THE BAPTIST AND THE BACCHUS
‘The story goes’ – says Vasari –
that when the Pope commissioned a work from him, Leonardo immediately set to work distilling oils and plants to make the varnish, at which Pope Leo exclaimed, ‘Oimè, costui non e per far nulla, da che comincia a pensare alla fine innanzi il principio dell’opera’ [‘Alas this man will never do anything, because he is already thinking of the end before he has even begun the work’].
This expresses well the Pope’s prickly relationship with Leonardo (though he was not the first of Leonardo’s customers to express such exasperation), and the departure of Giuliano at the beginning of 1515 introduces a note of uncertainty into Leonardo’s status at Rome. It will be a troubled year.
It is possible that the work commissioned by this Florentine pope was a painting of Florence’s patron saint, St John the Baptist. This is only a guess, but Leonardo’s half-length St John (Plate 28) is certainly a late painting – quite possibly his last – and it may have begun in this way. If so the Pope’s contemptuous comment shows also his limited understanding of Leonardo’s art, for it was precisely those subtle distillations of ‘oils and plants’ which gave the St John its lustrous, multi-layered picture surface, its aura of mystery and evanescence. Among the retorts and alembics of the Belvedere studio Leonardo contemplates his ‘capricious mixtures’ (as Vasari calls them), and contemplates the shape and mood of the painting he will create with them. The patron is impatient – ‘Oimè!’ – not perceiving that the master is already at work.
There are actually two late paintings of St John the Baptist by Leonardo, both now in the Louvre. There is the half-length, dark-grounded St John, mentioned above, and there is the larger painting of him full length, sitting in a landscape, which it is convenient to call St John in the Desert, though by virtue of certain additions to the figure – apparently added long after Leonardo’s death – the painting is often referred to as St John with the Attributes of Bacchus (page 473). There is not a scrap of documentation for either of these paintings. All we know is that one of them – a ‘San Iohanne Baptista giovane’ – was seen by Antonio de Beatis in France in 1517, and that both were in the French royal collection by the seventeenth century. The St John in the Desert may be the earlier of the two: the tree in the landscape can be compared to the tree in the Louvre Virgin and Child with St Anne. The date-range for these late works is broad, but in its beauty and mystery the half-length St John seems more than any of them an enigmatic final statement, or indeed a final question. According to Beatis, Leonardo was no longer painting in France, but one cannot quite imagine a painting he had with him standing or hanging in his studio without an occasional touch here, or another layer of varnish there, from the master or his pupils, and so the period of ‘composition’ – if the activity is not too attenuated for this word – would extend on into the last years and days of his life.
Angelic transformations. Pupil’s study of the announcing angel on a sheet of c. 1504–5 (left), and the full-frontal Angelo incarnato of the Roman years.
Like all these late works, the St John is the final stage of a long process of definition and redefinition. The earliest recorded stage is a small sketch at Windsor which is on a sheet containing studies for the Battle of Anghiari and is therefore datable to c. 1504–5.23 Compositionally the St John has its roots in that Florentine period in which other late works like the Leda and the Virgin and Child with St Anne also germinated. The Windsor sketch actually shows an announcing angel – the angel Gabriel – rather than St John, but the pose is the same, with the right forearm pointing vertically upward, and the left hand pressed against the chest. The sketch is in the hand of a pupil (Salai? Ferrando Spagnolo?), but it is probably Leonardo who has corrected the angle of the right arm. The composition is precisely reflected in a painting now in Basle, by an unknown ‘follower’ of Leonardo, and in a drawing by Baccio Bandinelli, the Florentine sculptor best known for his public spats with Michelangelo and Cellini, and for his statue of Hercules and Cacus outside the Palazzo Vecchio.24 Both these later versions combine the face of the half-length St John with the particular pose of the angel in the Windsor sketch. There are also studies of that left hand: one in the Codex Atlanticus is by a pupil; the other – a superb study in red chalk at the Venice Accademia – is Leonardo’s.25
The most extraordinary variant of this figure is a small drawing on blue paper, rediscovered in 1991, having been sequestered for years in the private collection of a ‘noble German family’.26 In this the ‘angel’ – in the same pose, but no longer with a wing to identify it as an angel – is shown with a disturbingly ambiguous face, a pronounced female nipple, and, beneath the gauzy veil of the cloth which he holds in his left hand, a large erection. (An effort was made at some point to erase this last feature, resulting in a grey-brown discoloration around it: this is the original colour of the paper showing through the blue preparation of the surface.) The drawing is datable to c. 1513–15 – the Rome years – and is probably contemporary with St John.
