On 25 April 1483 the Milanese Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception commissioned Leonardo da Vinci and the brothers Evangclista and Gian Ambrogio de' Prédis to paint some panels in a large altarpiece intended for their chapel of the Immaculate Conception in the church of San Francesco Grande. 1 The work was to be completed by the following 8th December, the feast of the Immaculate Conception. Leonardo himself painted the central panel of the altarpiece, producing the first version of the Virgin of the Rocks between 1483 and i486. Most scholars identify the painting now in the Louvre as that work (Fig. 1). It was followed by a second panel, slightly variant, painted from about 1495 to 1508 and now in the National Gallery, London (Fig. 2). 2 In a dark, rocky, cavernous place, at the edge of an unseen pool separating the sacred scene from the spectator, is set a group of the Virgin, the infants Christ and Saint John the Baptist, and an angel. Cloaked in a deep blue, the Virgin introduces the infant John to Christ for his blessing. To the right of the Virgin a stream or small river winds away, passing through a jagged opening out of the cave, then through a rocky ravine into the distance of a dawning day. The obscure iconography of this painting has never been satisfactorily explained. Until very recently the impressive, brooding landscape was neglected, and it was generally assumed that the depicted action derived from an'apocryphal story in which the Holy Family returning from Egypt encountered Saint John 'in a rocky place'. 3 Framing an interpretation within Franciscan elaborations of the medieval apocryphal tradition, augmented by the writings of the desert fathers, one scholar proposed an immaculist reading of the painting, arguing that the panel actually focusses on Saint John, an important example for the Virgin's privilege, since he had been sanctified in the womb of his mother Elizabeth at the time of the Visitation. 4 From a different perspective another commentator has propounded an esoteric reading, ultimately immaculist, based on the Apocalypsis Nova of the Blessed Amadeus Mendes da Silva; in this reading the cast of characters and setting in the painting were identified with those in the revelations of the Archangel Gabriel to Amadeus, withdrawn during his raptures to a grotto. 5 In 1992 two important philosophical interpretations of the painting appeared. One of them, drawing on Lucretius and the subsequent medieval poetic evolution of the goddess Natura, showed the Virgin assuming the role of a Lucretian mother-goddess planted amongst the springing vegetation, present and immanent in the cosmos. Considering the painting as one work in a longer sequence, the essay argued for Leonardo's consistent affirmation of a cosmic feminine generative principle. 6 The other interpretation finally recognized Leonardo's landscape as the classical underground source of all rivers and streams. 7 Each essay either suggested or developed creational readings of the landscape. Despite the historical circumstances of ...
During his sojourn in Rome from 1524 to 1527, Rosso painted a panel of a dead Christ with angels for his friend Leonardo Tornabuoni, bishop of Borgo San Sepolcro. Vasari saw the painting in the house of Giovanni della Casa at mid-century, but subsequently it was lost from general sight until the 1950s, when it was acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Fig. 1). The panel has been assessed by art historians as one of signal importance, at once a high water mark in Rosso's own work and masterpiece of the early Roman maniera, a painting remarkable for its great beauty and artfulness, composed after long study of Michelangelo and the antique. The first considered estimation of the work emphasized its sculptural qualities, its formal tensions in pose and color, and its artistic virtuosity, suggesting that the subject was a version of the imago pietatis, reworked into a resurrecting Christ, emblematic of the patron's titular see. Although still impressed with the suavity of the panel in relation to Rosso's previous work, a subsequent critic was more conscious of its ambivalences, discerning a continuity with the young Rosso's individualistic and eccentric sensibilities, finally identifying the subject as an assertion of the eucharistic real presence. Analogies with language have been advanced, among them an allusion to the intensely equivocal nature of the painting. For one scholar the artfulness of the panel and Rosso's artistic attitudes were separate from their religious purpose; for another, they were absolutely at odds.
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