Patrick Bade
The High Renaissance: Leonardo Da Vinci

Patrick Bade - The High Renaissance: Leonardo Da Vinci

- So we’ve arrived at the High Renaissance. This is a relatively short period, beginning around 1490 and ending around 1520. But it’s one of the high points in Western art. It’s a moment of harmony and equilibrium. And some of the greatest masterpieces in the Western tradition were produced in this short period. And I’m showing you perhaps the most representative building of the High Renaissance. This is the Tempietto by Bramante. Donato Bramante. It dates from around 1502. And it’s somehow, it’s in the Vatican. It’s erected over what’s believed to be the tomb of Saint Peter. And as I’ve said, it’s a perfect symbol of harmony, rationality, civilization. So it comes as a bit of a shock to know that it was commissioned and paid for by Isabella of Castile, who in her life, of course, didn’t represent any of those qualities. She’s the woman who drove Jews, Muslims out of Spain. She was very much a religious fanatic. Now, the three giants of the High Renaissance that I’m going to be looking at over the next three lectures are Leonardo da Vinci, he’s born 1452, Michelangelo Buonarroti, born 1475, and Raffaello Sanzio, born 1483. And these artists achieved a fame and a respect that no artists had had since Apelles, the time of Alexander the Great. We saw already in the 15th century, that the prestige of artists was increasing. That we know their names, we know what they look like, we know details of their lives.

But we know far more about these three. And Leonard, this is a 19th century painting of the death of Leonardo. According to Vasari, he was highly honoured and cherished by King Francis I of France. And Francis I is said to have held Leonardo in his arms when he died in 1519. This, of course, is the most famous painting in the world, the “Mona Lisa.” It’s very hard to get to see. You have to queue up and fight your way, and it’s behind bulletproof glass and behind barriers. And it’s a difficult paint. It’s so famous, it’s so overfamiliar that it is actually, I think, simply difficult to see and appreciate. This, it has, I think, still that has the record for the most expensive painting ever sold at auction. It was sold at Christie’s 2017 for $450 million. Ironically, it wasn’t sold in a sale of all master paintings. It was sold in a sale of postwar and contemporary art. And it’s at Christie’s, I’m quite surprised that they didn’t see the irony of this, because many people believe this painting is largely a contemporary painting. Even if there are traces of Leonardo’s original painting. Actually, what you’re looking at is largely the work of restorers. So the Saudi prince who laid out $450 million has actually paid for something that is effectively a modern fake. Now, Leonardo is the ultimate example of innovative commerce. The Renaissance man, of course, he was a great painter. He was a great thinker. He was a great scientist. He was a great inventor. When he was young, he was apparently very beautiful. He was a wonderful horseman. He was a wonderful musician. He was a man with everything. This is believed to be his self-portrait right at the end of his life.

As I said, he was way ahead of his time. We know that he dissected human bodies. He knew more about how human beings are put together and the inner workings of their bodies than anybody of his time indeed, for centuries ahead. He was fascinated in every aspect of the natural world, of whether it’s animal, vegetable, or mineral, these wonderfully exact and precise studies of plants. He, through his dissections of human bodies, he understood circulatory system of the body. He knew the blood circulates around the body. And this was more than a hundred years ahead of the man who’s supposed to have discovered this, English Dr. William Harvey. And as I said, he was fascinated by every aspect of the natural world. He went up exploring in the Dolomites, in the Alps, and he studied the rocks there. And he noticed, and in this little drawing left, that there were fossils of sea life. So he knew that, at one time, the rocks, these rocks in the mountains had actually been under the sea. And he was a great inventor. Some of his drawings have a slight Heath Robinson aspect. I don’t know if my non-British listeners will understand that. Look up Heath Robinson. He’s famous for his incredibly, his very witty drawings of incredibly complicated inventions. But so, Leonardo da Vinci is credited with the invention of the tank. He certainly understood the principles of the tank. And the various museums around the world have attempted to construct machines from his drawings. I don’t think many of them were actually attempted during his lifetime.

