Today is Leonardo’s birthday.
Below is The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne from the Louvre.
This painting depicts St. Anne (grandmother to Christ), the Virgin Mary, and the infant Jesus. Christ grapples a sacrificial lamb. Christ holding the lamb, to be scarified ... and, thus, Mary holding Jesus, in turn.
This had to have been a very difficult composition. The Virgin Mary has to sit on her own mother’s lap!
Either way, very beautiful. A serene landscape, balanced composition, and such charm in the love and passion evident in the delicacy and sweetness among the trio.
According to Waldemar Januszczak (in “Art review: Leonardo da Vinci, Louvre, Paris” The Times), this is his greatest painting;
... the awesome showing of Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with St Anne, a picture that usually hangs in the Louvre’s longest corridor, where the glare does it no favours. This, too, has been cleaned, and the results are staggering. What finesse they reveal. What beautiful physiognomy.
What gorgeous treatment of fabrics. What clever symbolism in the dark chasm above which the perfectly arranged group is balanced.
Leonardo’s greatest painting isn’t the unfortunately absent Mona Lisa, available only in a virtually real comic interlude at the end of this event. It isn’t even the gorgeous Madonna of the Rocks, which is here. No. His finest surviving achievement as an artist is this religious masterclass, filled with light, whose contribution to this strained exhibition is to show up everything else on display and to argue irrefutably for the primacy of painting.
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Being a tourist at the Louvre ! 😆
In such a heavily patriarchal religion, portraying the bond between Mary and her mother Anne is a rare instance of celebrating women's relationships. I love to see them depicted together in art.
ReplyDeleteYes, the motherhood bond.
DeleteThat is precious that painting.
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DeleteAbsolutely—The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne is a masterpiece of emotional depth and compositional complexity. The idea of Mary seated on her mother's lap while holding Jesus, who in turn embraces the lamb, is both symbolically rich and visually intricate. The paintings seem to have a very unique tone to them all—something one does not see in digital photography. There's a tenderness and quiet intensity here that Leonardo captures with astonishing grace.
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