Leonardo da Vinci Madonna Benois. School encyclopedia

Among Leonard's early works, dating back to the 70s, at the time when he had just left the master's workshop, are several images of Madonnas. Different authors delimit Leonardo's authorship in different ways. The most reliable attribution is to Leonardo in the famous Hermitage “Benois Madonna,” named after the previous owners.

Italy |Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)|"Benois Madonna"|1478|canvas|State. Hermitage| St. Petersburg

"Benois Madonna" proves the originality of Leonardo's artistic thinking in the early stages of the development of his work. There is a lot here that is fundamentally new for Florentine painting - in composition, in relation to chiaroscuro, and color. ... It is also remarkable that the figures are shown against a dark background. Instead of a landscape or conventional architectural motif, a calm, shaded depth is given here, the spatiality of which is emphasized by the image of the window. Somehow we sense that the window is quite far away in the depths.
The shading of this room suggests the most delicately designed chiaroscuro. Already in this work, Leonardo outlines those famous principles of sfumato that will be characteristic of his method of modeling form with chiaroscuro. Sfumato in Italian means “vague, scattered, soft.” This is chiaroscuro, but not active, the one that stereometrically sculpts the form, with the contrast of dark and lightened, snatching the volume out of the darkness and sharply illuminating it, but almost indescribable gradations of shading. Moreover, we note that for Leonardo in his sfumato the shadow is more important than the light. Subsequently, it will rarely produce dazzlingly illuminated areas of volume. Over time, taking into account all his future experience, this light shading will attack the entire figure, the entire composition. This is both good and bad. On the one hand, this gave his brilliant, keen eye the opportunity to trace the subtlest movement of air in the composition, the movement and state of the atmosphere in all parts of the depicted space. Figuratively speaking, under every fold. On the other hand, having established itself in Leonardo’s painting, passing from him to his students, this practice of light shading among less keen-sighted, less talented artists turned into a certain light-and-shadow heaviness, into a kind of shading, gloominess of the overall tone. Subsequently, Leonardo will be reproached for the fact that he taught painting to be funereal, gloomy-black, that he delayed for centuries the development of color, the development of coloristics towards greater lightening of tone, lightening of color in general. After all, Leonardo in his notes, in his so-called “Treatise on Painting” (which is not a treatise, it was compiled into a whole at a later time) sometimes says amazingly bold things, including about color. For example, analyzing the color shades that should be read in the white dress of a female figure illuminated by the sun on a green lawn, he talks about blue shadows, about warm and cold reflexes, he says that only in the 19th century. the impressionists obtained empirically. But in his own practice this is not the case. His painting gives completely different effects, the effects of this slightly shaded space, slightly humid air through which we see the figures. And although in “The Benois Madonna” this chiaroscuro as a system has not yet taken shape, here you can already see the first signs of its presence. And chiaroscuro also dictates the subtlety of coloristic relationships in details, in the color of fabrics, in his favorite yellowish-golden and vague violet-blue with light green.
The almost childlike fragility of the Madonna and the large, heavy forms of a well-fed baby are wonderfully contrasted. There is some special equivalent in this to the psychological state of the characters. Already in the very physical opposition of a mother-girl and a large child there is some additional grain of the plot.
Easily and naturally, Leonardo focuses the attention of the Mother of God and little Jesus on playing with a flower. This motif in itself is far from new - Christ playing with a flower. And the Dutch in the 15th century. it was written many times, and the Italians - a flower or a bird in the hand, sometimes a flower with a symbolic meaning. But here Mary’s childish joy is very fresh; she seems to equally rejoice at her son’s play and at the beauty of the flower itself. And as much as the mother is cheerful, the baby is so serious. Some huge inner work is happening in him when he examines the petals of a flower with his little hands. And this is also a somewhat unexpected psychological comparison. The thing, despite its apparent chamber size, is quite complexly organized both plastically, spatially, and emotionally and psychologically.

Leonardo Da Vinci "Madonna of the Flower (Benois Madonna)", 1452-1519

State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

Renaissance

Leonardo da Vinci is the most prominent exponent of the aspirations and ideals of the Renaissance. Leonardo's art revealed features that became characteristic of the High Renaissance: the creation of a generalized image of a person, the construction of a monolithic composition freed from excessive detail; harmonious connection between the individual elements of the picture. The artist's greatest achievement was the use of chiaroscuro to soften contours and to generalize shapes and colors. He did a lot for the development of portrait and landscape painting.