So you can see that he also understood the principle of the helicopter. You could say he invented the idea of a helicopter, something that would fly, a whirling thing that would fly. He also understood the principle of parachutes, as you can see from this drawing on the right-hand side. And he was very fascinated at this age-old obsession of mankind with flight. And he designed various machines that I think probably wouldn’t have worked to enable men to fly. Now, all of this, and he’s certainly one of the greatest artists, one of the greatest painters who ever lived. And yet, we only have less than 25 paintings by him. Many of these are unfinished. And so it’s something of an added mystery that we have two finished versions of this painting, the “Madonna of the Rocks” Art historians still argue about the chronology of these paintings. Stylistically, I think it’s pretty obvious to anybody who’s at all interested in the visual arts that the left painting, which is the one in the Louvre, is the earlier of the two paintings, and was the one that was originally commissioned by a monastery in Milan in the early 1480s. The one on the right-hand side, which is the National Gallery picture, represents a later phase in Leonardo’s style from the beginning of the 16th century, first decade of the 16th century. But so the mystery is that the one on the right was the one that was actually delivered to the church, Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, but was, and so there was some kind of skullduggery going on. I mean, it was a very long process, and the monks had to eventually sue Leonardo to get the painting out of him. So very probably he had actually finished off the painting on the left and secretly sold it to somebody else. So these two paintings, most historians think that the one on the left is entirely by the hand of Leonardo da Vinci as Germans would say, or autograph.

And the one on the right is actually only partly by him and partly carried out by assistants and pupils under his supervision. Here is a detail of the beautiful angel. I’m going to go back to this for a moment. Then the one, the painting in the National Gallery has been cleaned quite recently. The one in the Louvre, they haven’t dared. The Louvre has a much more conservative policy towards cleaning paintings. And so far, I mean, I do hope I live long enough to see either the painting cleaned or some technology to allow us how it would look if all the many layers of discoloured varnish were removed. Even under this, this thick gunge, brown gunge of varnish over the painting, we can see that it was originally a much more brightly coloured painting with strong reds and greens, as well as blue and yellow in the painting. Now, this is the face of the angel from the London version with, as you can see, it’s the most incredibly delicate, and subtle, and beautiful modelling of the forms. Every year, I refer to this, in my 34 years at Christie’s education, my first painting classes were always on the painting. It was at the National Gallery, I’d take my students. One of the first things I got them to do was to look at these two heads very carefully, Virgin on left-hand side, and the angel on the right-hand side. And I used to say to them, “Now this is a real test of your eye.

I want you to tell me which of these two heads you think is by the hand of Leonardo da Vinci, and which is painted by his assistants under his supervision.” And I would say, even though, I mean the obvious choice would be for the Virgin, she’s the most important figure in this picture. But nine times out of 10, students would get it right. They would say yes, it’s the face of the angel, which is more delicately and more subtly modelled than that of the Virgin. Now, Leonardo is the artist who leads us into the high reformation. He’s the oldest of these three artists. And it’s in Leonardo’s work that we see the three characteristics that differentiate the High Renaissance from the Early Renaissance. I’ve got a Fra Angelico, very typical Early Renaissance painting on the left-hand side. And that the three terms for these three qualities, the three Italian terms are chiaroscuro, sfumato, and contrapposto. So I’m going to exchange, oh, I didn’t put the terms on your, the list that I sent you today. I should have done that. There. No, they’re not. Anyway, chiaroscuro, it’s spelled C-H-I-A-R-O-S-C-U-R-O. Chiaroscuro, you can look it up on the Internet. It just means, in Italian it just means light and dark. But as far as Leonardo’s concerned, it means the introduction of black into shadows. If you look at the Fra Angelico, there’s no black in that painting at all. It’s just the pure colours. And so the advantage of introducing black into shadows is that you can have a much more consistent range of modelling from light to dark. It’s much easier to make things look three-dimensional. The disadvantages, of course, you’d lose some of the decorative gorgeousness of the colour. There’s that wonderful lapis blue you made from lapis lazuli that you have.

The Fra Angelico is colour stipply, of course, much more gorgeous, much more decorative, much more pleasing to the eye. Contrapposto, which is spelt with two Ps. Contra, post, double P, posto. It’s a twist in the body, which we see both in the Christ Child blessing John the Baptist. Christ Child in the middle on the foreground and in the angel. So this twisting of the body is something, it becomes very characteristic of the High Renaissance. It’s particularly taken up by Michelangelo. And it’s taken to excess in the Mannerist period, the Late Renaissance period that I’m going to be talking about with you in a couple of weeks time. Now, sfumato means smokiness. And I mentioned last time, if you stand in front of a Botticelli, the face of Botticelli’s Venus on the right-hand side, and you put your head down, you get the light reflecting off the surface, you’ll see that all the contours are actually, they’re very definite. They’re really clearly drawn, and they’re even incised into the surface of the panel. Now, Leonardo realised that this is actually very artificial. You know, even if you have perfect eyesight, the atmosphere, air modifies what you see. And especially at a distance.

