The da Vinci Legacy. Jean-Pierre Isbouts
St. Anne Trinity represented another, even greater challenge. Placing three figures in a dynamic cycle of movement and emotion was always difficult, as illustrated by the complexity of the Virgin of the Rocks. In that case, Leonardo’s solution was to place the figures in a loose, pyramidal composition, in which gestures and poses inferred a relationship among them. The problem was that this robbed the figures of any close emotional attachment to one another.
The Saint Anne was perhaps an opportunity to rectify this. Unlike the characters in the Virgin of the Rocks, here were three figures who shared a unique and powerful connection—that of mother and child, the strongest human bond imaginable, across two generations. The challenge was how to exploit the intense emotional power of this relationship. This is vividly illustrated in a series of studies showing how Leonardo grappled with various solutions, placing his figures this way or that way, moving ever closer to the optimal configuration.
Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist (the Burlington House Cartoon), ca. 1499–1500
Among these designs was a life-size cartoon that Leonardo executed for the Servite friars in Florence, lovingly drawn with wash and silverpoint to give the drawing a highly realistic finish. The monks were deeply taken with this work. They were so pleased that they organized a public exhibit of the finished drawing, which had people lining up around the block—perhaps the first public exhibition of a work by Leonardo da Vinci:
When it was finished, men and women, young and old, continued for two days to flock for a sight of it to the room where it was, as if to a solemn festival, in order to gaze at the marvels of Leonardo, which caused all those people to be amazed.26
Bernardino Luini, The Holy Family with Saint Anne and the Infant John the Baptist, ca. 1509–1515
It is hard to imagine such a public display if the Servite friars had not been happy with Leonardo’s final design, or felt that the terms of their contract had not been met.
Unfortunately, this particular cartoon has not survived. What has survived is what most historians believe is an earlier cartoon—the famous full-size drawing which today has pride of place at the National Gallery in London.
Francesco Melzi (?), The Trinity of Saint Anne (the Hammer Saint Anne), ca. 1508–1513
Known to scholars as the Burlington House Cartoon, it shows the three figures in a horizontal composition, with the addition of a fourth—John the Baptist as a young child. As part of this configuration, Mary is seated on St. Anne’s right leg, while holding the child Jesus in her arms. Jesus bends forward to bless the young John the Baptist, who crouches next to St. Anne. This suggests a counterclockwise flow of allegorical narrative: Jesus identifies his cousin John as the one who will announce him as the Messiah. Mary’s response is ambiguous; is she holding or restraining Jesus? Clearly, she wants to protect her young child from the Passion that John is destined to prophesy. Her mother Anne, however, turns to her and points to heaven, reminding her that this is God’s will; though she too anticipates the terrible suffering that is to come, she urges her daughter to submit to God’s plan.
The cartoon is a magnificent, highly finished work; a perfect painting in monochrome, executed in chalk and wash with highlights in white chalk. The face of Mary is as lovely as any of Leonardo’s portraits of women. Its painterly quality must have appealed to Leonardo’s pupils, for at least one of his followers, Bernardino Luini, then executed a painting based on the cartoon. Luini, one of Leonardo’s most accomplished Leonardeschi, followed the principal composition closely, particularly in the fine rendering of Mary’s head. But he also added the figure of Joseph, perhaps in an attempt to balance the composition with a figure on the right.
And yet, Leonardo himself was not satisfied with the solution. Soon he went back and revisited the idea from scratch, ultimately arriving at a very different and more vertical solution, as documented by Fra Pietro da Novellara, a prominent Carmelite cleric from Mantua who visited Leonardo’s studio in Florence in 1501.
In this new version, Mary is still seated on St. Anne’s lap, but as studies from around 1506 indicate, Jesus has now slipped off her lap and is crouching next to Anne, holding a lamb. This forces Mary to bend forward, just as Jesus turns his head to meet her gaze. Mary appears to try to restrain her child from embracing the lamb, since it is the symbol of the great sacrifice that awaits him. Anne, meanwhile, neither restrains nor corrects her daughter; she simply contemplates the scene, torn between her love for her daughter and her knowledge of God’s plan. But her mysterious, Mona Lisa–like smile reveals her knowledge of the ultimate outcome: the salvation of humankind. The same bittersweet smile has begun to form on Mary’s lips: she too knows that her son’s sacrifice as the Paschal Lamb is necessary for humanity to be redeemed.
Leonardo da Vinci, The The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Louvre version), ca. 1507–1515
Where once the composition was static, the new arrangement is filled with a circular flow of movement, each gesture a response, a reaction to another. This dynamic was instantly grasped by our perceptive eyewitness, Fra Pietro, who wrote:
It shows an infant Christ of about one-year old almost escaping from the arms of his mother. He has got hold of a lamb and seems to be squeezing it. The mother, almost rising herself from the lap of St. Anne, holds on to the child in order to draw him away from the lamb, which signifies the Passion. Saint Anne is rising somewhat from her seat; it seems she wants to restrain her daughter from trying to separate the child from the lamb, which perhaps symbolizes the Church’s desire that the Passion should not be prevented from running its course.27 (Italics ours.)
Since the first copy of this new composition dates from 1508, it is plausible to suggest that Leonardo did not make considerable progress on the Saint Anne until his second Milanese period. At least three copies by Leonardeschi were then made between 1508 and 1513 alone.
Unknown artist (Salaì?), Trinity of St. Anne, after an original by Leonardo da Vinci (Uffizi version), 1520–1525
The first of the three, previously attributed to Salaì but probably by Melzi, is now in the Hammer Museum at UCLA in Los Angeles, though currently exhibited in the J. Paul Getty Museum. Infrared reflectogram photography has revealed numerous modifications, known as “pentimenti,” which strongly suggest that the copy was made under Leonardo’s supervision.28 The second Saint Anne copy, by an unknown artist, is now in the Prado Museum in Madrid, while the third is currently in a private collection in Paris. A fourth copy, now in the Uffizi in Florence, was made during Leonardo’s subsequent stay in Rome, arguably between 1514 and 1516.
Of these, the Hammer copy, which is in excellent condition, best captures the evolution of Leonardo’s Saint Anne at that time. The painting abounds with the type of delicate detail that by now had become one of the hallmarks of Leonardo’s style, including the lovely cluster of “columbines, anemones and wild strawberries” in the foreground.29
And yet, Leonardo was not yet finished with his own Saint Anne. He continued to work on it, first in Milan and subsequently in Rome, in search of the perfect solution.30 That solution is what we see in the Louvre painting of the Saint Anne today. Whereas the Hammer copy was still framed by lush foliage and trees on either side,