Few works by Leonardo da Vinci have survived to this day; there are less than a dozen of his works in the world. Some remained unfinished, others were completed by his students. The Hermitage collection contains two of his works: “Madonna with a Flower (Benois Madonna)” and “Madonna Litta”.

The small canvas “Madonna with a Flower”, or, as it is often called, “Benois Madonna”, is one of the early works of Leonardo da Vinci. He made a number of sketches and preparatory drawings for this composition. A note from the artist himself has been preserved, from which it is clear that he began painting the picture in October 1478 at the age of twenty-six. Abandoning the traditional appearance of the Madonna, Leonardo depicted her as very young, admiring the Child with a gentle smile. The artist’s life observations are undoubtedly felt in the picture. The strictly thought-out composition is simple and extremely generalized. Mother and child are united into an inseparable group. The work uses the rich possibilities of chiaroscuro to sculpt forms, to give them special volume and expressiveness. The subtlety of the light-and-shadow transitions produces an effect characteristic of Leonardo’s works, when the entire image seems shrouded in an airy haze.

The high pictorial merits of the “Benois Madonna” allow us to judge the great skill that the artist possessed in his young years. Leonardo's painting surprises with its apparent lightness, which hides thoughtfulness down to the smallest detail. It is known that the master took a long time to create each of his works, sometimes forcing customers to wait several years for the paintings they ordered.

“Benois Madonna” as a work by Leonardo became known only in our century. At the beginning of the 19th century, it was sold in Astrakhan to one of the Russian collectors by a traveling Italian musician. It then belonged to the Benois family (whose name is preserved in the title of the painting). People first started talking about this work in 1908, when it was exhibited at an exhibition organized by the magazine “Old Years”. Soon the painting was almost unanimously recognized as the work of Leonardo da Vinci, and in 1914 it took pride of place in the Hermitage collection.

Leonardo da Vinci. "Madonna and Child" ("Madonna Litta"). The canvas will go on display at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan. Photo: State Hermitage Museum

The Italian town of Fabriano, with a population of only 30 thousand people, will receive one of the most important paintings by Leonardo da Vinci from Russia for temporary use. The State Hermitage Museum has promised to loan the Benois Madonna (1478-1480), one of the most valuable works in its collection, to the museum in the town of Fabriano, located in the Marche region of central Italy.

Fewer than 20 works indisputably attributed to Leonardo have survived to this day, so a real struggle ensued for the opportunity to obtain the master’s work on the 500th anniversary of his death (May 2, 1519). The decision to send the “Benois Madonna” to Fabriano is diplomatic in nature: from June 10 to 15, a UNESCO conference dedicated to “creative cities” will be held, in which delegations from 180 countries will take part. The painting will be exhibited at the Bruno Molaioli Municipal Pinacoteca from June 1 to June 30. After Fabriano, she will travel to Perugia for an exhibition at the National Gallery of Umbria from July 4 to August 4.

There is a legend that the Benois Madonna was brought to Russia by itinerant Italian musicians, although in fact its acquisition was most likely the result of a routine transaction in the 1790s. It is known that in 1908 the painting was owned by the Benois family in St. Petersburg, and six years later it was bought by Nicholas II, who paid for it an amount corresponding to modern £300 thousand - until the 1960s it remained a record price for the work art in real monetary terms.

“Benois Madonna” will be provided for temporary use to two Italian museums located just a few tens of kilometers from each other. Photo: State Hermitage Museum

In addition, the Hermitage promised to lend Italy another work by Leonardo from its collection - “Madonna Litta” will become the central exhibit at the exhibition “Leonardo. “Madonna Litta and the artist’s studio” at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan (November 8, 2019 - February 10, 2020). Painted between 1490 and 1492 in Milan, the painting remained in the city until 1865, when Alexander II acquired it from the Litta family.

The Hermitage curators are confident that the “Madonna Litta” is entirely the work of Leonardo, but there are many art historians who disagree with them and believe that the painting was painted by one of his students, most likely Marco d’Oggiono or Giovanni Boltraffio. In 2011, when the work was exhibited at the National Gallery in London, the Hermitage required that its description in the exhibition catalog be written by the St. Petersburg curator Tatyana Kustodieva. She also called the painting “the most valuable treasure of the Hermitage,” which caused a mixed reaction in art circles.