There’s a slight blurring of the contours. And it’s this blurring which Leonardo introduces and is taken up by many artists very quickly, it’s called sfumato. Leonardo on the left, Boticelli on the right. Now, we know that he was the illegitimate son of a lawyer and a peasant woman, but his father seems to have taken care of him. We don’t have much detail about his background and childhood. But he certainly was in Florence. and he seems to have entered the studio of Andrea Verrocchio at the age of about 14. This is Verrocchio’s most famous painting. It’s the “Baptism,” and it dates from 1475. And we know from what Vasari tells us and what our eyes tell us, that the angel on the left-hand side is by Leonardo. And so by this time, ‘cause Leonardo, he’s in his early 20s, so he’s presumably an assistant rather than just a humble studio assistant or pupil of Verrocchio. This is a detail, not very good colour, I’m afraid, but anyway, showing the face by Leonardo next to a face by Verrocchio. We see a difference. We see a difference in facial type, and we see a difference in style. And Vasari, according to Vasari, who usually, there’s a core of truth in what Vasari says, even if he dresses up in a rather fanciful anecdote. And Vasari said that when Verrocchio saw this face that Leonardo painted, he was so stunned by its beauty that he gave up painting and concentrated on sculpture from then onwards. This is not strictly true 'cause there are latter paintings by him, but I think there’s probably a core of truth in the story. And Kenneth Clark in “Civilization” makes a nice comment about this picture. He says he feels that the Verrocchio angel is just looking in total astonishment at this wonderful creature that seems to have come down from another world.

This is a sculpture by Verrocchio. And I think most remarkable feature, it’s a story of doubting Thomas. Thomas who doesn’t believe that Christ has come back from the dead, and Christ invites him to touch the open wound where his side was pierced by the spear. The most striking feature of this sculpture really is this very volumetric drapery. And that is certainly a feature of Leonardo’s early work. This is Verrocchio in the middle. And here are drapery studies. Drapery was something that the Renaissance artists were very keen on. If you remember the week before last, I talked about Masaccio. I said, he’s the first artist who depicted the Virgin, where you really sense that she has a body and knees underneath the surface of her clothing. This is one of the earliest surviving paintings by Leonardo, apart from his contribution to the “Baptism.” It’s in Munich, in the Alte Pinakothek. And I hope to have the pleasure of actually showing this painting to some of you at some point in 2022. Oops, no.

So it is still, I would say, very close in style to Verrocchio. Here’s a Verrocchio, Madonna on the left, Leonardo on the right, and do little compare and contrast. You can see that the basic idea comes from Verrocchio, but you can also see the progress that Leonardo has made. The greater softness, the sfumato, and this wonderfully atmospheric Dolomitic alpine landscape in the background that anticipates the background of the “Mona Lisa.” This painting is known as the “Madonna of the Carnation,” the red carnation, of course, is a symbol of the Passion of Christ. And here is a detail of the carnation. And here you can see better this misty alpine landscape in the background. Now, in these early years in Florence, he’s very preoccupied with the theme of the Virgin and Child. And so he wants to make a composition which is satisfying and harmonious. So you find very often these Madonna and Child there within a geometrical form, usually a pyramidal form. But he’s introducing a far gracer element of naturalism.

Let’s go back for a minute to, right. I was just saying that the stiffness of the Fra Angelico compared to, yes, and the naturalness, you know, the interaction between the Virgin and her baby, and the lovely touch of the little baby playing with the cat, these very spontaneous pen and ink drawings. This is, you can see, is another early Madonna from the same period in the early 1480s, this one in the Hermitage. And his most ambitious work in Florence, like so many of his works remain unfinished, this is the “Adoration of the Magi.” And he abandoned this picture, very elaborate picture, in 1481 when he left Florence to work in Milan. Here is an elaborate compositional drawing. You can see that like the Quattrocento artists I talked about in the last two weeks, he’s still very interested in problems of perspective. You have this very agitated composition, multi-figured composition. This is a painting by a contemporary artist who I admire very much called Paul Storey who’s absolutely obsessed by the “Adoration of the Magi” by Leonard da Vinci. It’s, I think, a lifelong influence on his work with again, these agitated, multi-figured compositions with strong architectural elements and an interest in Renaissance-type perspective. So this is Milan. And Milan was a very powerful state in Italy, more powerful militarily than Florence. And it was ruled by the Sforza family. And this is the huge Castello Sforzesco, Sforzesco, can’t say the word, in Milan.

