USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Beauty and the Uncanny: Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks

                                                                         

                                                           

                                                            

                                                                           

                                                                                        

                                                                                               Beauty and the Uncanny 

                                                    Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks

Using the setting of the tender scene involving the Christ child, his mother Mary,  the infant John the Baptist and a female looking  angel  inside  a cavern, with the gentle  tableau softly illuminated by a small flow of light from the cavern entrance, the Florentine master Leonardo da Vinci  creates, in his Virgin of the Rocks, one of the greatest evocations of the feminine  I have ever encountered in any medium,  the version shown here being at the National Gallery, London, the other being at the Louvre, Paris.

Imagine placing Jesus and his mother in a cavern, the cave being the province of earth centred spiritualities. 

Beginning  from that point, Leonardo creates a unique  vision out of an old and much treated Christian, Biblical subject  of the relationship between Jesus, the Messiah, and John, his forerunner, the two figures being shown as children, evoking the understanding that  they were divinely destined before birth to play the roles they did as adults.

The painting encompasses for me  a mysterious element, difficult to explain, an element that expands its evocation of female centred  spiritual realities to include the uncanny, a central feature in depictions of goddesses.

Mystery, as suggested by the cave/underground setting of the scene with its soft, semi-dark lighting, the tender and yet evocative silences of Mary and the angel, two women, human and divine, their robes somber and majestic; maternal power, evoked by the sensitivity with which they regard and guide the children, Mary's hand outstretched in a move suggestive of both benediction and declaration, enables the painting to embody a broad strata of female centred veneration from  many cultures.

 The two women in the painting   could be related to accounts  of  goddesses because of the various associations the painting makes with a universal symbolic language pointing to such associations.  

Central to these visual codes  are the cave setting and the crepuscular lighting, contexts that suggest the arcane and the esoteric, and through light, the possibility of entry into this mystery.

The cave may also take us to the nurturing darkness of the womb, resonant in its conjunction of the human and the other than human represented by the life animating the body of the child as the new human being  grows in the womb.

Humanity, divinity, material form imbued by a directing mystery-these qualities of the womb as creative space for bringing life into being may be seen  as evoked by this painting by  the Italian Renaissance master. 

 Another element evocative of the mysterious is the looks on the women's  faces, expressing, paradoxically, both remoteness and tenderness, an unhuman elevation from the moment,  together with a sensitivity to the care of the children they dote over.

This paradoxical look on the women's faces evokes for me something of the uncanny, a sense of something just beyond the edges of my understanding of reality, but not so remote from it as not to demonstrate a strong appeal in the contrast of the known with the strangeness coming from the unknown, represented by these figures in this setting. 

The quality of the uncanny in Leonardo first emerged for me from an unforgettable flash  from a print of Leonardo's Mona Lisa which a friend, Brother John Marie Osuide, had hanging in his room. As I looked at the painting, the painting seemed to momentarily peel away its surface to reveal a deeper level not ordinarily discernible. At this level  the placid beauty of the surface was replaced by something frightening, unsettling,  beyond the scope of my experience and understanding of life, something disruptive to my assured  universe. 

On mentioning this experience to my friend, he told me he had had a similar experience with the painting. 

His keeping the painting on his wall is likely to have had to do with his own practise of the Christian version of goddess  devotion since  he was an  ardent devotee of the Virgin Mary.

This sense of something  mysterious and disturbing in these Leonardo paintings of women is akin to various cultures', artists'  and writers' expressions of a relationship between the feminine and the uncanny. 

A central writer in this context  is the French poet  Pierre August Baudelaire. Another is the German poet Rainer Marie  Rilke.

 Rilke's Duino Elegies begins with a despairing cry expressing a fear of the beauty of the angels,   describing beauty  as the first glimmerings of the terrible. 

Baudelaire, for his part, in "Hymn to Beauty", wonders if the beautiful woman he refers to comes  from heaven or from hell.

 Baudelaire's  perplexity is mirrored powerfully in Marion Zimmer Bradley's novel   Sharra's Exile,  in which,  as a  character enters into trance,   a strange beauty emerges :

 "Suddenly in the emptiness, a face sketched itself on my mind. I cannot describe that face, although I know, now, what it was.  I saw it three times in all. There are no human words to describe it; it was beautiful beyond imagining, but it was terrible past all conception. It was not even evil, not as men in this life know evil; it was not human enough for that...Only a fraction of a second it burned behind my eyes, but I knew...."

This fictional account resonates strongly  with a similar vision described by Misanthropic Shaman, responding to a review on Amazon.com on   Shambhavi Chopras's book on the terrible and yet maternal Hindu goddess Kali, Yogic Secrets of the Dark Godess 

( Accessed 29 March 2014 ): 

"I have had somewhat frightening meditative experiences where I have reached a place of profound horror and beauty. I perceive a Dark Feminine Force, I don't know what to call her (perhaps Kali, perhaps not). All I know is that she creates, and simultaneously devours her own creations in an ongoing process of creation and destruction. Somewhat alarmed and confused by these visions, I am searching Hindu beliefs/practices to try to make sense of the experience."

David Kinsley's masterly survey of the development of the image of Kali from terrible, volatile goddess to still terrible and yet maternal goddess in The Sword and the Flute:Kali and Krsna: Dark Visions of the Terrible and the Sublime in Hindu Mythology sums up such  visions:

"The divine as revealed to man or apprehended by him, has always shown the tendency to surprise, delight, and stun, to overpower man in ecstasy or overwhelm him with fear and trembling."

Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks exemplifies unforgettably Immanuel Kant's summation of a powerful work of art as something that is  capable of evoking infinite associations, and as something created by the mind but which cannot be fully understood by the mind. 

The masterly  composition of the figures in Leonardo's  Virgin of the Rocks in relation to the unusual setting, the relationship between setting and figural composition in the context of a balance between light and darkness, the correlation of facial expression, gesture and clothing, enables this  great achievement unifying the beautiful and the uncanny.