“Leonardo da Vinci: Geological Representations in The Virgin and Child with St. Anne”
By Ann C. Pizzorusso
Da Vinci Press New York, 2021
Note: The following are my thoughts on what I found most enlightening about this booklet and should not be read as a review. - JK
Ann Pizzorusso’s 58-page booklet “Leonardo da Vinci: Geological Representations in The Virgin and Child with St. Anne” had me from its first paragraph:
“When Leonardo da Vinci left Florence for Milan in 1482, he spent considerable time exploring the Alps. In 1500 he arrived in the Veneto area and saw the Dolomites…, mountains which are a part of the northeastern Alps.” (p.5)
A few years ago, I was fascinated to discover that in addition to his polymathic interests and studies, da Vinci was also one of the pioneering Italian mountaineers. Later, I learned more about his underreported excursions into the Lombardy mountains, where he climbed such peaks as Mount Rosa, the second-highest elevation in the Alps between Italy and Switzerland. But this was the first time I’d read that he also visited the Dolomites, distinguished by their jagged peaks.
Later, Pizzorusso provides minor details, noting that da Vinci visited “the Alpine regions” of Veneto “in the early months of 1500” (p.14). This suggests to me that da Vinci visited the region sometime after he left Milan for Florence in late 1499, after the French invaded the city, and he visited Mantua and Venice early the next year.
A geologist and Italian Renaissance scholar, Pizzorusso determines in her 2021 booklet that da Vinci’s painting Virgin and Child with St. Anne is set in the Dolomites (p. 10), and she provides graphics pointing to its distinct geological features, including a glacial canyon, ravine and avalanche chute (p. 19).
Pizzorusso also explains how such features were formed over hundreds of millions of years (and lists a glossary of definitions for the technical vocabulary), and notes that they were rendered with da Vinci’s trademark precision:
“Because of his artistic prowess, he captured the geologic formations so accurately that we are able to identify them readily… The attention to detail imparts realism to the scene, even if it is in a minute area of the background.” (p. 20)
The preceding are among several facts I’d learned from reading this brief booklet about da Vinci’s St. Anne, my favorite of his compositional paintings, which I first saw at the Louvre in 2023.
My photo of da Vinci’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne at the Louvre in Paris.
I also found enlightening the graphics Pizzorusso superimposes on the painting, outlining the pyramidal structure of its human figures. She also applies these graphics to a series of stair-step rock ledges on which the subjects rest, providing stability to their apparent imbalance. (Similarly, she notes that in da Vinci’s earlier, unfinished painting Adoration of the Magi, the Virgin sits on a rock and her feet are at a stratified ledge.)
Additionally, Pizzorusso highlights the bed of colorful rocks and pebbles below Anne’s feet, called jaspers and banded agates that were eroded by wind and water into rounded shapes, which da Vinci portrayed with “astonishing accuracy,” she writes (p. 22). What is also news to me is Pizzorusso’s paragraph about a doctor who interpreted some rocks and pebbles at St. Anne’s feet as embryos. But Carlo Pedretti, the late preeminent da Vinci scholar, dismissed this claim as “an insult to Leonardo’s sense of decorum,” she writes (p27).
I also learned that scholars have never identified the species of the large coppery brown tree in the painting’s landscape. But through a process of elimination of various species, Pizzorusso determines that it is a common ash tree (Fraxinus excelsior). She notes that da Vinci was “a pioneer in botanic representation,” and cites some of his achievements in the field, including that “he conducted the first research into what is known today as hydroponics…,” and that his Codex Urbinas “provides a wealth of information on his observations of trees and the proper techniques to be used in depicting them in paintings.” (p. 34)
(Incidentally, in the notebook that I wrote in on first seeing the St. Anne, which includes several observations of unfinished areas, was this note: “[I] never noticed small trees under the large tree.”)
“Because of his artistic prowess, he captured the geologic formations so accurately that we are able to identify them readily… ”
Interestingly, Pizzorusson writes that da Vinci considered many factors to achieve a unifying tonality in the painting, including the color of the tree in relation to the gray-white and blue-gray mountains and the coppery red rocks in the foreground. Da Vinci also had to consider environmental light and “how far away the tree was from the viewer as well as the atmospheric conditions which might affect how it would be seen,” she writes.
Pizzorusso even draws on da Vinci’s expertise in cartography. She notes how the exquisite topographical maps he produced reveal developments in bird’s-eye views of lands and draftsman techniques that more clearly defined mountain heights and water depths, imparting “a three-dimensionality to his maps,” she writes. However, she doesn’t write that this mapwork informed his geological representations in the St. Anne (p. 50). Yet this page features an image of a topographical map da Vinci drew of Tuscany from 1503-04, which I know was around the same years he was involved with plans to divert the Arno River, build a canal, and turn swampy marshes into a reservoir. Such work would have further informed his geological knowledge, all before he started to paint the St. Anne.
Pizzorusso also notes that other artists picked up on da Vinci’s geological representations. She features The Resurrection, a painting by his pupils Marco D’Oggino and Antonio Boltraffio, which, she writes, “shows rock formations depicted with the utmost care” and that are “accurate enough to be identified.” (p. 49)
Pizzorusso’s booklet also features several impressive modern photographs of the Dolomites’ terrain, revealing the meadows that divided its mountains, including those with autumnal colors that closely resemble the landscape in St. Anne.
Prior to reading “Leonardo da Vinci: Geological Representations in The Virgin and Child with St. Anne,” I published an article about my experience seeing da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks in London last year. For research, I read Pizzorusso’s informative article on the geology in both versions of that composition. I bought this booklet expecting a similarly enlightening experience and it delivered.
Above all, this booklet confirmed for me what I had already expected, that is, da Vinci painted the St. Anne with the utmost fidelity to nature (while taking some license for artistic stylization), and that he did visit the Dolomites before he created this painting that survives at the Louvre. It helped open my eyes to features of the painting I’d never noticed or knew existed. Ultimately, thanks to this booklet, I’ll be a more knowledgeable author when writing about St. Anne.