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Some paintings are as mysterious as they are famous. Watching them is like diving into a deep, dark sea. You never know what unsuspecting pearl your eyes could lose from their secret lips – what key you might find that could unleash their power. Take, for example, the Virgin of the Rocks of Leonardo da Vinci, in which the baby Jesus is found in a dark cave during an alpine celebration with a baby, John the Baptist. Or rather, take the two versions of the work created by Leonardo between 1483 and 1508: the one found at the Louvre in Paris (considered the oldest of the two, completed around 1486) and a later version at the Gallery national. in London (started in 1495 and completed 13 years later).
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Hidden in plain view in both paintings, lies an insignificant detail that, once spotted, turns the scene into something more complex and controversial than the vision of a sacred manger, watched tenderly by the Virgin Mary and the Archangel Uriel. They become subversive statements that challenge the Church's conception of the creation of the world. No, I'm not referring to Uriel's sharp finger in the Louvre version (removed in the last painting), of which Dan Brown is a sensation, in his novel The Da Vinci Code, does not refer to John but cuts his neck. an invisible figure, whose ghostly head, Mary, holds like a bowling ball between the flared fingers of her outstretched left hand.
The element I am referring to does not appear in any conspiracy theory and is indeed obvious to everyone. It appears slightly transformed from version to version, just above Mary's right hand: the apparently harmless palm, whose flared fronds (particularly crisp in the previous version of the Louvre) are shaped to reproduce with precision the contours of A scallop shell.
To understand just how surprising and provocative this complex symbol is, we must first remember the story of Leonardo's vision.
To understand how surprising and provocative this complex symbol is – an alpine palm tree transformed into a displaced scallop shell – we must first remember the story of Leonardo's vision, which emits a strange underground poetry . Although very different in temperature and tone, the two paintings share the same basic composition.
Settled in a moist mountain recess, the works are based not on a pbadage from the Bible, but on a popular apocryphal tradition that imagined Jesus and John meeting by chance as children fleeing the Mbadacre of the Innocents (the execution of all around Bethlehem, as ordered by Herod the Great), decades before John baptized Jesus into adulthood. Grouped in a pyramid, the four characters of the work – Jesus, John, Mary and Uriel – huddle against a ragged roar of high rock formations, perched on the edge of a still pond that separates us from them.
It is doubtful that the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception of Milan wished for a rocky representation when she asked Leonardo to create a central panel for his altarpiece in 1483. Rather than raising and decorating it. To enthrone the mother and the child in a choir of angels, as we expected, Leonardo discovers in the depths of his imagination a grotesque and uncomfortable cave.
The primordial backdrop is so overwhelming that the paintings may seem more about the ancient architecture of chiseled cliffs than the miracle of Christ's arrival and survival in a perilous world. That Leonardo, moreover, seems to have neglected to include any reference to the doctrine that gave his name to the Confraternity (that the Virgin Mary, like Christ himself, was conceived "immaculate" and without sinning ) confused the observers of the works.
Few art historians doubt that Leonardo's vision was influenced by the memory of a mountain excursion during which he found himself wandering "among dark rocks". "I arrived at the mouth of a large cave", was to testify later Leonardo, "in front of which I was sometimes amazed.By leaning, I was trying to see if I could discover some thing inside, but the darkness inside prevented it.Several, two opposing emotions were born, fear and desire – the fear of the dark grotto menacing, the desire to see s 'there is something wonderful inside.'
Pushed to enter, Leonardo's curiosity was rewarded by the discovery inside a fossilized whale and a horde of ancient shells that he would remember the fascinating geometric furrows in the pages of his notebooks.
In the years that followed, the disturbing presence of oysters and corals and various sea shells and snails on the "high peaks of the mountains", far from the sea, worried the imagination of the artist. For Leonardo, the explanation accepted by ecclesiastical scholars of a great flood, such as that described in the Old Testament, regarding the relocation of these shells, did not wash. These creatures have not been thrown away. They were born there.
The seashells in the mountains were proof of this, Leonardo came to believe and told his diary that the alpine peaks were once the seas of the seas. And so the Earth was much older and shaped much more randomly by violent cataclysms and seismic upheavals over a long period of time (not the smooth hand of God in a few days) that the Church would not want. ;admit.
