01/12/2023
The genius of Leonardo bubbles and boils in this dazzling drawing. It is so much more than a “study” for a painting.
This sheet of paper lets you glimpse the polymathic scope of his mind that he explored in notebooks on everything from anatomy to flying. The sketches of gear wheels show him thinking about an engineering problem at the same time as he plans a painting. But the main design is even more astonishing. It’s a frenzied, chaotic, inky smear that he seems to have done in a totally random way – only then has he gone over its dense shape to mark out faces and figures.
As the art historian EH Gombrich pointed out, this resembles the almost shamanistic method he recommended to artists: gaze at a stain, said Leonardo, until you start to see faces and landscapes and battles in it.
Here he has created his own stain and found forms there. Out of his dreaming emerges a close-bound family of mother, child and grandmother, like a vision from the unconscious.
You can see why the surrealist Max Ernst was inspired by Leonardo.
Studies for the Virgin and Child with St Anne by Leonardo da Vinci, 1505–8
The guardian: Art weekly