And this is who Leonardo worked for. He worked for Duke of Milan, Ludovico il Moro. You see him. This is not by Leonardo, it’s by a local Milanese artist. There is Ludovico on the left. And his wife, she looks a bit grim here. This is Beatrice d'Este, but actually she was the it girl, the party girl of the Renaissance. She was very pretty and she liked having a good time, and she put on lots of parties and festivities in Milan. So Ludovico il Moro was a ruthless character like so many of these, I think you’ve been hearing about, or, no, you are going to hear about Machiavelli, and you’ve heard a bit, think about the Borgias. So, you know, it was a tough game in Italy in the Renaisssance. And he was one of the toughest, he was, when Leonardo arrived, he was regent of Milan because the heir to the dukedom was just a child. But the child died under mysterious circumstances in 1494, probably murdered on the orders of Ludovico il Moro. So Leonardo was employed in lots of different capacities, and particularly as a military engineer. And we have these amazing drawings of brilliant military inventions of this giant crossbow. I don’t think this was ever constructed. And all sorts of fiendish, again, Heath Robinson-ish devices for, you know, siege engines and colossal cannons, and so on. Some of them have been constructed in modern times, and they do seem to work. So it was Ludovico il Moro who commissioned from Leonardo the other most famous of his works, which is “The Last Supper” in Milan in the refractory in the church next to the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. And this is without doubt, one of the most famous images ever created by a Western artist and one of the most influential. So people going to Milan, of course, this is one of the must-sees when you go to Milan, it’s actually difficult to get into, even pre-Covid.

It was always a bit of a problem to book tickets. And you’d have to go through all sorts of, you know, like airport security to get in. And it’s only a certain number of people are allowed in at a time. So it’s a kind of awesome experience to go and see it. But I have to say in some ways it’s also a disappointment because you are not really seeing very much of Leonardo’s work. It’s really a stain on the wall that has been endlessly restored and cleaned. So who knows how much of… You’re seeing Leonardo’s concept rather than his work. Now, he was a very restless experimenter, and he tried all sorts of new, experimental techniques for painting on a wall. He wasn’t satisfied with the traditional technique of fresco. He wanted, which he, you know, tends to look around pale, and pallid, and rather flat. And his experiments backfired, and the painting started to disintegrate already in the early, before it was even finished during his lifetime. This is what it looks like now after its latest cleanings and restoration. You’ll probably get a better idea. There are a couple of very early full-sized copies made by pupils of Leonardo. There’s one in the Royal Academy in London. They give you a better idea, I think, of the original colour. The other very intriguing large scale decorative painting in Milan that survives again in a very parlour state is the Sala delle Asse in the Castello Sforzesco.

And that is also, well, that is undergoing more or less permanent ongoing restoration. Now, Leonardo, as well as “Mona Lisa,” is a very great and a very influential portraitist. This extremely beautiful painting, it’s unfinished again. We don’t know who the sitter is. It’s always referred to as a “Portrait of a Musician.” This is, I can’t remember, it’s the Ambrosiana I think it’s, or the Brera. I think it’s the Ambrosiana in Milan. So this format, the half-length or bust-length, three-quarter view, was actually invented in Flanders. I’m going to talk about that in a couple of weeks time when I get to early Flemish painting. And it was introduced to Italy, a rather complicated way via Sicily. This is a painting by Antonello da Messina on the right-hand side, who, as his name suggests, was a Sicilian artist that he trained in Naples with a Flemish artist. So he picked up the oil technique from the Flemish artist. And also this format. Previously, most Italian portraits in the Quattrocento are profile or frontal. So while in Milan, Leonardo painted other portraits. This one, it’s in the Louvre. And it’s traditionally known as “La Belle Ferronniere.” We don’t know for sure who she is. Some people now think it actually might be Beatrice d'Este, the duchess. More people think it’s the duke’s mistress, Lucrezia Crivelli, extremely beautiful painting, less celebrated, I suppose, than the “Mona Lisa,” but just as beautiful.

And, of course, there’s this other, a painting believed to be of another mistress of the duke, Cecilia Gallerani, the woman with the ferret, which is in Krakow in Poland. This is a portrait on the right-hand side that is known to be of Beatrice d'Este by a Leonardo pupil called Ambrogio de Predis. So it’s up to you really to think whether this could be the same woman, if there is sufficient likeness between the two portraits. I think it’s possible. And oh, here’s another portrait of Beatrice d'Este, who died sadly very young, in childbirth. This is a portrait that Leonardo made of her sister, Isabella d'Este, who is the, marriage into the Gonzaga family. And she became Duchess of Mantua. And there’s extensive correspondence from her between her and Leonardo. She was desperate to get paintings by Leonardo. And he really played hard to get. I mean, it’s quite interesting. It’s an interesting moment in a changing relationship between the patron and the artist. In this correspondence, she is definitely one who’s, you know, begging him for work. And he’s playing hard to get, which shows, I think, a change in the status of the artist. She wanted, of course, she wanted an oil portrait.

