The Madonna of the Yarnwinder

Press reports of the trial concerning the theft of Leonardo’s The Madonna of the Yarnwinder, prompted me to go to the Scottish National Gallery and have yet another look at it. Few, I imagine, would elect any of the great trio of High Renaissance artists, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael as favourite painters. They inspire awe rather than delight. Probably the greatest draughtsmen who ever lived, they reached such perfection in the concerns of painters of their age,d that those who followed them were stymied for a time as what to do. It was only when Caravaggio showed that saints could be wrinkled and bald and even paunchy, that, with this new realism and heavy light and shade, Western painting was given a new lease of life.

With Leonardo in particular, the wide area where he employed his genius, somehow comes between the spectator and the paintings. It certainly came between Leonardo and the ability to finish them. Could we have had the crowning achievement of the whole Renaissance, if The Adoration of the Kings had been completed? Some may consider that his range of interests has caused certain paintings to be overloaded. Wouldn’t The Virgin of the Rocks, in both its versions, be more digestible if Leonardo hadn’t felt the need to bring to them all the fruits of his enquiries into geology and botany? Then there is The Mona Lisa with all the stuff about the enigmatic smile and the idea that the eyes follow you about. The composition of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne is beautifully resolved in drawings, but in the painting something more ambitious with very complicated poses is attempted and the work left unfinished.

But there are Leonardo paintings with a subtlety of detail and handling unique in the history of art, that have all the serenity of any Piero della Francesca. The portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci in Washington and the beautiful Lady with an Ermine in Cracow are such works. The Madonna of the Yarnwinder is another. This small painting makes every other work around it in the Scottish National Gallery look ordinary, the Raphaels, the Verrochio, the Perugino. The Wemyss Botticelli if it weren’t on loan to the Städel in Frankfurt would suffer the same fate.

I note that Kenneth Clark in his book on Leonardo, first published 1939, revised 1958, describes The Madonna of the Yarnwinder as a very good copy of a lost work. I doubt this. Copies of Leonardo are invariably squirm-makingly awful, witness the copies of the lost Leda and the Swan. The Madonna of the Yarnwinder is simply stunning.

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