Parvez Kabir's 2011 review -‘Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan’
I
Last week, the biggest exhibition of 2011, ‘Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan’ came to an end. The show went houseful from day one to its very last. The opening was broadcasted in every electronic media, including the Cinemas and it boosted National Gallery’s visitor count up to a record high. The exhibition brought half of Leonardo’s painterly oeuvre to the public along with many of his original drawings and a handful of paintings from his workshop. ‘The Guardian’ justly described it as, ‘Knockout’.
The display itself was intelligent and well thought out. Seven rooms were made to house one iconic work each, accompanied by drawings and workshop products around its theme (1). An exception to this rule was the fourth room, which was conceived as a chapel for the two ‘Virgin of the Rocks’ facing each other. To the full credit of the curators, Luke Syson and Larry Keith, the works displayed in this way enabled the viewers to engage with them in two distinct ways which are usually thought incommensurable. They could contemplate the masterpieces in isolation, as objects of beauty, devotion and meaning, and they could also see them as reflections of the world around. This world was preserved in the drawings, studies, copies and workshop production, in short the context where they belong to. I cannot recall when was the last time I saw an exhibition which retained such a delicate balance between the two modes of viewing without favouring one over the other.
But all great achievements come at a cost. The world of Leonardo was different, very different from our world and to put these works back into their context also means a bit of ‘letting go’ from our side. This, the curators couldn’t afford, and much as I sympathise with them, I fail to understand an aspect of their curatorial work. The literary and cinematic material around this exhibition, for some reason, is overwhelmingly connoisseurial. A lot of paper and film is spent on establishing the authenticity of some works which were thought of as workshop products in earlier times. ‘The Madonna Litta’, Christ ‘Salvatore Mundi’, and the ‘Musician’ are the three works which enjoy this expenditure most. But at the centre of all attention stands the London version of the ‘Virgin of the Rocks’. From the documentary film to the Museum souvenirs, we are bombarded with details of this work because, the film tells us, “this work sums up Leonardo’s Milanese period”. It doesn’t take much to see that the real motive behind this is to establish this work as an authentic Leonardo, which it probably is; but isn’t that already known? There are sceptics, of course, and I too am one of them, but to a general knowledge this work has long been established as an original. Then why this intellectual wrestling, why this mad angst to extract it from doubts all over again?
The reason, I am afraid, is the exhibition itself, and some of its contents. In order to give its audience a well-rounded view of Leonardo’s time, the exhibition, perhaps the first of its kind in this regard, displayed products from Leonardo’s workshop alongside his own works. There were works by Marco D’oggiono, Francesco Galli, Ambrogio di Predis and Francesco Napoletano, all remarkably close to Leonardo’s overall style. But the star of the show was Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, whose draughtsmanship seemed capable of giving Leonardo experts a run for their money, had he not been right handed. The exposure of these works at once revealed a rich, colourful workshop with a fluid exchange of works and ideas between the master and his apprentices, and an environment of learning and sharing.
But what is a delight to an Art Historian is often a nightmare to a connoisseur. The very exposition of a workshop casts a fresh cloud of doubts over the works which were sorted out earlier. But what more, it challenges our own frameworks of looking at the past, its objects and its artists. It muddles up the Leonardo we know, the Leonardo who was given to us by thinkers such as Burckhardt, Freud, Berenson and Clark. They saw in him the spirited individual that the ‘Artist’ was to become in Modern times, with Art being the natural expression of his personality. This idea, of course, would have been ‘news’ to a 15th century gentleman whose works were primarily judged on the scale of skill, mastery of design [designo] and ability to improve over existing models [invenzione]. There was hardly any artist in the 15th century who didn't have a workshop and was not responsible for some group-work or another.
The problem at hand is that our ways of understanding Art are fundamentally different from the ways it was understood in the Renaissance. We owe this to Modernism2. In the modern order, we know, a work started and finished all alone by a master comes to assume an autograph value and fetches a much bigger price in the Art market. An exposure of a workshop, still today, runs the risk of affecting a Master’s oeuvre and the price of things around it. It is this constraint which restricted the curators’ work to a regrettable degree. They could have revealed an illuminating history had they not been cramped with this burden of keeping intact the monetary order of things. Thus we see them painfully extracting original Leonardos from workshop products throughout the catalogue, even on occasions when all the evidences run counter to their argument. After all, in an open market, the loss of value, or rather price, is everyone’s loss.
