Recent Renaissance Revelations

Leonardo and Venetian Painting Discoveries

by Stan Parchin

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was commissioned in April 1483 by the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in Milan to paint the central panel of a triptych (three-part altarpiece) that was to be displayed in the religious order's oratory (a chapel usually reserved for individual prayer) in the church of San Francesco Grande. The side panels depicting singing and music-making angels were to be executed by brother artists Ambrogio and Evangelista de Predis (ca. 1455-1508 and 1440/50-1490/91, respectively).

Between 1483 and 1508, Leonardo had painted two variant versions of the same composition. His Madonna of the Rocks (1482-1486) presently resides in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, while the Virgin of the Rocks (ca. 1491-1508), the former painting's replacement, hangs in the National Gallery, London. The latter artwork was the one eventually displayed in the San Francesco oratory. In both masterpieces, Leonardo employed his atmospheric technique of sfumato, in which the Virgin Mary, the Christ Child, the infant Saint John the Baptist and an angel are depicted in the smoky or misty haze of a cave or grotto.

Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519
The Virgin of the Rocks, About 1492-1508
Bought, 1880
© The National Gallery, London
Used with permission

Recently, the National Gallery's curators and conservators decided to examine Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks using a scientific technique called infrared reflectography. With this method, a highly specialized television camera and monitor read and display wavelengths of light that are not visible to the naked eye but can be photographed. This method allowed the museum's experts to examine what lies beneath the layers of Leonardo's paint. They were surprised to discover two sets of underdrawings: one that corresponds to the painting that the viewer sees and another one concealed beneath the first underdrawing for a different composition with a kneeling figure that the artist abandoned. A special section of the National Gallery's website, fully illustrated with some of the infrared reflectograms, describes in detail the conservators' scientific investigation into Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks, resolving some art-historical questions while raising others.

Stateside, as scholars of Venetian Renaissance art were preparing for Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, an international loan exhibition of approximately 60 masterpieces to be displayed next year at Washington, DC's National Gallery of Art (its sole American stop), a remarkable discovery was made. Barbara H. Berrie, the museum's senior conservation scientist, found that some painters in Renaissance Venice achieved the brilliant color and unusual glow in their works by using pigments mixed with minuscule bits of powdered glass. Berrie collaborated with Louisa C. Matthew of the Department of Visual Arts at Union College, Schenectady, NY on the study, entitled Material Innovation and Artistic Invention: New Materials and New Colors in Renaissance Venetian Paintings. Most painters and other artists in medieval and Renaissance Europe procured the ingredients for their pigments and dyes from apothecaries (speziali in Italian). It was previously thought that the artists' use of two arsenical minerals was the primary source responsible for the luster characteristic of paintings from Renaissance Venice. But a 1534 Venetian shop owner's inventory of 102 items discovered by Matthew revealed that some of the pigments Domenico de Gardignano sold contained glass. The document inspired Berrie to examine paint samples taken from two works by Lorenzo Lotto (ca. 1480-1556/57) and one by Tintoretto (1519-1594) using an electron microscope. All of the samples contained bits of powdered glass in them. Other research has revealed that professional color-sellers like the one described by Matthew existed in Venice as far back as the end of the Fifteenth Century. This may account for the luxurious colors of other Venetian Renaissance painters' masterpieces.

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From your Guide: Stan Parchin, Senior Correspondent for Museums and Special Exhibitions, is a specialist in ancient, late-medieval and Renaissance art and history. His interests include: the art and culture of Old and New Kingdom Egypt; the Italian and Northern Renaissances; Church history; and witchcraft, heresy and social dissent in late-medieval and early Modern Europe.