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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I- Leonardo Da Vinci
PART II- Virgin of the Rocks
PART III- Psychological Aspects
PART IV- References
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PART I- LEONARDO DA VINCI
BIOSKETCH
Leonardo da Vinci, easily recognized as one of the greatest painters the world has ever known, was
born on April 15, 1452 in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the Republic of Florence. He was the out-
of-wedlock son of the wealthy Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine legal notary,
and Caterina, a peasant. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano in the home of his
mother, and then from 1457 he lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle,
Francesco, in the small town of Vinci. Da Vinci died at Cloux (now Clos-Lucé) in 1519 at age 67. He
was buried nearby in the palace church of Saint-Florentin.
Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, architect, inventor, and student of all things scientific. His natural
genius crossed so many disciplines that he epitomized the term “Renaissance man.”Some of his
most famous paintings include The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, The Virgin of the Rocks and the
Vitruvian Man. An artist of the Old Style, very few of his paintings exist today, totalling a dozen or
so, because of his revolutionary (albeit often destructive) techniques. He was also known for being
a chronic procrastinator.
Art, da Vinci believed, was indisputably connected with science and nature. Largely self-educated,
he filled secret notebooks with inventions, observations and theories about pursuits from
aeronautics to anatomy. But the concepts expressed in his notebooks were often difficult to
interpret. As a result, his contemporaries often did not fully appreciate his genius.
MEDIUM OF ART
Leonardo da Vinci typically painted with oil paint that he made by hand from ground pigments;
later in his career, he worked with tempera made from egg whites. His work surface typically would
be a canvas or board, or sometimes stone when painting a mural. Da Vinci mixed his own oil paints
and mediums. He ground his own pigments and mixed them with an oil base. However it usually
differed with what he was painting; for instance for the Last Supper he painted onto a dry wall
rather than on wet plaster, so it is not a true fresco painting. He first sealed the stone wall with a
layer of pitch, gesso and mastic, and then painted onto the sealing layer with tempera.
INFLUENCES ON DA VINCI
Da Vinci received no formal education beyond basic reading, writing and math. Leonardo's
grandmother encouraged his art and his childhood was rich in practice. Da Vinci’s uncle, who had a
particular appreciation for nature that da Vinci grew to share, also helped raise him. His father
appreciated his artistic talent and apprenticed him at around age 15 to the noted sculptor and
painter Andrea Del Verrocchio, of Florence. When he was 20, in 1472, the painters’ guild of
Florence offered da Vinci membership, but he remained with Verrocchio.
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Florence, at the time of Leonardo's youth, was the centre of Christian Humanist thought and
culture. A prevalent tradition in Florence was the small altarpiece of the Virgin and Child.
Leonardo's early Madonnas such as The Madonna with a carnation and the Benois Madonna
followed this tradition.
Leonardo had many friends who are now renowned; one was mathematician Luca Paciol and three
women Cecilia Gallerani and the two Este sisters, Beatrice and Isabella. He even drew a portrait of
Isabella. Leonardo's most favourite pupils were Salai and Melzi. Salai painted a nude version of the
Mona Lisa, known as Monna Vanna in 1515.
PART II- VIRGIN OF THE ROCKS
The Virgin of the Rocks (sometimes the Madonna of the Rocks) is the name used for two paintings
by Leonardo da Vinci, of the same subject, and of a composition which is identical except for
several significant details. The version generally considered the prime version, that is the earlier of
the two, hangs in The Louvre in Paris and the other in the National Gallery, London.
Louvre version London version
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Both paintings show the Madonna and Child Jesus with the infant
John the Baptist and an angel, in a rocky setting which gives the
paintings their usual name. The significant compositional
differences are in the gaze and right hand of the angel. In April of
1483, the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception
commissioned Leonardo to paint the Virgin of the Rocks as part of
an altarpiece for its chapel in the church of San Francesco Grande
in Milan. The painting was done on a wooden panel which was
meant to be placed within a larger sculpted altarpiece for the
chapel.
Perspective
Leonardo was intrigued by the atmosphere and by its effects on the colours and distinctness of
distant objects. He called this subject aerial perspective. On the left side in the distance, the forms
become less distinct as they get lost in a haze of foggy atmosphere, which illustrates the
implementation of aerial perspective.
Values (light and dark)
The most distinctive quality of his painting is Leonardo’s manipulation of the range of tonal
modelling from light to dark. The very smooth transition between colours and between light and
dark that Leonardo used in this painting is called sfumato, which means “smoky”. Not only is it
visible in the landscape, but also in the figures that are cast in light which smoothly turns into areas
of dark shade. The light affects the colours and creates the warm feeling of flesh against the
coldness of the rocky landscape. This use of light is called chiaroscuro, a contrast of very dark to
very light values in the brightness of a colour.
Composition
For the painting’s composition, Leonardo placed several figures in a basic pyramidal arrangement.
Here, the patrons had requested that Leonardo include the Virgin Mary, the Christ Child, and at
least one angel, but in order to give better balance to the scene Leonardo included the figure of
John the Baptist as well.