This troubling image, now generally called the Angelo incarnato – the ‘Angel made flesh’ – caused a sensation when it was first exhibited in New York in 1991, and has since exercised scholars and indeed psychiatrists. André Green writes:
Here one meets all the contradictions, not only between feminine and masculine, but between a certain ecstasy and a sadness tending almost to anguish. The mouth is too sexy and childish, closed and half-open, dumb and about to speak. The curling hair is an attribute which may be of either sex. We feel, in short, uneasy and this is doubtless further provoked by the erection which can be seen behind the veil. There is perhaps something satanic behind this angelic being, but we cannot say if our anxieties of interpretation reflect our own difficulty in finding an overall coherence in the work, or if they stem from the incompatibility of heavenly aspirations and orgasmic pleasures.27
The art-therapist Laurie Wilson sees ‘the perverse ugliness’ of the drawing as arising from ‘difficulties in representing or controlling negative feelings’ – a product, one might gloss, of sexual guilt.28 There is a challenge in such ugliness – an invitation to respond to the drawing as a kind of specialist transsexual pornography. The angel has become an unsavoury-looking catamite fished up from the lower reaches of the Roman flesh-market. The angelic salutation is travestied as the prostitute’s come-on; the hollows of the face suggest sickness, which in turn suggests syphilis; and there is a needy, pleading look in those unpleasantly large, doll-like eyes. (Curious how the big eyes are already a feature of the pupil’s angel-sketch of c. 1505: this is a part of the initial conception.)
There is some background to this, because there had always existed a current of imagery – scurrilous or symbolic, according to how it was presented – referring to the Annunciation as a kind of impregnation of the Virgin by the angel Gabriel, who brings the Holy Spirit which ‘quickens’ her womb. The erotic interpretation of this is found in such risqué works as Pucci’s Queen of the Orient, which Leonardo knew and quoted from, in which a young man’s prodigious member is said to be a gift from the angel Gabriel: ‘She said: “My love where did you get that thing?” And he replied: “The Angel Gabriel by the will of God manifested it to me”. “No wonder” (said she) “that it’s such a beauty if it’s come straight down from heaven.”’ 29 The blasphemous idea of the Annunciation as an erotic encounter is heard in Elizabethan England, where the Earl of Oxford, a louche young aristocrat who had travelled extensively in Italy, liked to scandalize his dinner-guests by saying that ‘Joseph was a wittol [i.e. cuckold]’, and where Christopher Marlowe, that great Elizabethan exponent of Machiavelli, was reported as saying that ‘the angel Gabriel was bawd to the Holy Ghost because he brought the salutation to Mary.’30
The ‘salutation’ to Mary is precisely expressed by the raised right hand in the sketches and drawings of the announcing angel which we find from c. 1505, and in the Angelo incarnato the gesture is given this tarni
shing overtone of prostitution which is part of sixteenth-century atheistic lore.
All this seems to recall that cryptic note which Leonardo wrote, and then crossed out, on a sheet now in the Codex Atlanticus. The sheet is also datable to around 1505, as there is once more a small Anghiari horse on the verso. The words Leonardo wrote are ‘When I made a Christ-child you put me in prison, and now if I show Him grown up you will do worse to me.’ The first part of the sentence has been interpreted as referring to his run-in with the Officers of the Night in 1476, which possibly involved a painting or terracotta featuring Jacopo Saltarelli as the youthful Christ, and the second part to some later proposed work which Leonardo feared would prove even more scandalous. The subtext of this is the troublesome adjacency of homosexuality and spirituality in his depiction of angels and young Christs: the models he used were sexually desirable young men, and a certain homoerotic charge is present in all his angels (the Annunciation, the Virgin of the Rocks, the San Gennaro terracotta) and is most luridly incarnated in the full-frontal Angelo incarnato.
