Unfinished Perfection

Leonardo’s ‘The Virgin and Child With St. Anne’

Can we call something both unfinished and perfect? It’s not hard to say yes if the thing is literary (Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene”) or even musical (Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony). With painting, the question is tougher to answer. Let me suggest at least one candidate for unfinished perfection.

A museum overbrimming with masterpieces and gawking visitors can challenge someone who wants to look at pictures. But patience is a virtue. Take the Louvre. Behind bullet-proof glass and a long rope hangs the Mona Lisa, impossible to see well through the crowds of camera-toting tourists, who rush through, snap their pictures to prove they have been there, and then leave.

‘The Virgin and Child with St. Anne’

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a famously slow painter, and not many finished works survive. But once you leave the room where the Mona Lisa is enshrined you find yourself in the Grande Galérie, still crowded but less claustrophobic, and in the presence of five other Leonardo pictures. Tourists stop for a moment, but you can get close to any of these and enjoy (relative) solitude. The first is probably from Leonardo’s workshop, not entirely of the master’s own hand: St. John the Baptist, or perhaps Bacchus, whose raised finger is a Christian symbol, but whose thyrsis, vine leaves and panther skin are clearly pagan. The next is the elegant lady “La Belle Ferronière.” Then the famous “Virgin of the Rocks,” with its mysterious setting and its chiaroscuro lighting. Then another androgynous St. John with upward pointing finger.

Then, the masterpiece: “The Virgin and Child with St. Anne,” begun probably in 1500. Leonardo worked on it in both Milan and Florence, and kept it with him (as he did the Mona Lisa) until his death. Unfinished, it still offers a total aesthetic experience in terms of its design, form, color and human drama. (To take its measure, you can look at a preparatory study in London’s National Gallery, “The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist.”)

Clive Bell, Virginia Woolf’s brother-in-law, coined the phrase “significant form” in 1914 and, along with Roger Fry, another Bloomsbury denizen, popularized the idea that form itself can convey and produce feeling. Leonardo’s picture, especially its human geometry, sublimely exemplifies such conveyance. Leonardo learned from Masaccio (1401-1428) how to give sculptural mass to flat figures through the principles of perspective. To the earlier master’s technique, however, he added a humanism that looks to our eyes distinctly, realistically modern.

The Virgin is balanced on the lap of her mother, St. Anne. She gently restrains or supports her son, who is himself grabbing a little lamb. A gently energetic flow of the life force extends from St. Anne, the largest, oldest and highest figure, down through her grandchild, to the animal and plant worlds below her. The two women gaze down in wonder at the child; the child and the lamb are both looking up.

The picture is a study in support, connection, direction, in separateness and unity. St. Anne’s left arm rests upon her invisible hip. Mary’s head is in front of her mother’s shoulder. The fullness of her robe and its unfolding across her lap suggest, almost, that her child is coming out of her body (again). We can trace a line from her knee to her elbow, to her shoulder and head, and thence to her mother’s shoulder. The picture combines straight lines and swirling ones so naturally that it obscures for a moment the difficult artistry that has made everything seem natural, indeed inevitable.

What does it all mean? Freud had a thing or two to say about this picture in his essay on the painter. Leonardo had written about a childhood dream in which a vulture attacked him in his crib. Freud detected within the Virgin’s robe the figure of the vulture (Egyptian hieroglyphs sometimes used the vulture as a maternal image), which he took as a symbol of Leonardo’s repressed homosexuality.

Freud got it wrong for two reasons. Leonardo’s German translator made Leonardo’s “vulture” out of what was actually a kite or hawk. More important, it strains credulity to see any bird shape in the Virgin’s lap. Freud came closer to a truth when he considered the two women. St. Anne hardly looks older than her daughter; they seem to be of one age. And Leonardo, himself illegitimate, had two mothers, his birth mother and then his father’s wife.

Theology tempts us too but, like psychoanalysis, ultimately fails to explain the picture’s power. The lamb symbolizes Christ and his future sacrifice; it’s also just a child’s pet. Is Mary pulling him away from his foredoomed fate? And his grandmother: Do her enigmatic Mona Lisa-like smile and her hand on her hip say “I am older and wiser. I know that boys will be boys. Let the kid play”? Does one woman resist the tragedy, and the other accept it?

Theological and biographical details pale by comparison to the picture’s formal and human aspects. Consider the colors. At the top we see an almost Chinese background of ice-blue mountains with both a horizontal and vertical sweep. The colors darken from the top of the canvas to the bottom. The Virgin’s face occupies a radiant spot in the center. On the right side we have a single tree. At the bottom are rocks, an earthly base. Those on the left are small and detailed; those on the right, vague. (The Virgin’s somewhat splotchy mantle is equally unfinished or else abraded.)

The Virgin knows that her son will die. She must be filled with sorrow. But the picture is all “luxe et calme,” a gentle family portrait of three generations. Without knowing the story, a viewer would assume that it depicts, with delicate humor, domesticity and soft feelings. Such tenderness mutes tragedy for a moment, and then deepens it. And the picture’s “unfinished” status? Its conception exceeds its execution, but this hardly matters. The picture takes us in. Its formal elegance and the humane portrayal of its characters are perfection enough.

Mr. Spiegelman, the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University, writes about teh arts for the Journal. His latest book is “Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness” (Farrar Strauss Giroux).

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704596504575272681406945388.html

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