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| Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) : Sant'Anna, la Vergine e il Bambino con l'agnellino / Sant'Anna Metterza / La Vierge, l'Enfant Jésus et sainte Anne / Sainte Anne en tierce / Sainte Anne trinitaire / Anna selbdritt / Pyhä Anna kolmantena / Anna själv tredje. 1499–1517 (unfinished). Oil on poplar wood. 168 x 130 cm. Leonardo painted and exhibited for the Church of Santissima Annunziata in Florence and took the painting or a copy with him to France. It remained a work-in-progress. Original owner after the painter's death: King Francis I of France. Le Musée de Louvre. High Renaissance (1494–1527). A controversial restoration took place in 2011 and looks very different. This is a photo of the painting before 2011: itself retouched, digitally altered with increased brightness and contrast for better viewing on screens. Originally C2RMF: Galerie de tableaux en très haute définition. Public Domain. Photo and data: Wikipedia. |
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| Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) (contested): Salvator mundi. Reproduction of the painting after restoration by Dianne Dwyer Modestini, a research professor at New York University. 1500. Oil on walnut wood. 65.6 x 45.4 cm. Louvre Abu Dhabi. Public Domain. High Renaissance (1494–1527). Photo and data: Wikipedia. |
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| Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) : Ritratto di Monna Lisa del Giocondo / La Joconde / Mona Lisa. 1502–1517 (unfinished). Oil on poplar wood. 77 x 53 cm. Subject: Lisa del Giocondo (Lisa Gherardini, 1479–1542). Painted in Florence. Original owner: King Francis I of France. Le Musée de Louvre. Photo: from cropped and relevelled C2RMF.jpg retouched. Originally C2RMF: Galerie de tableaux en très haute définition. Public Domain. High Renaissance (1494–1527). Photo and data: Wikipedia. |
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| Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) (contested) : La scapigliata / La testa di fanciulla (detta La scapigliata) (unfinished). 1501–8. Oil, umber, and white lead pigment painting on poplar wood. 24.7 x 21 cm. Galleria nazionale di Parma. Public Domain. High Renaissance (1494–1527). Photo and data: Wikipedia. |
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| Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519): A sketch of the head of Leda for two oil paintings on Leda and the Swan (both lost). 1503–10. Red chalk on red prepared paper. 20 x 15,7 cm. Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milano. Public Domain. High Renaissance (1494–1527). Photo and data: Wikipedia. |
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| Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) (contested) : San Giovanni Battista / Saint Jean-Baptiste / Saint John the Baptist. 1513–1516. Oil on walnut wood panel. 69 x 57 cm. Le Musée de Louvre. Photo digitally retouched: C2RMF: Galerie de tableaux en très haute définition. Public Domain. High Renaissance (1494–1527). Photo and data: Wikipedia. |
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| Disputed: Bacco (su un precedente san Giovanni Battista) / Bacchus. "Generally considered to be a workshop copy of a Leonardo drawing. According to Kemp, it may have been begun by Leonardo as a figure of John the Baptist." 1510–1516, later repainted and altered. Oil on walnut panel transferred to canvas. 177 × 115 cm. Le Musée de Louvre. Public Domain. High Renaissance (1494–1527). "This painting was first described in the French royal inventory as Saint John the Baptist in the Desert, then at the end of the 17th century, possibly as the result of a restoration, as Bacchus in a Landscape. Like Leonardo's half-length portrait Saint John the Baptist, it is a syncretic work. The index finger pointing upward toward a divine sign and the deer are Christian symbols. The thyrsis, the crown of vine leaves or ivy, the bunch of grapes, and the panther skin are attributes of Bacchus." Photo and data: Wikipedia. |
In art, there are looks and gazes in various directions and dimensions. In live performances, we watch and respond, and performers look at each other and us and act and react. We watch television and films, and sometimes the performer or moderator looks back, addressing the camera = us. In a painting, the subject can be imagined to return the look. In Rainer Maria Rilke's poem Archaic Torso of Apollo, dedicated to Rodin, a headless statue notices us and summons: "you must change your life".
John Berger's famous argument about the "male gaze" was about European nude oil painting since the Renaissance: "One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight." (Ways of Seeing, p. 47).
The "male gaze" discourse was adopted in film criticism by Laura Mulvey, and her essay has become newly topical in the Me Too movement, also in Finland in a book by Anu Silfverberg.
The issues are big. Are we identifying with a subject? Are we reducing the other to an object?
