There
are two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks, one (the earlier) in the
Louvre, Paris and another in the National Gallery, London. The first
work that Leonardo executed in Milan is the so-called Virgin of the
Rocks, which actually expresses the theme of the Immaculate Conception,
the dogma that affirms Christ was conceived without original sin on
Mary's part. This canvas was to decorate the ancona (a carved wooden
altar with frames where paintings were inserted) in the chapel of the
Immacolata in the church of San Francesco Grande in Milan.
On 25
April 1483, the members of the Confraternity of the Conception assigned
the work of the paintings (a Virgin and Child in the center and two
Angel-Musicians for the sides), to Leonardo, for the most important
part, and the brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista De Predis, for the side
panels. Scholars now feel that the two canvases on this same subject,
one in the Louvre and the other in London's National Gallery, are simply
two versions of the same painting, with significant variants. The Paris
Virgin of the Rocks, entirely by Leonardo, is the one which first adorned
the altar in San Francesco Grande.
It may
have been given by Leonardo himself to King Louis XII of France, in
gratitude for the settlement of the suit between the painters and those
who commissioned the works, in dispute over the question of payment.
The later London painting replaced this one in the ancona. For the first
time Leonardo could achieve in painting that intellectual program of
fusion between human forms and nature which was slowly taking shape
in his view of his art. Here there are no thrones or architectural structures
to afford a spatial frame for the figures; instead there are the rocks
of a grotto, reflected in limpid waters, decorated by leaves of various
kinds from different plants while in the distance, as if emerging from
a mist composed of very fine droplets and filtered by the golden sunlight,
the peaks of those mountains we now know so well reappear.
This same
light reveals the gentle, mild features of the Madonna, the angel's
smiling face, the plump, pink flesh of the two putti. For this work,
too, Leonardo made numerous studies, and the figurative expression is
slowly adapted to the program of depiction. In fact, the drawing of
the face of the angel is, in the sketch, clearly feminine, with a fascination
that has nothing ambiguous about it. In the painting, the sex is not
defined, and the angel could easily be either a youth or a maiden.
Leonardo 3000