She wanted a painted portrait. She never got it. This, she instead, much later on, she was painted. She commissioned this portrait on the right-hand side by Titian. But in fact, it was too late. Whatever beauty she had, she’d certainly lost it by then. She was in her 60s when this portrait was painted. And it was actually the second version. Because the first version, which you see a copy of, the original first version doesn’t survive, but this is a copy of Titian’s first attempt to paint Isabella d'Este. And unsurprisingly, she wasn’t thrilled with it. And she told him to go back to his studio and paint her as she looked 40 years earlier. So, and there is so many intriguing mysteries connected with Leonard da Vinci. And one that has been, it’s very, very much in the press, in the news in recent years is, what happened to the mural that he painted in this room? It’s the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence. So, Milan fell to the French. Oh, I should really tell you that story.

I should have told you, in connection with Ludovico il Moro, he was eventually undone by his ambitiousness and his own ruthlessness in 1495. Because of his rivalry with the papacy and Naples, he invited the French army into Italy. And that was actually a disastrous decision that he came to regret because it set a whole series of very destructive wars in Italy. And eventually, the French actually took his dukedom from him and imprisoned him. So Leonardo had lost his patron at the end of the 1490s, and he goes back to Florence, and he’s in Florence for a decade. And while there, of course, there there’s a new kid on the block, there’s a new star, and that is Michelangelo. And so, obviously, there’s an intense rivalry between them. I mean, Italians love this kind of thing. You know, pitting artists against… There are so many stories in the Renaissance and later in the Baroque period of artistic rivalries. And in a good-natured way, of course, we’ve seen in modern times with The Three Tenors. But in the Renaissance, it often wasn’t actually very good-natured at all. And so people, everybody wanted to pit Leonardo against Michelangelo. And both were commissioned to paint big battle scenes in this hall. And Leonardo actually started his mural, “The Battle of Anghiari” and actually got quite far with it. Michelangelo only got as far as making lots of preliminary drawings. He never actually executed a mural. We know what it looked like because, more or less, because we had this drawing actually by Rubens made after a lost drawing, after the lost original.

So what happened to it? Well, again, Leonardo got bogged down in technical experiments, and had problems with it, and failed to finish it. And the Duke of Tuscany, de’ Medici, Duke of Tuscany ordered Vasari, of all people, to paint over it. So the big mystery, well, lots of people said, “How shocking.” You know, Vasari who honoured the great artists of the Renaissance and immortalised them through his lives, that he would destroy a painting, a masterpiece by Leonardo, but perhaps he didn’t. There are clues in his painting that have been interpreted by some modern historians as really like a secret clues to say that the Leonardo painting still exists. And they’ve made investigations and it’s known that there’s a gap between the wall on which Vasari’s mural is painted, and there’s a wall behind it with a very small gap. And they’ve drilled through and they found traces of a painting on the wall behind. But this has turned into a real drama with different academics, really, you know, fighting with one another and insulting one another, and saying, you know, some people obviously wanting to find out, want to find out more about what’s going on behind this wall. It’s perfectly possible that Leonardo’s mural still exists. But how do we get to it without destroying the Vasari mural in front of it?

Anyway, it’s like “The Last Supper.” It’s a composition that has been endlessly imitated, this big tangle of fighting men and horses. So as I said, Rubens made this copy of a lost copy. And the composition haunted Rubens for the rest of his life. Whenever he had to paint a battle scene or a lion hunt, I think it was always in the back of his mind, this circular, whirling group of horses and figures. This is a Rubens’s “Lion Hunt.” And on into the 19th century, this is a Delacroix “Lion Hunt,” who’s looking back to Rubens. It’s fascinating in Western art, how you get these chains of influence, one artist influence another who influences another over a period of centuries. We had drawings, wonderful drawings for “The Battle of Anghiari.” This is a study for one of the fighting figures by Leonardo. Now, while in Florence, in the first decade of the 16th century, he was very preoccupied with this subject, which is the Virgin and Christ Child. Virgin, somewhat uncomfortably sitting on the lap of her mother, Saint Anne. And so this a very complicated composition with rather complicated poses, once again within a pyramidal, pyramidally shaped composition. This painting is again unfinished. It’s in the Louvre. And they, about, oh, it must have been about four years ago when there was a big Leonardo show. No, of course, it was ‘17, it’s 2017. No, no, '19 is the death of Leonardo. Yes, 2019, it was. So they cleaned it. I’m showing you the difference, the painting, pre-cleaning and post-cleaning. You can see how quite vividly the colours have come up.