Most art is beyond identification and projection, in realms of metaphysics, philosophy, religion, history, social awareness, etc., or applying narrative strategies outside identification and projection.
Before the Renaissance, Western art was transcendental for a thousand years, and Byzantine art even longer. When the focus shifted back to the human individual, psychology was revived, along with issues of identification and projection.
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John Berger's thesis is persuasive about Western art from the Renaissance to Modernism. But it is rewarding even about artists outside his argument such as Leonardo.
(Berger discusses nude oil paintings, and no nude oil painting by Leonardo exists. He painted only two, both featuring Leda and the Swan, now missing believed lost. In both, Leda, the Queen of Sparta, was portrayed as a mother with her infant children and their father, Zeus, disguised as the Swan.)
Berger's thesis helps us define why Leonardo is different. He is different because of the absence of the "male gaze".
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The distinctive "Leonardian gaze" emerged around the year 1500 in paintings such as Sainte Anne trinitaire, Mona Lisa and Salvator mundi. The artist was then about 50 years old. After them, the look never left Leonardian paintings, not even ones whose authorship is contested and disputed. It is so characteristic that retroactively a void can be felt in Leonardo's previous paintings except The Last Supper.
Looks and gazes form a complex web. There is the artist's look at the model. The artist may emphasize surface likeness. Or the artist may focus on character and define it with insight like the painter Mikhailov does in Anna Karenina. There is the look of the subject. The look of love can be selfless like that of Madonna and child. Or the look can be one of desire, of a woman watching herself being looked at like in Berger's thesis. Or something else.
In one respect I agree with Dan Brown, the author of the best-selling mystery thriller The Da Vinci Code: that Mona Lisa seems to be Leonardo's self-portrait as well as the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo (Lisa Gherardini). The looks and smiles appear to be hers as well as his.
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In his essay "Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci" (1910), Sigmund Freud took as the starting point a remark from Codex Atlanticus where Leonardo discusses birds, including the kite (nibbio): "Questo scriver si distintamente del nibio par che sia mio destino, perche nella mia prima ricordatione della mia infantia e mi parea che essendo io in culla, che un nibio venissi a me e mi aprissi la bocca colla sua coda e molte volte mi perecuotesse tal coda dentro alle labbra". ["It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the kite, for it comes to my mind as a very early memory, when I was still in the cradle, a kite came down to me, he opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a few times with his tail against my lips."]
Unfortunately, Freud used a German translation where "nibbio" had been mistakenly translated as "vulture". His interpretation based on vulture mythology collapsed. An authoritative critique is Meyer Schapiro's "Leonardo and Freud : An Art-Historical Study" (Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 17, No. 2 (April 1956).
As usual in Freud's essays on culture, there is an embarrassing disregard of accuracy in some of the detail. But it is equally clear that the main argument survives and is in fact strengthened by criticism. It remains an unsettling fact that Leonardo's earliest memory of infancy is of a big bird moving its tail against his mouth.
Soon after Freud has published his essay, an eerie observation was made by Oskar Pfister about Sainte Anne trinitaire at the Louvre: a riddle image / image-devinette / Vexierbild of a vulture hidden in Madonna's dress, its tail touching the mouth of the Child. ("Kryptolalie, Kryptographie und unbewusstes Vexierbild bei Normalen", 1913). Once detected, it cannot be ignored.
I don't know what to think about this. In Italian and German the relevant bird-words (uccello, Schwanz, etc.) do carry a sexual double meaning. Leonardo was always fascinated by birds and flying, and when he saw caged birds for sale, he bought them to set them free. His only nude oil paintings were about Leda and the Swan.
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Freud's Leonardo essay was his personal favourite, and in it he introduced pioneering ideas about narcissism and sublimation. Leonardo was not sexually active, and he was able to sublimate his energy into a drive to knowledge. Curiously, although he was a pioneer in anatomy, his drawings of female inner organs and sexual intercourse were way off the mark.
Leonardo loved beautiful young boys but evidently only as a joy to behold. According to Giorgio Vasari's pioneering biography (in Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori) Leonardo himself was a beautiful man, not only in appearance but also in manners, a lover of beauty and knowledge in all forms, also a man of exceptional physical strength who could break an iron lock with his bare hands.
