New Secrets of Leonardo's Paintings

“The Hermitage is yet again permitting itself to present the museum world with an exhibition-discussion. Serious specialists are of the opinion that the paintings being shown in it were created with the participation of Leonardo da Vinci himself. The latest methods in restoration, technological analyses and refined visual examination, together with recently discovered documents allow many Italian and Russian art historians to detect the touch of Leonardo’s own hand in works traditionally assigned to the category of ‘Leonardeschi’.

“The world is currently seeing a certain tide of ‘returning’ attribution to Leonardo and a more thoroughgoing study of the entire cultural phenomenon that bears his name. A striking example is the attribution, exhibition fate and market price of Salvator Mundi. Coming up is an analysis of several more works from the Hermitage collection,” the museum’s General Director, Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, says.

For the first time two works from the collection of the Museum of Christian Culture that are associated with Leonardo’s name are being presented to the wider public – the paintings The Battle of Anghiari and The Virgin of the Rocks. This display also includes the painting Angel from the stocks of the Hermitage.

In the opinion of Italian and Russian researchers, Leonardo da Vinci himself. The link between the works and the great master is indicated by historical documents, an analysis of the manner of execution and the results of x-ray examination. The exhibition-discussion in the Picket Hall, however, only begins to lift the veil of secrecy in Leonardo studies, which has still to be removed entirely.

Modern-day digital technologies will inform exhibition-goers about the evolution of Leonardo’s artistic style. Virtual reality goggles and video projection in the Picket Hall provide the opportunity to take a fresh look at the genius’s artistic legacy.

The authors of the concept for the exhibition are Sergei Olegovich Androsov, chief researcher in the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art, and Yelena Vladimirovna Maklakova, scholarly consultant of the Museum of Christian Culture.

The exhibition curator is Zoya Vladimirovna Kuptsova, senior researcher in the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art.

The exhibition’s scholarly consultant is Luca Tomio, аn authoritative Italian scholar and expert on Leonardo.

The exhibition can be viewed by all holders of tickets to the Main Museum Complex.

More about the exhibition

The painting from the collection of the Museum of Christian Culture contains the central scene of the mural depicting the Battle of Anghiari on which Leonardo worked in the Salone dei Cinquecento (Hall of the Grand Council) in Florence in 1503–06. That huge (8 by 18 metre) composition was supposed to show the Florentine Republic’s victory over the forces of Duke Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan.

In the centre of the composition the artist placed horsemen fighting for a standard. The hitherto unseen artistic expressiveness of this scene was intended according to Leonardo’s concept to convey “the most beastly madness” of war. The mural was never completed due to the plasterwork, which rejected the paints, and the subsequent return of the Medici family to power – and evidently did not survive.

Among all the known variants of The Battle of Anghiari, the picture from the collection of the Museum of Christian Culture occupies a special place. The basis of the panel is poplar wood, which was used by Renaissance artists. The preparatory drawing was made by someone’s left hand without a preliminary sketch (Da Vinci was left-handed), and the character of the strokes resembles Leonardo’s drawings.

Furthermore, The Battle of Anghiari from the Museum of Christian Culture does not display the inaccuracies that exist in other works. For example, the followers of Leonardo frequently depicted incorrectly the chain holding the sword of the Milanese commander Francesco Piccinino and the pose of the horseman on the right – the condottiero Orsini pulling on the reins.

Examination of the picture under infrared light revealed a charcoal preparatory drawing with subsequent reworking. Luca Tomio hypothesizes that this is the “experimental panel” that contemporaries wrote about and on which the artist made a rough draft of the future mural.

Leonardo painted The Virgin [or Madonna] of the Rocks in 1483–84 as an altarpiece for the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception in the Church of San Francesco Grande in Milan. It was never installed there, however, and soon found its way to France (where it is now in the Louvre). A second version (National Gallery, London) was produced for the chapel instead, painted under Da Vinci’s supervision, but to a significant degree by his pupils.

Documents attesting to Leonardo having worked along with his pupils on a third version of The Virgin of the Rocks were discovered only in the 1980s. From those, it emerges that over a period of at least four months the master and his pupils made a copy of the original painting in San Francesco Grande.

That work is not believed to have survived down to the present. After the restoration of the picture in 2016–17, however, several major scholars, including Luca Tomio, expressed the tentative opinion that the Saint Petersburg Virgin of the Rocks may be that very third version mentioned in the document. The work from the collection of the Museum of Christian Culture stands out not only for its fairly good state of preservation, but also for its high artistic merits.

The elaborate religious symbolism of the first Madonna has been preserved down to the finest details – the flowing water representing Baptism, the reddening rocks pointing to the martyrdom of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ, and also the painstaking depiction of the plants, including carnations (a symbol of Christ’s Passion), aquilegia (the Holy Spirit), palms (martyrdom and immortality), cyclamen (a symbol of love) and fern (an allusion to the Immaculate Conception).

According to one hypothesis, Leonardo worked on the depictions of the Archangel Gabriel and the Christ-Child, while also making artistic corrections to the appearance of the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist, which were painted by his pupils. The soft artistic manner and precise, co-ordinated transitions between light and shade are vivid indications of the style of the genius from Vinci.

The Angel is a painting that came into the imperial collection of the Hermitage in 1886 as a work by Leonardo, but from 1899 it was already considered a copy. Meanwhile, when describing the collection of Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici of Tuscany in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Giorgio Vasari does mention “the half-length figure of an angel raising one arm in the air; this arm, being foreshortened from the shoulder to the elbow, comes forward, while the hand of the other arm is laid on the breast.”

It is customarily considered that the painting depicts the Archangel Gabriel appearing to Mary to bring the news that she will give birth to a Son. The artist conveyed the mystery of the Annunciation with the aid of a smile, a gesture pointing heavenwards as the tidings of the birth of the Saviour and deep shadows (sfumato) as metaphors for light from darkness.

The condition of the painting hinders the definitive identification of its creator. After several destructive restorations in the early 19th century and its subsequent transfer onto canvas, numerous breaks appeared in the paint layer. A thick layer of yellow varnish almost completely conceals not only the outlines of the wing behind the angel’s back, but also his eyes, locks of hair and the part of the torso running off into the depths of the picture space.

The works presented in the exhibition arouse great interest among both researchers and the general public. Many of these paintings’ secrets, including their connection to the great Leonardo da Vinci, have still to be uncovered. The aim of the joint project between the State Hermitage and the Museum of Christian Culture is to lay the foundations for further scholarly research and public discussion of Leonardo’s artistic legacy.