Fossils and Flora
According to Leonardo's note in his notebooks, we learn that the riddle of seashells that arose incongruously at the top of a mountain came back to him just before he began to work. on the first version of the Virgin with rocks in 1483. Recalling an incident of the year Before, while the artist was designing an unfinished equestrian statue for the Duke of Milan, Ludovico il Moro, he wrote: "When I made the big horse for Milan, a big full bag [of shells] I was brought to my workshop by some peasants; these were found in [the mountains of Parma and Piacenza] and among them, many have been preserved in their first freshness. "
The fact that Leonardo is preoccupied with the puzzle of seashells on the mountains at the very moment when he began to conceive of the Virgin with the Rocks is crucial for our interpretation of his paintings. His fascination with shell shifting sheds an intriguing light on how his mercurial imagination could shape the double meaning of a scallop-shaped palm, like the one that bristles to Mary's left, just above her head. John.
Leonardo was a supporter of inserting an iconographically significant flora into his works; the primrose we see under the hand that Christ raised to bless John, for example, would have been recognized by contemporaries as an emblem of the savior's intracism. Taken literally, the palm tree could also be easily seen as a simple and simple omen of the palm leaves that will be thrown in front of Christ when he entered Jerusalem the Sunday before his crucifixion.
But Leonardo never works at a simple or direct level. Digitizing one's notebooks means repeatedly seeing one image change effortlessly into another – the spiral of a nautilus shell turning into a woman's hairstyle. He would not have lost sight of the fact that the palms radiating outward from the arena of the tree are identical to the rays found inside a scallop – a symbol badociated not only with Mary but more precisely to the doctrine of his Immaculate Conception.
A painting by the Italian master Piero della Francesca, contemporary of Leonardo, executed ten years before Leonardo began working on the Virgin with the rocks, illustrates the well-established link between Mary and the scallop. In the so-called Brera Madonna, a flat-shelled dome in the apse behind Mary, while a pear-shaped egg hangs, thus completing the iconography and suggesting that the fertility of Mary is as miraculous as the mystical making of pearls, which were then thought to develop supernaturally from a purest dewdrop.
You may be wondering where is the pearl in the Virgin of the Rocks, if the palm tree is really a double sign that merges with the symbolism of a beaded scallop? In fact, Leonardo gave us 20. At the precise center of the two paintings, which have been underestimated for half a millennium, is a polished pin that prevents Mary's cloak from slipping off her shoulders. This stone is surrounded by a halo of 20 dazzling pearls surrounding the central stone. If you have doubts about the fact that this clutch of glittering stars is intended to be connected to the palm / scallop that yawns at arm's length, follow the path of the hem of Mary's coat, which leads our eyes directly from the constellation of pearls to the open palm of the scallop shell.
When the time comes for Leonardo to come back on the subject of the second version (perhaps because of a dispute with the Confraternity on a compensation, prompting the artist to sell the original board more expensive to another buyer), all types of plants initially described in the Parisian painting is replaced by another type of foliage. Except the palm tree. Although simplified and more stylized in the last painting, webbed fronds actually look more like grooved furrows radiating from the hinge of a scallop shell. The decision to equip the baby Jean-Baptiste with a cross (taken by Leonardo himself or by a later artist, as some scholars think) only amplifies the profile of the palm in the story of London painting. The collision between the inclined cross and the palm, against which it seems to lean, prefigures the brutal blocking of the palms of Christ on the cross during the crucifixion.
What does all this mean in the way we read the pair of masterpieces that are the Virgin to the Rocks? The claim that Leonardo was able to carve a complex and ambiguous symbol with contradictory meanings is hardly revealing. It was a unifying and incorrigible imagination that perceived form matches where others would only be likely to see difference and discord. But merging a palm tree with a scallop shell in a mountain cave is much more risky in its religious implications than confusing the nautilus shell with an elaborate hairstyle. By hiding in his paintings an allusion to the heretical thesis that seashells found in mountainous rocky landscapes are proof that the Church's teachings on the creation of the Earth were erroneous and superstitious, Leonardo left himself and his work vulnerable to accusations of heresy. (When the French inventor Bernard Palissy made similar observations publicly a century later, he was violently denounced.)
Leonardo's determination to create such a subversive symbol (not once, but twice) shows how important it was for him to witness, no matter how subtle, the beautifully blasphemous truth of nature. The scallop / palm easily forgotten, squatting gently in the shaded margins of the works, transforms his masterpieces into subversive ruminations on the geological evolution of the Earth – the icy and icy drama in which we find ourselves all stranded and desperate for a miracle that saves the soul.
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