The identification of the child figures may be confusing to the modern viewer in part because they
are not accompanied by obvious iconographic clues revealing their identities. The figure on the left
is St. John, and the figure seated on the right is Christ. Adding to this confusion is the fact that not
only is the Christ Child not seated in the Virgin’s lap, but she is not even touching her son. Instead,
her hand is on the back of St. John, who knees in adoration toward his cousin. Christ, in turn,
blesses St. John.
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Quality of line
In the Virgin of the Rocks, Leonardo places the head of the Virgin Mary at the apex of a rather
broad, stable pyramid formed not by actual lines but by the extension of her arms and the direction
of her glance. The base of the pyramid is suggested by an implied line that joins the “endpoints” of
the baby Jesus and the infant John the Baptist.
Techniques and Medium
This painting is one of Leonardo’s early masterpieces, and it shows his reliance on traditional Italian
Renaissance pictorial devices. It is similar to the traditional chiaroscuro technique used by earlier
Italian painters, but it is more refined and elevated to convey a higher level of visual realism. The
gestures and glances among the figures results in a more dynamic portrayal of the Virgin and Child.
The angel on the right glances out at the viewer while pointing at St. John, whose gaze toward
Christ provides a main focal point of the painting. The Virgin also gazes down at her son, and the
placement of her left hand reinforces the emphasis on Christ. The connection between the Virgin
and St. John is then made by the placement of her right hand. Thus the way Leonardo made all the
figures interact in a naturally-engaging way is different.
Both walnut oil and linseed oil were employed in the painting. Both the azurite-containing under
paint of the sky and the ultramarine layer applied to the sky seen through the aperture in the
grotto were painted using walnut oil. Heat-bodied linseed oil was used as the medium for some of
the under painting layers in the draperies, identified in samples from both the grey under modelling
layer of the Virgin’s tunic and the red lake-containing underlayer below the angel’s blue robe.
Moreover, heat-bodied linseed oil was found in the dark grey paint of the angel’s over-sleeve, while
conversely the yellow lining of the cloak seems to be bound in heat-bodied walnut oil.
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PART III- PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS
The Virgin of the Rocks is a masterpiece at depicting a variety of psychological and internal states.
The Virgin of the Rocks displays human psychology in intimate harmony and balance with the
surrounding natural world.
For the first time Leonardo could achieve in painting that intellectual program of fusion between
human forms and nature which was slowly taking shape in his view of his art. Here there are no
thrones or architectural structures to afford a spatial frame for the figures; instead there are the
rocks of a grotto, reflected in limpid waters, decorated by leaves of various kinds from different
plants while in the distance, as if emerging from a mist composed of very fine droplets and filtered
by the golden sunlight, the peaks of those mountains we now know so well reappear. This same
light reveals the gentle, mild features of the Madonna, the angel's smiling face, the plump, pink
flesh of the two putti.
The painting shows the church values one expects from an altarpiece such as this painting, made
for a convent in Milan. Mary-Ecclesia presents the Body of Christ for adoration and communion.
She also shelters the infant Baptist under her arm and robe just as the traditional Madonna of
Mercy shelters the faithful in Renaissance art. John the Baptist thus represents the beholder who
comes to the altar of the mother church and kneels, protected by her embrace, to worship the
Corpus Christi.
Ecclesiastical and Christian ideas also inform the landscape. The sunrise heralds the new age of
Christ’s birth and the divine light born into a dark, sinful world. The river flowing through the
painting and watering the flowers in the foreground plays on John the Baptist and the sacrament of
baptism while suggesting Mary’s miraculous fertility which renews the world. The river also invokes
the old idea of Christ as the fons vitae, the fountain of life imaged in medieval Christian art.
What are the qualities that attracted me to the drawing? London's Virgin of the Rocks is an
appealing picture and "highly original" in its subject and treatment. Although fifteenth-century art
often placed Mary in a landscape, she was usually imaged in an enclosed garden to allegorize
sacred fertility, on the one hand, and cloister-like chastity, on the other. The clarity with which the
bodies of the Virgin and the angel are defined in the National Gallery painting indicate that they
were drawn from detailed studies, probably from life. Leonardo’s choice of a rocky wilderness was
highly unusual. Leonardo created a similar landscape while recasting the setting and figures in his
own terms, at once more closely studied from life and more visionary and poetic. The highly
realistic and exquisite painting of the flowers in the Louvre Virgin of the Rocks indicates the hand
and mind of a man who spent many hours in botanical research.
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PART IV- REFERENCES
1. Leonardo Da Vinci and the Virgin of the Rocks
http://leonardovirginoftherocks.blogspot.in/p/summary-of-case.html
2. Louvre Official Website "Virgin of the Rocks" http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-
notices/virgin-rocks
3. National Gallery, London Website, Virgin of the Rocks
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/cgi-
bin/WebObjects.dll/CollectionPublisher.woa/wa/work?workNumber=NG1093
4. Virgin of the Rocks http://www.wga.hu/html_m/l/leonardo/02/2virg_p.html
5. Culture and Values: A Survey of the Humanities – Lawrence
https://books.google.co.in/books?id=HmDOX42ArwgC&pg=PA422&lpg=PA422&dq
