November, 2009, Painting of the Month
 Leonardo da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine
(prob. about 1490)
Among Leonardo’s less
famous is this careful study of a
young woman holding an
“ermine”. The lady is supposed
to be Cecilia Gallerani -
daughter of a mercantile family
some of whose accounts are of
scholarly interest in the history
of accounting. Presumably the
ermine (actually, a ferret) is a
pet, not an animal raised for its
fur, but we do not really know.
Everything is very carefully
modeled. The paint is applied
with great attention to detail.
Every aspect of lighting is
under complete control. Most
commented on by critics is the
use of the “three-quarters”
profile - in this case, the
woman has faced to our left,
but her eyes are directed to
our right, so her head is turned quite dramatically, exposing a perfect and somewhat long
neck.
Coloration is also extremely careful, particularly in that the lady’s skin is not quite the same
color as the pure white of the ermine, but it’s rather close. The colors of her clothing and hair
only serve to accentuate her skin.
There is also great subtlety at work here. The position of the woman’s hand is carefully
thought out, somewhat below the center of the canvas. In fact, what is at the center is the
lady’s breastbone. What is closest to that point is actually the animal’s head. The beads of
the necklace are distinct from those of a rosary, but reminiscent of one. I do not know the
origin of the use of beads to assist the rosary, but the practice was certainly old by
Leonardo’s time.
There are certain slight incongruities, despite the care (or, given that it’s Leonardo we’re
talking about, probably because of the care) lavished on the work. The lady has remarkably
large hands. Her mouth is slightly uneven from left to right. Her eyes are also slightly uneven
and remarkably widely spaced. Her shoulders slope to an extent almost impossible without
some physical pathology. Admittedly the Renaissance style of her dress might contribute to
this, but it is difficult to see how the dress could stay on, given how steep the slope of the
shoulders is.
What are we to make of these slight difficulties? Can it be that the master has been careless?
Or can it be that the purpose of these slight flaws is to direct our attention to the execution of the artistic work, so that we think not only of Cecilia Gallerani and her ferret but also of the
painter and his work?
Or is there something else at work here? Someone (I have no idea who) has called this the
“first truly modern portrait”. I’m not sure what that means, but it might have been a judgment
pronounced in the heyday of abstract expressionism - it sounds fairly recent. And
understanding this painting as exhibiting a degree of abstraction may be the key; in fact, it may
be an important feature of all of Leonardo’s works. Note, for example, that there is nothing
behind the figure. Note the broad swaths of color. Note the pose, intended perhaps to
capture the lady in the act of turning to look at something to her left.
In others of Leonardo’s works, such as the famous “Mona Lisa” and the “Last Supper” we
also see exquisite care with the geometry, even at the expense of making parts of the painting
unbelievable or seemingly arbitrary. Can it be that Leonardo was looking ahead by centuries,
towards the time when abstractions from reality would become the subjects of works of art,
and reality itself would take a back seat?
In an unfortunate book (Progress in Art; I say “unfortunate” both because the work is too
often ignored and because it contains some serious errors as to the intellectuality of science
and mathematics) Suzi Gablik (p. 70 f.) calls attention to the Renaissance as the birthplace of
abstraction. In this, I think she gives too much credit to the Renaissance and not enough to
other times and places, but the point remains. She gives a curious quotation from Piaget:
It is precisely because it enriches and develops physical reality instead of merely extracting from it a set of read-made structures that action is eventually able to
transcend physical limitations and create operational schemata which can be formalized
and made to function in a purely abstract and deductive fashion.
I’m not quite sure what this means, and it may mean very little - very little except this, given the context of Gablik’s book: art can create out of the materials of reality something that has
a wholly new intellectual structure. Art need not be dependent purely on the details of what is
depicted; instead, the human mind can take art to a new and useful or interesting level.
And who would lead us better in that direction than Leonardo?
|
All text on this page is the work of J W Durham and is licensed only under terms
of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
United States License. Other licensing terms may be available.