The relationship between this angel and the Louvre St John is paralleled in other late works – compositional variations on a theme, as in the different positionings of Leda or the shifting group of the St Anne ensemble – but in the St John the variation is a kind of concealment, almost a bowdlerizing. The right arm no longer extends forward, exposing the front of the angel or saint; it crosses over his chest, concealing that budding adolescent breast, and also concealing those graceful fingers of the left hand (though it remains precisely the same left hand in the part that is visible). Further concealment is provided by the cloak of animal fur, and indeed by the positioning of the lower edge of the painting, which cuts the body off above the hips. The hollow-eyed visage of the Angelo incarnato has transformed into a lustrous, glowing face framed in rich auburn curls: the androgyny of the figure is expressed without being explicitly specified, as in the drawing. In retreating from the sexually specific, Leonardo creates a more profound and elegant ambivalence. The Louvre painting retains an almost poignant trace of the homosexual come-hither – and the likeness of the face to an idealized image of Salai anchors this to Leonardo’s personal life – but it is subsumed into the numinous lustre of the painting. The tone of malady and corruption in the Angelo incarnato has been healed by those magical ‘oils and plants’ distilled at the Belvedere. Slowly, soothingly, repeatedly they are applied to the panel, layer by superfine layer, until the figure we see there – at once sexual and spiritual, masculine and feminine, sinner and saint – seems to resolve all the conflicts of our divided and irresolute lives.
Though figuratively and gesturally linked to the announcing angel, the Angelo incarnato contains another reference entirely, and could equally be entitled the Bacco malato, or ‘Sick Bacchus’, a motif well known in the work of Caravaggio.31 This would suggest a modulation between Christian and pagan iconography of the sort we find in the Leda. Leda is a pagan version of the Madonna, an image of miraculous motherhood who has been impregnated not by the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove but by a notoriously randy classical deity disguised as a swan.
Bacchus is the Roman version of Dionysus – the name is a corruption of Iacchus, an epithet given to Dionysus for his rowdiness (from the Greek iache, a shout) – and, like Dionysus, he is more than the god of wine and revelry: he is an archaic principle of generative nature, and thus priapic as represented here by Leonardo. He was a son of Jupiter, and was said to have ‘sprung from Jupiter’s thigh’ (because after the death of his mother, Semele, Jupiter sewed him in his thigh to nurture him) – undoubtedly a further coding of him as phallic. The figure of Bacchus is comparable to that of Leda – a symbol of pagan fertility and generation – and it would appear this link was specific, once again, to Leonardo’s output around c. 1505, for it was at precisely that time that the Duke of Ferrara was writing letters about a certain ‘Bacchus by Leonardo’, and in so far as the letters refer to someone who owns it, this seems to be a genuine lost work emanating from Leonardo’s Florentine studio, at much the same time as the early studies for Leda. This lost Bacchus may have had certain figurative similarities to the Windsor drawing of the announcing angel, also c. 1505.
The sickness of Bacchus, to which the later, Roman, ‘angel’ alludes, is part of his nature as a vegetation or fertility god: it indicates the post-generative, post-coital withering – he is an autumnal god, a god of decline. In Leonardo’s version he is still tumescent while incipiently sick – a dynamic of time or process is woven into the drawing. The party is almost over, but not quite.