You can get much better impression again of this wonderful alpine landscape in the background. Here is the, I took this photograph, here is the “Madonna of the Rocks.” They haven’t got, as I said, they haven’t dared to clean that yet. And they haven’t dared to clean the “Mona Lisa.” Actually, there are 16th century accounts of the “Mona Lisa,” which emphasise her rosy cheeks and pink lips. Well, she ain’t got rosy cheeks, pink lips now 'cause she’s under lots and lots of, yeah, layers of yellow varnish. So while working on this picture, Leonardo produced a cartoon. Cartoon is a full-sized preliminary drawing for a painting. And usually, what would happen is that the contours would be pricked. And then you rub charcoal on the back, and the outline of the composition then will be transferred to the panel. Now again, Vasari tells us that Leonardo made a cartoon for this picture, and that it was exhibited in his house in Florence. And that everybody, for three days, everybody in Florence queued up to look at this cartoon, which was considered to be a wonder. Well, that particular cartoon doesn’t survive. But this one, which is in the National Gallery in London, does. And it’s the only full-sized cartoon by Leonardo that survives. You have to imagine, you know, a very large, they didn’t have plate glass. So there was no, a large drawing on a piece of paper can only be stored by rolling it up. Rolling it, unrolling it. Of course, it’s extremely damaging. So we do, we have some cartoons by Michelangelo. There’s one in the British Museum. And there are several surviving by Raphael.

But they’re extremely rare because of their fragility. And this is, it’s such an awesome thing. You know, when you’re next in London, the National Gallery, do go and look at it. And here is a rather more spontaneous pen and ink drawing that seems to be related to it. And there are various other drapery studies again for the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, very beautiful drapery studies. And here is the London cartoons slightly better. And you can see this is a good quality detail, a very fascinating thing. I think one reason why it’s, of course, also unfinished. And I think this, in modern times, we tend to be very fascinated by unfinished works that are not resolved and have ambiguities. These are the, well, one on the left is the final completed painting by Leonardo. It’s of Saint John Baptist. And it’s a very strange painting. I find it quite hard to like really. It’s also in the Louvre. It’s also very dirty. They haven’t cleaned it. But so, what an odd way. It’s really in its way, it’s as odd as Donatello’s little “David” that I showed you earlier. This is a very sexy rather, well, sexually ambiguous. He’s rather androgynous, very beautiful John the Baptist. John the Baptist is usually depicted as rather sort of shaggy, and hairy, and rather masculine. But this particular John the Baptist, as I said, very beautiful, sexually ambiguous young man who seems to be really giving us a rather come-hither look.

The painting on the right-hand side is also in the Louvre of “Bacchus.” And again, there’s something mildly blasphemous about this, I would say. 'Cause this comes from Leonardo’s studio, and it’s thought to be by his pupils or studio assistants that closely related, as you can see. So somehow the back of Leonardo’s mind, he’s associating the Baptist, John the Baptist, with the god of wine and pleasure, which seems a very odd association indeed. Here is a rather better quality detail of this ambiguously smiling face of John the Baptist. Now, Leonardo then goes down to Rome. And once here in Rome, he once again finds himself in competition with, not only with Michelangelo, but with yet another new kid on the block, the somewhat younger Raphael. And he seems to have really wanted to drop out of this competition. And he was in failing health. We know at the end of his life he had a stroke that affected, you can see a loss of precision in his drawings towards the end of his life.

But he is invited to France by King Francis I of France, great Renaissance prince. And he lives in a little manor house that you see top left at Amboise that was actually connected by tunnel to the Francois I castle at Amboise, which is the main picture here. And according to Vasari and other accounts, he was very much an honoured guest of the king, even though he wasn’t painting anymore. And the king valued him for his wisdom and his conversation. But he also, he may, is traditionally said, and it’s possible that he had a hand in the designs for the great castle at Chambord, and particularly this amazing staircase. I can well believe that it comes from the brain, this complex double staircase comes from the brain of Leonardo da Vinci. And I finish once again with this image of Leonardo, honoured guest of the king of France, dying apparently in the arms of the king of France. So I’m going to come to an end here and see what we have in the way of…

Q&A and Comments:

“What is the size of Leonardo’s… Remember surprise of sight of, of Leonardo’s paintings.”

You’re so right actually. If you only know paintings from reproduction, it’s always a shock to see them in reality. Well, actually, there are no paintings by Leonardo that are on an enormous scale. Like obviously the, I don’t how big “The Battle of Anghiari” was. Presumably, it must have been big on a wall in that enormous room in Florence. But the panel paintings of Leonardo are certainly not enormous. I mean, the “Mona Lisa” is life size. You probably saw that from the photograph I showed you with people looking at it. .

“Leonardo gifted like no man before or since.”

I think I would really go with that, you know? Who are the greatest geniuses? The only, well, Shakespeare maybe, Bach. There on a level above pretty well everybody else.

“What only he could have given the world with a good manager?” Are you volunteering?