II
To return to the show, it was puzzling that no one cared or speculated over the nature of the workshop, how was it possibly organized, how were the commissions taken and honoured and the labour distributed. Instead, the works were made to stand as answers to such questions, with their beauty hailed as qualitative evidence. This, I’m afraid, is the least convincing of all methods which connoisseurs normally employ while detecting ‘hands’(3). Talking of ‘Madonna Litta’, it is remarked in the exhibition catalogue, first quoting Gustav Waagen, that “this picture…is the rarest of all those ascribed to the great master which it is currently possible to buy in Europe.”, and then quoting Gukovskij “Those critics who doubt that the Madonna Litta’ was painted by Leonardo himself have not succeeded in putting forward the name of another artist to whom there are any kind of convincing grounds for ascribing a picture of such great artistic quality.” The author then presents what she calls ‘the indisputable evidence of scientific examinations’, which conclude “that the work was painted by one artist working alone, not by two”. She also reminds us that the work was copied by many in Milan and “it would hardly have occurred to the numerous copyists to repeat and adapt the work unless they were convinced that they were dealing with an original by the great master.” (4)
Now, compared to this, what do we get in the exhibition? The painting displayed along with preparatory studies made in the Leonardo workshop. We get this beautiful head of a woman, by the master himself, and two other preparatory studies, one of the child’s head and another of the Madonna’s drapery, by Boltraffio! Looking at the child’s head, the author tells us, “It has been suggested that it was copied from the painting. But that it was actually preparatory soon becomes apparent, since the quality of the drawing is extremely high and the correspondence is close but not exact.” Of the drapery study, he says “they [these studies] are almost certainly preparatory drawings for the painting rather than copies after it, since they do not overlap each other compositionally. […] some of the beautifully designed deep folds of drapery falling over the arm in this drawing are covered by the Christ’s left leg in the painting, which can therefore be understood as the result of a series of independent studies, cleverly assembled.”(5)
What are we to make of attribution, then? It is common to see apprentices making finished works from their master’s studies, their dictates, in order to meet lesser commissions. The reverse seems unlikely but cannot be ruled out. In any case, external facts aren’t enough to shed light on this problem. But if we play the game by the curator’s rule, taking the work itself as evidence, we may see a thing or two in this regard. It can be argued that the figure is cold and wax like, and it altogether lacks the tonal dissolve of a usual Leonardo (6) . Then you have a weird Christ Child with a rather awkwardly gazing eye. But what this painting really suffers from is the coordination among the figures. Madonna’s right breast appears to have shifted further right to meet the mouth of her child, which can only be a result of an on-the-board collage of the three preparatory models. But then, Leonardo’s model bent a little more forward whereas Boltraffio’s stood erect. As a result, the unhappy collage of the two cartoons produced a pumped up effect in the upper part of the Madonna’s body, further distorted by the insertion of the child in the composition. However, I must mention here that these minute flaws do nothing to obscure the work’s beauty, which is indeed of a high order. Neither do I believe that apprentices are more flawed than their masters, for often the opposite stands true. The point I want to make is that in autograph works, we usually see a unity of imagery where both inspired moves and flaws appear to be equally distributed. In the hands of the apprentices, however, the parts appear flawless and often improved but their blending onto a whole is what gives the game away (7).
III
So the question remains, is this not a Leonardo, then? The answer, I am afraid, is in double negative; it is indeed a Leonardo, regardless of whether it is by the master’s own hands or not. The work was commissioned to the master, who gave the lead, approved its quality at its completion. It was meant to carry the brand Leonardo and ‘function’ as his work, a point that should conclusively put an end to all our silly ‘who did what’ games. Nobody cared in 16th century if an apprentice painted the parts of a work by a well-known master as long as the brand and quality was retained, and neither should we. And yet, we judge these works solely on autograph values, something which they never intended to address in their own time. We do so because it’s not them, but us who are caught up in a complicated system of ‘relic- economy’. Isn’t it curious that in the last ten years, a handful of ‘originals’ have been extracted from workshop products, but not a single original pushed back to the workshops? In older times the traffic moved both ways, partly because works were seen as national treasures, and in a competitive international market, one’s loss is the other’s gain. The situation is different in the open market; here symbolic pride gives way to hard cash, and one person’s loss is everyone’s loss. As a result, the market cannot afford a ‘price- drop’ anymore. The one who suffers most from this is the Art Historian; he is wanted as long as he makes the past meet the needs of the present. When he does the opposite, nobody wants him anymore.
The Leonardo show, with all its glories and its eye popping brilliance, its serene beauty and its dazzling discoveries, has some lessons to give, then. We are moving towards a time where only upward mobility of capital will serve the interests of the market, and any downward mobility will be met with grave resistance and institutional indifference. This also means that our experience of history will operate on two registers; while the virtual register will enable greater dissemination and share of our past, the corporeal register will produce an ever increasing distancing of the same. These are only the first signs of things to come; these are only the lessons learnt, lessons from Leonardo.
