On 10 December 2015, the exhibition-study School of Leonardo da Vinci opened in the State Hermitage, featuring paintings from a private St Petersburg collection: Mary Magdalene by Giampietrino, Madonna and Child and Female Portrait by Italian followers of Leonardo in the late 15th to early 16th centuries.
Present at the opening were Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, and the exhibition’s curator, Tatyana Kirillovna Kustodiyeva, leading researcher in the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art.
“The splendidly restored paintings from a private collection,” Mikhail Borisovich said, “are an exemplary case study in how works of painting should be restored.”
The aim of the exhibition is to acquaint visitors with unknown works of the school of Leonardo da Vinci, the methods by which they are studied and scientific and technical expert assessment. The display includes X-rays, infrared and ultraviolet photographs of the paintings.
Mary Magdalene was painted by Giampietrino, who is justly considered Leonardo da Vinci’s most gifted pupil. He so skilfully adopted his teacher’s style of painting that for many years a number of his works were attributed to Leonardo himself. The theme of Mary Magdalene is a leitmotif running through Giampietrino’s oeuvre. In the painting in the exhibition, though, he deviates from his usual approach. The young sinner, wearing a very luxurious green costume, is sitting by a granite sarcophagus, holding a vessel of myrrh. That little alabaster vase with a lid is a sort of coded signature for Giampietrino and occurs on all his compositions on a similar subject. The woman’s facial type, the slight smile and the interest in depicting hair derive from Leonardo’s art. The saint’s pose and movement are close to the depiction of the figure of the Magdalene in one of Leonardo’s sketches in London’s Courtauld Institute. The way the red granite coffin is conveyed with such physical veracity is captivating.
The studies carried out made it possible to conclude that this Mary Magdalene is one of the artist’s earliest compositions on the subject: infrared photography shows that Giampietrino did not immediately find the right shape for the vessel that he then repeated unchanged in all later works on this theme.
The Female Portrait has been attributed to various hands, but none of the hypotheses put forward has proven sufficiently persuasive. The lady depicted undoubtedly belongs to the upper echelons of society as is indicated by her clothing and adornments. Such dresses of light brown material with a broad square neckline came into fashion in Milan in the late 1400s.
The support and preparatory paint layer of the painting have survived satisfactorily. Under infrared light a face can be made out that has typically masculine features, which differ from the final version, when the artist transformed it into a feminine countenance, altering the character of the cheekbones and chin. This metamorphosis remains an enigma, like much in the oeuvre of Leonardo himself.
The Madonna and Child is the work of an unknown artist. The starting point for the depiction of Mary could have been a drawing by Leonardo now in Oxford, while the position of the child’s legs may have come from the sketch for The Madonna with Fruit Bowl in the Louvre collection.
The whole surface of the painting was covered with a thick layer of oxidized yellow lacquer which hampered the interpretation of the composition and the perception of the chiaroscuro. The lacquer was removed and the losses of paint were made good. Infrared photography revealed a splendid preparatory drawing executed in charcoal, silverpoint and ink. There are also noticeable traces of pounce – a coloured powder rubbed through holes pricked in a cartoon to transfer the design onto a primed panel. The best preserved and most interesting part of the painting is the landscape that that is based upon work done from life. The whole setting is dominated by characteristic stratified cliffs – a detail of which Leonardo was particularly fond and which occurs in many of his works (from the early Adoration of the Magi to the late Saint Anne). His followers also liked to employ the same kind of motif. In places a thin line lightly traces the contours of the buildings, elsewhere it gives way to ink that create contrasts of light and shade. The creator of this picture applied his paints not only with the brush, but also with his fingers, the marks of which can be spotted on the face and ear of the Christ-Child.
“The paintings belong to the school of Leonardo da Vinci,” Mikhail Piotrovsky stressed. “In the Hermitage we have not only Leonardos, but also a whole hall of the school, circle and followers of the great master. That very thing is one of the topics of scholarly research, one of the topics of the Hermitage’s exhibition activities, one of the topics that Tatyana Kirillovna Kustodiyeva, the creator of this exhibition, studies. … I am very grateful to the owners of the paintings and grateful to everyone who made the exhibition – curators and designers.”
