Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Leonardo da Vinci
Italian; 15th-century, 16th-century
London, England: The National Gallery
92%
The Burlington House Cartoon. c1508. Charcoal with white chalk on paper, mounted on canvas
There can be a stultifying sort of completeness (almost a hermeticism) to Florentine pictures of the High Renaissance which this large drawing, by dint not just of the facts and affordances of its medium but moreover of Leonardo's masterful deployment of them, substantially circumvents. In its toying with unfinish and implication it manages to resolve itself aesthetically more than many of Leonardo's other pictures ever do. That a fully formed upper half of the Christ Child emerges from a miasma of chalk and charcoal; that the two most prominent feet in the foreground are incomplete in completely different ways; that the general description of the two women makes it seem as though they've been plucked from separate pictures; that the background is in a constant state of threatening to appear, although it never does — but that, nonetheless, the modeling is as firm as that in any cinquecento image of this ilk, and that there's unity wherever the image's weak formal overtures fade off into the shadowed space between figures: all of that is what places this among the great Renaissance artworks. (TFS, 2025)
Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum
69%
A Miracle of Saint Donatus of Arezzo. 1475-79. Oil on panel (attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, with Lorenzo di Credi)
This panel was once a predella, so we're missing a lot of its point when we judge it as a standalone artwork. But it's been removed from its altarpiece and it's displayed by itself in the museum, so what else can we do? Each figure is extremely well modeled, and the robes of the angel in particular have a fulsome beauty, contoured as they are by those lighter tones on his back. But the space in which we find these figures isn't articulated to quite the degree it ought to be: Donatus is too squarely framed by the portal behind him and the trees behind that, and the angel's gestures fail to find an adequate groove with the architecture. It's not impossible that the rest of this panel's original altarpiece would have justified some of its shortcomings, but as it stands it's a minor work. Cool that there's a Leonardo (attributed) in Worcester, though! (TFS, 2025)