of words, the mind cannot contain it,
a miracle too rich and strange to hold.22
Dante specifically described the two actions of her mouth: ‘the first is her sweet manner of speaking, the second is her miraculous smile. I do not mention how this last act of her mouth works in the hearts of people because the memory is not capable of retaining the image of such a smile nor of its effects’.23
The effects of the lady’s eyes are similarly beyond the endurance of our senses:
From out her eyes, wherever they may move
come spirits that are all aflame with Love;
they pierce the eyes of any one that looks
and pass straight through till each one finds the heart;
upon her face you see depicted Love
there where none dares to hold his gaze too long.24
When Petrarch wrote of Simone Martini’s portrait of his beloved Laura, he underlined the heavenly and otherworldly dimensions of the subject, the image, and the artist:
For certain my friend Simone was in Heaven,
the place from which this gracious lady comes;
he saw her there and copied her on a page
as proof down here of such a lovely face.
The work is one that only up in Heaven
could be imagined, not down here with us
where body serves as veil for souls to wear …25
Leonardo is an artist of veils. Petrarch’s poetry was in in his library.
Although love poetry is ostensibly a secular genre, it frequently adopted a quasi-religious tone. The idealized beloved becomes heavenly. It is this character that Leonardo brilliantly emulates in his Mona Lisa. He would claim in his paragone (comparison of the arts) that what the poets had been able to accomplish with words, he would surpass in his art, using the nobler and more vivid sense of sight.
The painter … can place in front of the lover the true likeness of that which is beloved, often making him kiss it and speak to it. This would never happen with the same beauties set before him by the writer. So much greater is the power of a painting over a man’s mind that he may be enchanted and enraptured by a painting that does not represent any living woman. It previously happened to me that I made a picture representing a holy subject, which was bought by someone who loved it and who wished to remove the attributes of its divinity in order that he might kiss it without guilt. But finally his conscience overcame his sighs and lust, and he was forced to banish it from his house. Now, poet, attempt to describe a beauty, without basing your depiction on an actual person, and arouse men to such desires with it.26
The story of the infatuated owner is likely to be part of the stagey rhetoric of the paragone, but it does conveniently illustrate the potential crossover of the various dimensions of divine love in secular and religious subjects.
What we cannot tell is whether the smiling lady with devastating eyes originated with Leonardo’s secular portraiture or his portrayal of holy women. The smiling St Annes and Virgins in his surviving drawings are not securely datable to before 1503. Whichever came first, Lisa and the holy women smile in a way that relates to us teasingly, since they intimately know secrets at which we can only guess.
The most blatant of the spiritual smiles and direct glances are those accorded to Saint John the Baptist (Plate 9), which is as concentrated an image as the Salvator Mundi and testifies to how deeply engrossing a single figure can become. It is all calm centre, with a dark void at its periphery. It was probably the last of the paintings he began, if not the last to be finished. The right way to approach it is to confront it unequivocally as a religious image. It is suffused with spiritual knowingness to an unsettling degree. The youthful prophet is prophesying. He is telling us of the advent from the heavens above of the very Son of God. Christ was incarnated in a virgin’s immaculate womb in such a way that he was to be in this world but not of this world. We will look further at Leonardo’s notion of the incarnated spirit when we study the iconography of the Salvator Mundi.
Christ’s destiny on earth was to be sacrificed to redeem our sins, brutally crucified—as St John’s reed cross prophesizes. The saint is made manifest in the divine light that transcends the darkness of the void, reflecting God’s primordial separation of light and darkness in Genesis: ‘And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness’. The separation is also between the Old and the New Testaments, between the era before Christ and the Anno Domini, between the era sub lege (subject to Moses’s law) and sub gratia (subject to Jesus’s grace).
Like St Anne in the London cartoon, St John’s deep delight in spiritual bliss is made apparent to us but the nature of that bliss lies beyond our earth-bound comprehension. This paradox is the fruit of Leonardo’s remarkable technique. The soft modelling in light and shade promises the definition of form, but the harder we look the more we are at a loss to define the precise contours and plasticity of the saint’s face. His eyes are darkly veiled but emit a subdued radiance (Fig. 2.7). The emotional tenor is akin to Dante’s worship of Beatrice; in both the love is that of the elusive divine. We know that the even stronger radiance of eyes of the Salvator was achieved by painting extremely thinly on a light priming in a very remarkable way.
Fig. 2.7Saint John the Baptist, Paris, Louvre, detail.
The dark, impenetrable background plays a key role in the St John and in a cluster of small-scale devotional paintings that originate in Leonardo’s circle. Examples are the Christ by Salaì (Fig. 2.8) and the Young Crist as Salvator Mundi in Nancy (Fig. 2.9).27 Not only does Leonardo exploit the background to set off the supernatural spotlight that falls on the saint, he also uses it to evoke the blackness of the fathomless void beyond the visible cosmos. It plays a similar role to the gold backgrounds in traditional icons, but any resort to extensive gilding was largely ruled out for Renaissance painters within their framework of naturalism. The Salvator was probably Leonardo’s first devotional painting to exploit the black void as a signal of the ineffable.
Fig. 2.8Salaì (Giovanni Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno), Christ, 1511, Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.
Fig. 2.9Follower of Leonardo, The Young Christ as Salvator Mundi, Musée des Beaux Arts, Nancy.
The Salvator Mundi stands integrally within Leonardo’s small but decisive sequence of spiritual pictures. It is the overtly religious counterpart to the Mona Lisa and stands as the implicit presence behind the Saint John. However, compared to his counterparts, the unsmiling Salvator is more spiritually commanding and less benign, challenging us to follow him as ‘the way, the truth, and the life’. The calm centre now carries with it a certain absoluteness.