Freud's hypothesis about Leonardo is that around the time of the painting of Mona Lisa and Anne Trinitaire he met a model whose look and smile evoked his mother and his dearest memories of infancy, and he re-lived his own psychological course of development that had begun with an overkill of mother love. Leonardo was the first-born child of his single mother Caterina di Meo Lippi. When his father's new wife Albiera Amadori failed to conceive, they adopted Leonardo who thus received a double blessing of motherly love.
In the Anne Trinitaire painting, Mary sits on Anne's lap in a mother-grandmother symbiosis. Because they seem to be of the same age, they also appear as Leonardo's tribute to his childhood paradise of two mothers.
Freud proposes that Leonardo came to identify with his mother and love beautiful boys the way his mother loved him. This hypothesis of a possible trajectory of homosexual development is today probably politically incorrect and may make anyone who dares mention it ostracized in circumstances of cancel culture. But ever since I read Freud's essay 25 years ago I have not been able to forget it when thinking about Leonardo. I cannot help remembering it even in thinking about Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alexander McQueen.
Freud has interesting speculations about Leonardo's obsessive focus in his notebooks on seemingly trivial details while ignoring great events. He is puzzled by Leonardo's proverbial slowness and tendency to leave everything unfinished, a conspicuous trait already registered by Vasari. Psychological reasons may lie in the background, but I find that Leonardo was also ahead of his time: an unfinished quality can be a strength, as has been generally acknowledged in art since the 19th century. The essay, the sketch, the work-in-progress has been getting increasingly valued. The revelation of the non finito was a Renaissance phenomenon, stunningly present also in the work of Michelangelo, such as the Rondanini Pietà.
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Vasari registers the contemporary astonishment at the Mona Lisa smile. Freud offers a compendium of later reactions to the Gioconda mystery.
"What fascinates the spectator is the demoniacal charm of this smile. Hundreds of poets and writers have written about this woman, who now seems to smile upon us seductively and now to stare coldly and lifelessly into space, but nobody has solved the riddle of her smile, nobody has interpreted her thoughts. Everything, even the scenery is mysterious and dream-like, trembling as if in the sultriness of sensuality." (Richard Muther: Geschichte der Malerei, 1909)
Freud continues:
"The idea that two diverse elements were united in the smile of Monna Lisa has been felt by many critics. They therefore recognize in the play of features of the beautiful Florentine lady the most perfect representation of the contrasts dominating the love-life of the woman which is foreign to man, as that of reserve and seduction, and of most devoted tenderness and inconsiderateness in urgent and consuming sensuality. "
"Müntz expresses himself in this manner: 'One knows what indecipherable and fascinating enigma Monna Lisa Gioconda has been putting for nearly four centuries to the admirers who crowd around her. No artist (I borrow the expression of the delicate writer who hides himself under the pseudonym of Pierre de Corlay) has ever translated in this manner the very essence of femininity: the tenderness and coquetry, the modesty and quiet voluptuousness, the whole mystery of the heart which holds itself aloof, of a brain which reflects, and of a personality who watches itself and yields nothing from herself except radiance....' " [Eugène Müntz : Léonard de Vinci, 1899]
"The Italian Angelo Conti saw the picture in the Louvre illumined by a ray of the sun and expressed himself as follows: 'The woman smiled with a royal calmness, her instincts of conquest, of ferocity, the entire heredity of the species, the will of seduction and ensnaring, the charm of the deceiver, the kindness which conceals a cruel purpose, all that appears and disappears alternately behind the laughing veil and melts into the poem of her smile.... Good and evil, cruelty and compassion, graceful and cat-like, she laughed....' " [Angelo Conti : "Leonardo pittore" in Conferenze Fiorentine, 1910]
Freud gives the floor to Alexandra Konstantinowa:
"During the long period in which the master occupied himself with the portrait of Monna Lisa del Gioconda, he entered into the physiognomic delicacies of this feminine face with such sympathy of feeling that he transferred these creatures, especially the mysterious smile and the peculiar glance, to all faces which he later painted or drew. The mimic peculiarity of Gioconda can even be perceived in the picture of John the Baptist in the Louvre. But above all they are distinctly recognized in the features of Mary in the picture of St. Anne of the Louvre." [Alexandra Konstantinowa : "Die Entwicklung des Madonnentypus bei Leonardo da Vinci, 1907]
Freud again: " But the case could have been different. The need for a deeper reason for the fascination which the smile of Gioconda exerted on the artist from which he could not rid himself has been felt by more than one of his biographers. W. Pater, who sees in the picture of Monna Lisa the embodiment of the entire erotic experience of modern man, and discourses so excellently on "that unfathomable smile always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work," leads us to another track when he says: "
"Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of his dream; and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last." [Walter Pater : Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 1873]
" ' Herzfeld surely must have had something similar in mind when stating that in Monna Lisa Leonardo encountered himself and therefore found it possible to put so much of his own nature into the picture, "whose features from time immemorial have been imbedded with mysterious sympathy in Leonardo's soul.' " [Marie Herzfeld : Leonardo da Vinci, 1906]
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"Mysterious sympathy". "That unfathomable smile". "The peculiar glance". "The charm of the deceiver". "The kindness which conceals a cruel
purpose". "Indecipherable and fascinating enigma". "Two diverse elements are united in the smile". "The demoniacal charm of this smile".
