No name in art sells like Leonardo da Vinci. Even Banksy’s pranks and Damien Hirst’s provocations can’t seem to shake Leonardo’s exalted status in the hearts (and the wallets) of today’s image-consumers. His <em>Mona Lisa</em> alone keeps the Louvre afloat, the highlight of the hasty tours that shuffle visitors through miles of master pieces only to have them turn away from Leonardo’s iconic portrait for a selfie.
The Brera gallery in Milan, once Napoleon’s overflow room for looted art destined for the Louvre , stands virtually empty, ignored by 300,000 tourists who spend up to 100 euros a head for a 15-minute glimpse of <em>The Last Supper</em>. Meanwhile, Dan Brown enjoys early retirement thanks to his fictional thriller <em>The Da Vinci Code</em>, and Leonardo’s <em>Salvator Mundi</em>, despite debate about its attribution, remains the world’s most expensive painting since its purchase in 2017 for $450 million by Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The cult of Leonardo has only grown after the 500th anniversary of his death in 2019. In Italy, the region of his birth, Tuscany, is now a Da Vinci pilgrimage site for tourists. This summer a major exhibition of replicas of his “machines” opened in the granaries of the old Orsini fortress in Pitigliano. In Florence, visitors can see the new Leonardo Room in the Uffizi Gallery or go to the Leonardo da Vinci Interactive Museum – which is fully immersive and created to be an entertaining and educational experience for all ages.
The virtual Leonardo is so successful that museums are cropping up from Amsterdam to Las Vegas, with three in the city of Rome. His fertile and almost febrile mind loved to solve problems; his brilliant drawings allow modern viewers to surf along his ideas for parachutes, waterworks and military defences, which, because of their impracticality at the time, were never constructed.
The upside of the tech takeover of Leonardo is that we can explore his art and inventions as never before. The downside is that he is presented as a posterchild of a Promethean man of science unfettered by the sexual constraints of an outdated Christian morality.
A casual glance at his life might even lend some credence to this perception. Certainly, Leonardo’s physical beauty spurred contemporaries to speculate about his proclivities. In his twenties , he was brought before the Florentine magistrates for sexual misdemeanours; in Milan he took in a pretty young manservant, Giacomo Salai. It has lent grist to the mill of the “gay Leonardo”, but for all this romantic musing about Leonardo as scientist, homosexual activist, or even eco-prophet, he made his name and his fortune as a painter.
Besides his private writings, his one publication was a posthumous treatise on painting. And, despite their wispy brushstrokes and fragile flecks of fresco, Leonardo’s paintings have shown formidable resilience to the persistent erosion of secular readings. There is much to appreciate in how technology can make this 500-year-old artist relatable to the modern era, but an accurate picture must take into account that Leonardo was a Christian painter inspired by a Christian age.
Leonardo’s greatest works were the fruit of his engagement with religious subjects, entrusted to him by some of the Renaissance’s most exacting patrons of sacred art. His first commission in Milan, conferred on him by the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in 1483, was the <em>Virgin of the Rocks</em>; it was destined to grace an altar dedicated to the recently-approved feast, whose proper offices would be composed by one of their number, Fra’ Bernardino de’ Busti.
It was a daunting task. Not only was there no formal dogma of the Immaculate Conception to draw upon, but Bernardino would also have to approve the finished work. Leonardo’s original mind tackled this subject at its Franciscan core: the notion that God’s plan for salvation existed before time. Employing what would become his signature mysterious landscape, Leonardo composed the scene in an enigmatic, almost Platonic cavern.
He then created an orderly triangular arrangement of figures in the foreground, culminating in the towering figure of the Virgin, with a swathe of gold silk around her waist to symbolise the immaculate vessel that bore Christ. Jesus, perched at the bottom, penetrates the neat line of the triangle, closest to the altar. Looking through a Catholic lens, it becomes clear that divine mystery stimulated Leonardo’s creativity.
Leonardo’s masterpiece, <em>The Last Supper</em>, revealed his genius in composition, or the placement of figures in space. Depicting the moment after Jesus announces that he will be betrayed, Leonardo drew viewers into the mystery through human reactions. It took Leonardo three years to paint the work, much to the frustration of his patrons, the Dominicans of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The friars lamented that he would stare for hours at the wall “doing nothing”, but though his hand was inactive, his mind was working to produce a composition that would be unique among those of his many peers who had tackled the same subject – and he succeeded.
He grouped the apostles into threes: a rhythmic reminder of the Trinity. Each apostle reacts differently to the news of the betrayal, but the most interesting trio, <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/very-odd-the-way-in-which-mainstream-media-reported-on-last-supper-parody-at-olympics/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">parodied in the recent display at the Paris Olympics</mark></a>, juxtaposed Peter, John and Judas. John leans away from Christ, while Peter pushes forward, thrusting Judas outwards, closest to the viewer. Jesus, though surrounded by his friends, is yet utterly alone, with his head and arms forming an isolated triangle. The effect of Leonardo’s composition recalls a stone dropped into water: a splash followed by ripples, but his design always draws the attention back to Christ.
The French conquest of Milan eventually brought Leonardo to Rome, where he again challenged traditional iconography in his last surviving panel: St John the Baptist. Most artists depicted a gaunt zealot, but Leonardo chose to depict John as a young, soft, almost sensual youth. The work invited reflection on the Forerunner’s time in the desert, joyfully renouncing worldly comforts to prepare for the Saviour. Although his Baptist has been touted as “proof ” of his homosexuality, identity in the Renaissance era was not defined by sexual leanings but by who one was before God. Leonardo surely struggled with sin and temptation like everyone else, but used his art to glorify creation at its best – not its basest.
Leonardo spent the last three years of his life in France, where, according to his biographer Giorgio Vasari, he “earnestly resolved to learn about the doctrine of the Catholic faith”. Another author, and the first to use archival research, described the aged Leonardo as having “abdicated things of this world with a grand determination to focus solely on the great themes of death and the afterlife”. After receiving the last rites, Leonardo died a Christian death on 2 May 1519. His estate included a library of 150 books, with several bibles and psalters in Italian along with works of St Augustine and St Albert the Great.
Though he was fascinated by creation, with age Leonardo grew increasingly interested in the Creator. His art reveals a man engaged with questions of faith, even if struggling to comprehend it. At the end of the day, for all the AI, merchandising and clickbait, Leonardo still compels viewers to gaze upon the face of the Lord.
<em>Photo: Da Vinci Genius immersive art show in Amsterdam (Credit: DIEPHOTODESIGNER.DE FOR FLORAANDFAUNAVISIONS.)</em>
<em>Dr Elizabeth Lev is an art historian based in Rome, and the author of 'A Body for Glory' (Vatican Museums Press, 2014).</em>
<strong><strong>This article appears in the October 2024 edition of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">HERE</mark></a></strong></strong>.