Q: “Why was he called il Moro?”

A: Do you know, I don’t know that. I’ll have to look. It may have been to do with his looks.

Q: “Was Leonardo?”

A: Yes, he definitely was very much appreciated in his time.

“Leonardo’s letter to Ludovico Sforza, which includes his talents and what he could do for Sforza and the history of his past employment is considered to be the first modern resume.”

That’s very interesting idea. Yes, I have read that. 'Cause the engineering skills would’ve been the biggest attraction for a condottieri like Ludovico. As you said, he did get the job.

Q: “Where the four sculptures by him are located?”

A: There’s been quite a few things by Leonardo that have been recently attributed to him. The horse, there’s a horse, which is a study for the equestrian monument that he was going to make for Ludovico Sforza. I’m not sure where they are now.

Q: “Why all the alpine and dolomite-like backgrounds?”

A: Well, the Dolomites do make a fantastic background. They’re very, and you are right, he’s not the only artist who paints them. 'Cause Durer, who crossed the Alps, he painted alpine landscapes. Altdorfer does wonderful ones. And who else? Of course, a bit later is Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Q: “How could Saint Anne considered the Virgin’s mother as she was Jewish?”

A: The Virgin is Jewish, Jesus is Jewish. Of course, the question is, did Saint Anne, how was a Virgin conceived? So, you know, this, I’ve talked about this before. The whole notion of the Immaculate Conception is that the Virgin herself, not just Jesus, the Virgin herself was conceived without sexual intercourse. But that was a doctrine that was developed in the Late Middle Ages, and actually not adopted as dogma by the Catholic Church, and amazingly till the 19th century.

Q: “What is the pointed finger rule about?”

A: Well, I think it’s point. It’s a symbol, you know, to the , the other side, to heaven. It’s a symbol of mysteries, knowledge that is beyond us.

Thank you for your comment, Robin. “Yes, another, the extended finger, and that’s how I understand it.”

Q: “Can you give us some suggestion about how to discover what an artist is trying to say beyond?”

A: Well, that is iconography. It’s a whole science in itself. And, you know, it’s very, very specialised in different periods. You know, the iconography of the Italian Renaissance, the iconography of Baroque painting, the iconography of Dutch painting, it’s a real science. And there are many art historians who spend their whole lives trying to investigate what paintings mean, what everything symbolises in a painting.

Q: “Was Leonardo homosexual?”

A: I think he was. I think, well, as I said last time, the whole concept of homosexuality didn’t really exist in the Renaissance. But he was certainly arrested and charged with sodomy when he was in Florence. He never married, but that, you know, that’s neither here nor there. And he certainly had, like Caravaggio, he had very intense relations with pupils that we today might interpret it as being homosexual.

“Lately, there’s also been some discussion that 'Mona Lisa’ had more prominent eyebrows originally, possibly. In other paintings by Leonardo of the Virgin female, her figures seemed to have very little indication of eyebrows.”

Certainly, we know that in the Quattrocento, women plucked the hair on their forehead to give themselves a higher forehead. It was thought to be more, you look more intelligent, more refined if you had a high forehead. So I think it’s quite likely that they would’ve plucked the eyebrows as well.

“Lucky enough to see ‘The Last Supper’ and the ‘Mona Lisa’ in 1963.”

Yeah, I must say I sort of absolutely quail at the thought of going to Florence. Actually now would be the best times ‘cause they’re probably relatively few people. But the queues and the crowds with the, and for, you know, for all of these things, Venice, “Last Supper.” The Louvre, I mean it’s annoying to me that the, I wish they would take the “Mona Lisa” and put it somewhere else because it’s in a room with numerous other great masterpieces of the High Renaissance, and, of course, you can’t see anything because of the mob standing in front of the “Mona Lisa.”

“For the last years of his life, he carried around a group of his unfinished paintings.”

I don’t know if we, do we know that he touched them up here and there? Certainly he took them with him to France. And that is, of course, why the Louvre has the largest number of his paintings.

“I’ve never been to Amboise. Lucky you.”

Somebody recommending a book on Leonardo by Walter Isaacson. Huge, huge literature on Leonardo, of course.

Q: Do I think that “Salvator Mundi” is by Leonardo?

A: He may have originally painted it, but I think what you see is mostly not by Leonardo.

Yes, that’s what I thought Hillary is saying. Ludovico was called il Moro because of his swarthy complexion.

Q: “Is it true that he had a beautiful male lover who was his muse?”

A: Who knows? I hope so. I hope so for his sake. It’s no, it’s not. “Ecce Homo” is Christ as the Man of Sorrows. And the painting that sold for 450 million is “Salvator Mundi,” Christ the Saviour of the World. It’s a different iconography with a different meaning. Yeah.