In Milan's Museo Poldi-Pezzoli, the Madonna Litta will most likely be presented as Leonardo's original. It will be paired with another work from the Litta family collection - “Madonna of the Rose” (circa 1490) by Boltraffio. The museum promises that the exhibition will help understand “the relationship between Leonardo and his students.”

The story of one painting.
"Madonna with a Flower (Benois Madonna)."
Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci "Madonna Benois", 1478-1480, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519)

The small Tuscan town of Vinci was once the homeland of one of the greatest geniuses of mankind. At the age of ten, Leonardo, the son of a notary and a peasant woman, moved to Florence - the epicenter of economic, industrial and cultural life of the Renaissance. Here he learned the first fundamentals of artistic creativity, and even then he showed an extraordinary versatility of interests. Among other things, Leonardo was seduced by science, but his contemporaries believed that it only distracted him from serving the high ideals of art. They were partly right, because the genius’s excessive enthusiasm for all spheres of existence served as an indirect reason for his modest pictorial heritage, which today numbers just over ten works. But on the other hand, it was scientific research that contributed to the fact that each of the paintings created by Leonardo is an invaluable example of how high the human spirit can soar, striving to understand the world. The painting “Madonna with a Flower” is one such evidence.

Most researchers date this painting to 1478, which means Leonardo da Vinci painted it when he was only 26 years old. In 1914, “Madonna with a Flower” was acquired for the collection of the Imperial Hermitage from the private collection of the Benois family. Shortly before this, the curator of the Hermitage art gallery, Ernst Karlovich Lipgart, suggested that the work belongs to the brush of the great Leonardo, and in this he was supported by leading European experts. It is known that already in the first third of the 19th century, the “Madonna with a Flower” was in Russia with General Korsakov, from whose collection it later ended up in the family of the Astrakhan merchant Sapozhnikov. Maria Alexandrovna Benois, née Sapozhnikova, inherited this painting, and when she decided to sell it in 1912, a London antique dealer offered 500 thousand francs for it. However, for a much more modest sum, the owner gave up the “Madonna” to the Hermitage - she wanted Leonardo’s creation to remain in Russia.

Quite modest and unpretentious at first glance, “Madonna with a Flower” is surprising in that it does not reveal its charm immediately, but gradually, as one immerses oneself in this special inner world. The Mother of God and the baby Jesus are surrounded by twilight, but the depth of this space is clearly indicated by a bright window. The Virgin Mary is still just a girl: plump cheeks, an upturned nose, a perky smile - all these are features not of an abstract divine ideal, but of a very specific earthly girl who once served as a model for this image. She is dressed and combed in the fashion of the 15th century, and every detail of her costume, every curl of her hair is examined closely by the artist and conveyed in Renaissance detail. The love and joy of motherhood was reflected on her face, focused on playing with her child. She hands him a flower, and he tries to grab it, and this whole scene is so vital and convincing that it’s time to forget about the upcoming tragedy of Christ. However, the flower with its cruciform inflorescence is not just the compositional center of the whole picture, but also a sign, a symbol, an omen of the coming Passion. And it seems that in this conscious and concentrated face of a baby reaching for a flower, the future Savior is already visible, who accepts his destined cross. But on the other hand, this gesture also contains a symbol of the Renaissance with its boundless desire to understand the world, discover its secrets, go beyond its borders - in general, everything that Leonardo himself strove for.

Leonardo's harmony of the whole is created through the synthesis of particulars: mathematically verified composition, anatomical construction of bodies, light and shadow modeling of volumes, soft contours and warm sounding colors. The traditional plot is rethought here: the image of the Madonna is more human than ever, and the scene itself is more ordinary than religious. The figures are voluminous and almost tangible due to the subtle play of light and shadow. Each fold of clothing lies according to the volume of the body and is filled with movement. Leonardo was one of the first in Italy to use the technique of oil painting, which allows him to more accurately convey the texture of fabrics, nuances of light and shade, and the materiality of objects. In order to even more clearly imagine how far all these discoveries extended at that time, it is enough to simply compare Leonardo’s Madonna with the work of his predecessor and teacher, the painter Andrea Verrocchio.

