February Art: humanity
My first time in the Louvre, repelled by crowds jostling the bullet-proofed Mona Lisa, I met this woman unregarded in a corridor. She was somehow not worthy of being in the same room (although being the Louvre, it was a very grand corridor) – never heralded by Walter Pater’s sinuous prose, or sent on a diplomatic visit to America, instead sniffed at by supposed connoisseurs (Berenson: ‘one would regret to have to accept this as Leonardo’s own work’) – even the name, La Belle Feronnière (c.1495), which as far as I can see means the beautiful iron ornament, seems dismissive (possibly in real life she was Lucrezia Crivelli, lover of Ludovico Sforza, sometime Duke of Milan). Which shows how little people know.
Painters had made beauty before, but not such humanity, her serious face half-turned in concern or love (are the eyes looking at us or over our shoulder?), rendered with infinite subtlety by the new oil paints, the lips, cheek, and brow in softest sfumato: ‘Your shadows and lights’ Leonardo wrote, ‘should be blended without lines or borders in the manner of smoke losing itself in the air’. His notebooks show him studying the effects of reflected light, which arrives from the shoulder below to leave the curve of lower cheek glowing with soft colour. Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci is an engaging artist, always starting projects, not so often finishing them; when he finished this walnut panel he’d made someone living.
thebicyclops 