“How much monetary…” You know, who knows really? The monetary value is sort of in a way meaningless, I think with these paintings.

Judith saying, “In his book about Leonardo by Isaacs and he said he painted so little 'cause he would always have done what interests him and not give us more paintings.”

I think that’s very, I think that’s true. He was a man, I can hardly believe he wasn’t Jewish actually. He had that incredibly Jewish quality of curiosity, and, you know, appetite for knowledge and curiosity. I think of it as a particularly Jewish quality. And he had it to an incredible degree, and he was very restless personality as well. Thank you for your kind comments. So why were so many? I think you know, that, is what Judith just said. It’s this restlessness, this, and also I think he was one, I think he had incredible ambition. And I think he, although our paintings, his paintings look so wonderful, so perfect to us, I think he was aiming for something impossible, and that might be another reason why he didn’t finish his paintings.

“Il Moro does not mean Muslim, it mean…”

Well, yes, that’s quite right. Yes, but well, a Moor possibly from Spain. But although, I think probably most people would’ve understood a Moor as being a Muslim.

Q: “Did Leonardo have faith?”

A: I don’t feel that from his, there are certain artists, you look at their work and you think this artist really had faith, and faith is the inspiration of his work. No, I think Leonardo had curiosity rather than faith. I think he was asking questions rather than feeling that the Catholic Church was going to give him all the answers. So my guess is that he didn’t, but that’s just a personal opinion.

Q: “Are there things we should look for in a painting that will tell us the painter’s point of view?”

A: Yes, lots of things. I can’t even begin to talk about it here though. I hope I can bring that up maybe in other lectures.

Q: “What about the Leda? Is it by him?”

A: I think most people believe that there was a version of Leda by him. I did have it in this lecture, but I took it out. You’ll find it in the pictures at the bottom that I took out. It’s believed that the original version by him was also in the French royal collection and was destroyed on the orders of Madame de Maintenon, who was very British and she didn’t like its eroticism. There are a couple of other versions of it, which may be studio pictures that he may have had some involvement with.

Philip still saying he managed to see the “Mona Lisa” 10 days ago in a small group. Well, you must have good connections or you are very well organised.

“The drawing in Parma, it’s such a beautiful thing.” It’s ravishing. Anyway, I’m hoping to do a tour to Parma. I mean they’ve asked me in theory. Kirk have asked me to do a Verdi tour to Parma. And that will, that’s in the museum there, which is full of other wonderful things, Correggio, and Parmigianino, and so on.

“An early form of attention deficit disorder for…” Yeah, maybe. Yes, he’s certainly a restless character.

Q: “How do you think he decided when to use sfumato in painting?”

A: Well, I think it’s partly he used his eyes and he could see that the Quattrocento technique of linearity was an artifice. So he starts to use it in the early 1480s.

Q: “Can one see clearly works that’s unfinished?”

A: Yes, I think you can actually, you can. There are areas which are, you know, are completely unworked on. The queen’s collection, she has 400 drawings. It’s the biggest collection of Leonardo drawings. They were imported to this country by the Earl of Arundel in the 17th century. And nobody knows exactly how they got into the queen’s collection. Somebody opened a drawer in the 18th century, and there they were.

Q: “Was Leonardo a good businessman?”

A: I’m not sure about that. I mean, there is the tricky business, I said, of the, absolutely was, of the first version of the “Madonna of the Rocks.”

Q: “Did Italy ever object to Leonardo’s?”

A: They were a bit late. I don’t think anybody would’ve objected in the 16th century. They wouldn’t have thought of it. It wouldn’t have been till at least the 19th century that, you know, people started worrying about where cultural heroes were buried. And, you know, Weber, Wagner was involved with repatriating Weber’s body from London to Germany. That sort of thing happened in the 19th century. By then it was too late.

Q: “Was he paid for unfinished work?”

A: He was sometimes, they wouldn’t have paid for it knowing it was unfinished. Well, I suppose he could have, perhaps he sold unfinished works to Francis I, I don’t know. But there’s certainly, for instance, you know, he was paid in advance for the “Madonna of the Rocks.” And that’s why the monks were so upset and why they sued him because he didn’t deliver.

And I think, have we got to the end? Yes. I think that’s the end. Thank you again. Thank you for your patience and apologies for my complete ineptness of plugging my plug into the wrong thing. I hope it didn’t cause too annoying an interruption.

And again, I’m off to Glyndebourne again tomorrow with a group. And so I won’t be talking to you on Wednesday. My next talk will be next Sunday, and that will be another great of the High Renaissance, Michelangelo.

So that’s it for today. Thank you. Bye-bye.