Madonna and Child

Andrea Verrocchio

Around 1473-1475

Wood, tempera

The Madonna of the Flower was originally painted on wood, but for greater preservation it was transferred to canvas in 1824.

In 2012, the painting turned 534 years old.

"MADONNA LITTA"

There are so many paintings depicting the Virgin Mary that the most famous ones are usually given nicknames. Often the name of one of the previous owners sticks to them, as happened with the “Madonna Litta”.

The painting, painted in the 1490s, remained in Italy for many centuries. Since 1813, it was owned by the Milanese Litta family, whose representatives knew very well how rich Russia was. It was from this family that the Maltese knight Count Giulio Renato Litta came, who was in great favor with Paul I and, having left the order, married his nephewItse Potemkin, becoming a millionaire. However, it has nothing to do with Leonardo’s painting. A quarter of a century after his death, in 1864, Duke Antonio Litta turned toHermitage, recently became a public museum, with an offer to buy several paintings from the family collection.

Angelo Bronzino. Competition between Apollo and Marsyas. 1531-1532. State Hermitage Museum

Da Vinci's painting arrived in Russia in very poor condition; it had to not only be cleaned, but also immediately transferred from board to canvas. So the first one appeared in the Hermitage« Leonardo» .

By the way, here is an example of disputes over attribution: did Leonardo create the “Madonna Litta” himself or with an assistant? Who was this co-author - his student Boltraffio? Or maybe Boltraffio wrote it entirely, based on Leonardo’s sketch?
This issue has not yet been finally resolved, and the Madonna Litta is considered a little dubious.

Leonardo da Vinci had many students and followers - they are called "Leonardeschi". Sometimes they interpreted the master’s legacy in a very strange way. This is how the type of nude “Mona Lisa” appeared. The Hermitage has one of these paintings by an unknown author - “Donna Nuda” (“Naked Woman”). It appeared in Zimny ​​during the reign of Catherine the Great: in 1779, the Empress acquired it as part of the collection of Richard Walpole. In addition to her, the Hermitage also houses a large collection of other Leonardesques, including a copy of the dressed Mona Lisa.

"MADONNA BENOIS"

Previously, the painting was owned by her father, the Astrakhan millionaire merchant Alexander Aleksandrovich Sapozhnikov, and before him, by her grandfather Alexander Petrovich (grandson of Semyon Sapozhnikov, who was hanged in the village of Malykovka by one young lieutenant named Gavrila Derzhavin for participating in the Pugachev riot). The family said that “Madonna” was sold to the Sapozhnikovs by wandering Italian musicians who somehow ended up in Astrakhan.

Vasily Tropinin. Portrait of A.P. Sapozhnikov (grandfather). 1826; portrait of A.A. Sapozhnikov (father), 1856.

But in fact, Sapozhnikov’s grandfather purchased it in 1824 for 1,400 rubles at an auction after the death of the senator, president of the Berg College and director of the Mining School Alexei Korsakov (who apparently brought it from Italy in the 1790s).
Surprisingly, when after Korsakov’s death his collection, which included Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt and other authors, was put up for auction, the Hermitage bought several works (in particular, Millet, Mignard), but neglected this modest “Madonna”.

Having become the owner of the painting after Korsakov’s death, Sapozhnikov began restoring the painting; at his request, it was immediately transferred from board to canvas.

Orest Kiprensky. Portrait of A. Korsakov. 1808. Russian Museum.

The Russian public learned about this painting in 1908, when the court architect Leonty Benois exhibited the work from the collection of his father-in-law, and the chief curator of the Hermitage Ernst Lipgart confirmed the hand of the master. This happened at the “Exhibition of Western European Art from the Collections of Collectors and Antique Dealers of St. Petersburg,” which opened on December 1, 1908 in the halls of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts.

In 1912, the Benois couple decided to sell the painting; the painting was sent abroad, where experts examined it and confirmed its authenticity. London antique dealer Duveen offered 500 thousand francs (about 200 thousand rubles), but in Russia a campaign began for the state to purchase the work. The director of the Hermitage, Count Dmitry Tolstoy, addressed Nicholas II. The Benois couple also wanted “Madonna” to remain in Russia, and eventually lost it to the Hermitage in 1914 for 150 thousand rubles, which were paid in installments.