Leonardo’s Facial Mystery
The discovery that great portraits do not depict identifiable people, as long believed, is a real eye-opener. (See the book free online titled Every Painter Paints Himself.) Yet the significance of what you can now see in portraiture can only be grasped when one recognizes that even depictions of biblical figures in Renaissance art, in which each character should have a separate sacred identity, do not. My prime example is Leonardo da Vinci's portrayal of St. Anne (left, c. 1508) and St. John the Baptist (right, c. 1513-16) in separate paintings, both now in the Louvre. They have hung in the same room for well over a century. The two faces, clearly of different genders, are identical - same features, hairstyle and smile, same pose, point-of-view and lighting. Leonardo must have gone to great lengths to ensure this similarity given that he inverted and rotated St Anne's face when using it for John's. He did not make the similarities approximate but exact. That is why the similarity is so important, significant and meaningful yet, as far as I can tell, it has never been noted in modern times. Yet Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American poet, wrote home after a visit to the Louvre in the nineteenth century:
"Leonardo da Vinci has more pictures here than in any other gallery & I like them well despite of the identity of the features which peep out of men & women. I have seen the same face in his pictures, I think, six or seven times."1
The reason why Emerson and a large number of visual artists can see the similarities while ordinary viewers cannot, even while in a room with both pictures, is because each group uses a different type of visual perception. Ordinary viewers expect different figures so that's what they see. Emerson and artists, on the other hand, on the same poetic wavelength as Leonardo, would have known that different poems by a great poet never depict the outer world but the inside of a single mind where each character is an aspect of its author. Many still believe that what we see in Renaissance art is what the patron ordered but we now know from examples like this that that cannot be so. Patrons in the Renaissance were probably as fooled as we were.
Re-published with slight revision; originally appeared 21st July, 2010.
1. Cited in a New York Times review on Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology, ed. Adam Gopnik (The Library of America) 2004
Posted 10 Apr 2013: AndrogynyVisual MetamorphosisLeonardo da VinciPortraitureVisual Perception
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Reader Comments
Doesn’t it strike anyone as a little odd that while one is the face of a woman, the other is that of a man, yet, as the post so accurately points out, the faces are identical?
To my eye, the painting of St. Anne is clearly feminine, but, since they are identical, St. John is also clearly feminine.
William
09 Jul 2013