This Bacchic theme is also germane to the other Leonardo painting of St John, the full-length St John in the Desert, which specifically has the attributes of Bacchus. The painting is first documented in the French royal collection at Fontainebleau in 1625. It is described in early Fontainebleau catalogues as ‘St Jean au désert’, but in the 1695 catalogue this title is crossed out and substituted with ‘Baccus dans un paysage’.32 This has led to the assumption that the Bacchic attributes – the panther-skin, the crown of vine-leaves, the grapes, and the Bacchic staff or thyrsus formed from the Baptist’s cross – were added in the late seventeenth century. Technical examination neither confirms nor refutes this hypothesis (X-ray analysis cannot help: the painting was treated with white lead when it was transferred to canvas in the nineteenth century, and this renders it opaque to radiation.) It is equally possible that this modulation between the Baptist and the Bacchus was part of the original conception, and was simply not noticed by
St John in the Desert, later catalogued as a Bacchus.
the early cataloguers. The Baptist was traditionally represented wearing a coat of sheepskin, which becomes a panther-skin by the addition of some spots or speckles – panthers were at this time considered synonymous with leopards.33
An early variant of the painting, attributed to the Leonardo follower Cesare da Sesto, suggests that this pagan overtone was intrinsic to the Leonardo St John. Cesare was himself in Rome in about 1513, and may have had contact with Leonardo there. His Baptist precisely echoes Leonardo’s, even down to the splayed big toe of the left foot.34 He is not a Bacchus – there is no coronet of vine-leaves, no panther-skin, no bunch of grapes – but two things strike me. The first is that the face of Cesare’s Baptist has something of the sickly pallor and hollow eyes of the Angelo incarnato, and also his gauzy mantle. The second is that the cross he rests in the crook of his left arm is entwined at the tip with a snake, and thus becomes an allusion to the caduceus of Mercury. Mercury, the messenger or herald of the gods, is a parallel to St John the Baptist, who was sent to ‘prepare… the way of the Lord’, and can also be related to that other messenger, the angel Gabriel. So here Cesare too is playing the game of pagan attributes and accoutrements, and this persistent but protean figure from Leonardo’s late years takes on another shape – Angel, Baptist, Bacchus, Mercury: messengers of the spirit-world, of new life quickening in the midst of sickness and death. ‘Who is it who rekindles this flame which is always dying?’
THE DELUGE
And then the thunder spoke…
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
On the verso of the Angelo incarnato are three words in Leonardo’s hand, originally written in red chalk, then gone over, by him, in the same black chalk or charcoal that he used for the drawing on the other side. They read:
astrapen
bronten
ceraunobolian
This curious list is a transliteration of three Greek words, meaning ‘lightning flashes’, ‘storms’, ‘thunderbolts’. They have been related to a description by Pliny of the legendary prowess of the Greek painter Apelles, who could ‘depict that which cannot be depicted’, namely atmospheric phenomena such as these.35 Leonardo was often compared to Apelles in gratulatory poems, and mentions him admiringly as one who painted ‘fictions full of great meanings’;36 now, near the end of his career as a painter, we here find him pondering the magical power of the painter
or draughtsman to capture the fugitive, inexpressible effects of Nature in violent agitation – Sturm und Drang.
Leonardo had always vibrated to the drama of storms. That early literary fragment about the cave actually begins with a description of a storm – ‘a whirling wind racing through a deep sandy valley, its rushing movement driving to its centre everything that obstructs its furious course’. In his painter’s notes of the early 1490s there is a passage on ‘How to represent a tempest’:
You must first show the clouds scattered and torn, and flying with the wind, mixed with clouds of sand blown up from the seashore, and boughs and leaves swept along and scattered with other light objects which are flying around… while the wind flings sea-spray around and the stormy air takes on the look of a dense and smothering mist.37
In these descriptions there is a sense of huge vectors and currents at work, and of the different materials which move in different ways through them, and act as markers of the storm’s invisible potencies. We have glimpsed him on the rainswept strand at Piombino, studying the complex mechanics of crashing breakers. On another occasion, near Florence, he watched with awe the effects of a whirlwind:
The returning eddies of the wind… strike upon the waters and scoop them out in a great hollow, and lift them into the air in the shape of a column with the colour of a cloud. I saw this on a sandbank in the Arno. The sand was hollowed out to a depth more than the height of a man, and the sand and gravel were whirled around in a scattered mass over a wide area. It appeared in the air in the form of a great bell-tower, and the top spread out like the branches of a huge pine tree.
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