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End notes
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(1) The first room is called ‘The Musician in Milan’ where drawings and workshop products led to the central image of Leonardo’s ‘Portrait of a Musician’. The second room, ‘Beauty and Love’ brought studies and Milanese portraits around the painting ‘Lady with an Ermine’. The third room, ‘Body and Soul’ brought Leonardo’s anatomical studies and group compositions around the painting of ‘Saint Jerome’. The fourth room ‘Representing the Divine’ installed the two ‘Virgin of the Rocks’ facing each other, with workshop innovations on the other walls. The fifth room had ‘The Madonna Litta’ among sketches and improvised copies by Leonardo’s pupils. The sixth room ‘The Miracle of Talent’ had the Burlington Cartoon, surrounded by sketches and compositions and also the newly discovered ‘Salvatore Mundi’. The last room, in the Sainsbury wing, housed drawings and cartoons made for the ‘Last Supper’; a blown up digital image of the same and also a 17th century full scale copy of the mural.
(2) As we know, the discourse of Art shifted paradigmatically in the 19th century. Of all artists of the past, those who were distinct personalities were found compatible to the modern ideals of artistry and were consequently absorbed and re-contextualised. Those, whose works were less idiosyncratic and more in sync with the normative, for example Raphael and Reni, were denied such a reconfiguration and were seen as somewhat outdated. But artists like Leonardo, with an independent personality or Michelangelo, with a brooding individualism, hardly posed a problem in conversion. Their works became the artists themselves, their traces, or even better, ‘a piece of them’, a living testimony of their psychology and temperament.
(3) Beauty is often a result of stylistic conventions, and in the pre-modern times, every master who ran a workshop sought to systematize his style so that it becomes easy for emulation. This is why we find so many ‘figure types’, ‘compositional schemes’ and ‘cartoons’ in 16th century workshops, including those of Raphael, Perugino and Titian. A talented apprentice, following such a ‘system’, can indeed conjure up pictures of real beauty without sacrificing the ‘style’ of the workshop. Gombrich knew this when he remarked “With Raphael, the more a picture fits to his ‘style’ the less likely it is to be by him.” What he meant is that we should do good to separate the general from the particular in detecting ‘hands’, for chances are more that the general style will lead to pictures of great but predictable beauty while the particular will produce unpredictable results.
(4) The catalogue essay on Madonna Litta, by Tatiana Kustodieva, herself a curator at the State Hermitage Museum, is exemplary in its with anxieties with attribution. The case she makes is rather sloppy, for the absence of negative evidence [the absence of another candidate-author for the painting, the absence of a trace of group work etc] cannot be taken as proof for the presence of a positive one. The last point is particularly pitiful, for we find ample of copies made of workshop products throughout the Renaissance, including Leonardo’s own ‘Leda and the Swan’.
(5) Antonio Mazzotta, quoted from the exhibition catalogue.
(6) 19th century Connoisseurs usually had a refined sense for ‘surface impressions’. Both Richter and Cook relied on their eyes for judgment and it is hard not to agree with them on most occasions. Following their connoisseurship, we may separate the Leonardos into two categories, warm and cold. The warm Leonardos usually have a glowing skin with a richer and subtler blend of tones. The portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, La Belle Ferronniere, Christ Salvatore Mundi, the Paris Virgin of the Rocks and the Mona Lisa are examples of this. The cold Leonardos have a stronger use of chiaroscuro, a sharper tonal dissolve and a wax-like flesh tone which the 19th century connoisseurs found difficult to attribute to Leonardo’s style and technique. The Madonna Litta, The London Virgin of the Rocks, Leda and the Swan are examples of this. Connoisseurship means little to my historian’s interest; in fact, it is rather a hindrance to a fuller understanding of past practices at times. But faced with a choice, I would rather follow the judgments of the 19th century connoisseurs than the present ones here, who seem to be too keen to reach the end of their objective, irrespective of the means taken in the process.
(7) In the connoisseur’s method, ‘Pentimenti’, or ‘the change of mind’ is one of the characteristics which separates autograph works from workshop products. Since the master doesn’t have a ‘superior’ model to emulate, we see him often improvising on the relations between the parts and the whole of his composition, rendering it a fluidity in the process which increase chances of going either right or wrong. Leonardo’s St. Jerome is a case in point. Here he changes and improvises relentlessly but never quite gets to the harmony of forms. He even makes the Lion a size shorter and thinner, with a rather long tail, in order to fit it to the semicircular foreground. In contrast to these extreme cases, the workshop products are usually error free but they seldom live up to the same degree of liveliness which we recognize in autograph works.
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In my opinion Parvez Kabir was the best Art Historian of My generation - Consumed by tuberculosis he left us very early.
http://theblackyellowarrow.blogspot.in/2013/11/a-tribute-to-parvez.html