There is certainly more than one set of contradictions beyond Leonardo's mystery paintings. I propose that one of them belongs to the spectrum today called non-binary. The androgynous quality of Leonardo's John the Baptist has struck viewers forever. Leonardo's homosexual preferences were never a secret, nor his asexual practices. He is on record of abhorring the very idea of sexual intercourse.
A Leonardo paradox is that he is the greatest symbol of mainstream culture, and yet his paintings frankly challenge received sex and gender roles.
Freud was a pioneer in proposing a constitutional bisexuality in human psychology, but at the time of writing the Leonardo essay he was partly stuck in the past in viewing homosexuality as abnormal, while at the same time affirming there was nothing neurotic or pathological in Leonardo.
If we apply the term "queer" to Leonardo, it does not sound wrong, but we should not banalize him by labelling him a "queer artist". He belongs to the great tradition of classical antiquity and the context of fellow artists like Michelangelo and Caravaggio. Their identity politics is not a matter of limitation but of liberation in their search of a wider, opener and more universal sense of human experience.
Leonardo's worldview was based on empirical observation and rational experiment. Most of his paintings have religious subjects, but even in them, Leonardo focuses on the human, not the superhuman. He does have a profound sense of the sacred, a reverence of the mystery of life.
In our age, understanding better than ever the complexity and variety of sex and gender, it is also easier to appreciate the queer gaze of Leonardo.
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| Guia Besana: Mona Lisa at Le Louvre. Photo credit: Guia Besana for The New York Times, 28 July, 2014. |
As a film historian I have kept returning to Leonardo da Vinci particularly since 2012, when I started to systematically revisit art history as a reference point to the cinema's transition into the digital era.
Digital cinema was being justly celebrated for being bright and clear. But Mona Lisa is an excellent example of the opposite of bright and clear. It is almost an apparition, a dream vision emerging from mist.
Leonardo was a master of the Renaissance device of sfumato ("in the manner of smoke") where everything is shrouded in subtle haze.
He was also one of the pioneers of the chiaroscuro ("bright dark") which is a way of painting with light: the figures are not conveyed in the manner of clear line drawings but emerging from light and shadows.
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As a man of the cinema I have also been troubled about the trend of restoration overkill. In exhibitions of old masters I find the relentlessly glossy surfaces of restored oil paintings uncanny.
I preferred the Sistine Chapel before restoration. In Michelangelo's paintings, eyes are all-important. In restoration, the twinkle in the eyes of his figures has disappeared.
I also preferred Rembrandt before restoration. I understand the urge to do something to the dark patina accrued over centuries. But with the removal of the darkness something else disappears, too. The paintings are now ghosts of their former selves.
The original glory of Leonardo's paintings is now only possible to fathom by straining the imagination. We can read from old testimonies, recorded by contemporaries such as Giorgio Vasari, how they looked and register what is missing. Mona Lisa has been cropped and changed in a successsion of restorations. For instance she has lost her celebrated eyebrows.
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The strange smiles in Leonardo's paintings after the year 1500 have affinities with predecessors in Ancient Greek and Etruscan art. The smiles seem to suggest long-forgotten secrets among artists separated by millennia.
Soon after Leonardo's death, Mannerism started, a current characterized by an increasing awareness of the paradoxical and the alienated. Representative figures included Dr. Faustus, Don Juan, Don Quixote and Hamlet. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy".
It is tempting to reflect Leonardo's strange paintings of the 1500s with regard to Mannerism. But my personal response is that they are not predecessors of Mannerism. They look back to something primitive and original that had been repressed during the Gothic centuries. The Rinascimento of Leonardo seems to refer, besides a return to a natural focus after a thousand years of a supernatural one, also to the rebirth of ancient, pre-Christian secrets on many levels.
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