Secret_History

Afterword 673
and 1508, he produced the second, or “London version”, of the Madonna of the
Rocks [See Plate 22.]. It is believed that the first was done to fulfill a contract with
the Milanese Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. Apparently, they didn’t
like it, and it passed into the hands of the French. The Confraternity commissioned
a second version in which Ambrogio da Predis was to have a share of the work.
Arguments and lawsuits between him and Leonardo and the Confraternity
followed, and twenty-five years passed before the Confraternity finally got the
version they wanted.
It is in comparing the two paintings that one gets the feeling that the first version
must have conveyed a message that the Confraternity wanted to suppress, and in
the second version, apparently acceptable to them, Leonardo managed to deliver
his message anyway. Either that, or he had little to do with the second version.
The Louvre version is generally accepted as Leonardo’s, but there is continuing
doubt about the National Gallery version.
In any event, the compositional changes reveal to us, apparently, what the
Confraternity objected to. They obviously objected to the angel, seated beside the
infant Jesus, pointing at the infant John the Baptist. They probably asked for halos
to be included, but I think Leonardo added the “reedy cross” across the shoulder of
John on his own initiative.
The paintings are about equal in size, but the figures in the second version are
brought closer to the viewer and made “heavier” and “more idealized” as though
they are made of stone. The colors of the second version have been subdued to the
point of actually looking as though they are dead bodies - a corpselike pallor
seems to deliberately emphasize that the “message” of the painting is “death”.
The item in the first painting that has received the most comment is the strange,
almost threatening hand of the Virgin. Let’s look at the hands from the two
versions side by side, keeping in mind all of Leonardo’s comments about “telling a
story” with his paintings, the gestures of the hands, and so on. I don’t think the
hand is threatening at all, as we will soon discover.
Now, let’s take a look at another of Da Vinci’s works: The Last Supper... [See
Plate 23.]
The Last Supper is said to be the “freezing of a moment in time”, the moment
when Christ has just spoken the words, “One of you shall betray me”, and the
disciples all react to the words with magnificent displays of poses and gestures,
“revealing the intentions of their souls”. Leonardo undoubtedly made many studies
before he began to paint, but only two of them are left to us today. One of them is
hastily - even roughly - drawn and shows all of the figures, even if they are not
lined up in a row behind the table. Unable to place all of them at the table because
of the small size of the page he was drawing on, he placed four of them at the
bottom. However, his intention was clear because he placed a repeated