The Virgin and Child with St. Anne - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

See also The Virgin and Child with St. Anne (iconography)
Anna selbdritt
Anna selbdritt, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne - is a subject in Christian art, showing Saint Anne with her daughter, the Virgin Mary, and her grandson Jesus. This type has been quite popular in Germany from the 14th century.-See also:...

The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne is an oil painting

Oil painting

Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil—especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil. Often an oil such as linseed was boiled with a resin such as pine resin or even frankincense; these were called 'varnishes' and were prized for their body...

by Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...

depicting St. Anne

Saint Anne

Saint Hanna of David's house and line, was the mother of the Virgin Mary and grandmother of Jesus Christ according to Christian and Islamic tradition. English Anne is derived from Greek rendering of her Hebrew name Hannah...

, her daughter the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus

Child Jesus

The Child Jesus represents Jesus from his Nativity to age 12. At 13 he was considered to be adult, in accordance with the Jewish custom of his time, and that of most Christian cultures until recent centuries.The Child Jesus is frequently depicted in art, from around the third or fourth century...

. Christ is shown grappling with a sacrificial lamb symbolizing his Passion

Passion (Christianity)

The Passion is the Christian theological term used for the events and suffering – physical, spiritual, and mental – of Jesus in the hours before and including his trial and execution by crucifixion...

as the Virgin tries to restrain him. The painting was commissioned as the high altarpiece for the Church of Santissima Annunziata

Basilica della Santissima Annunziata di Firenze

The Basilica della Santissima Annunziata is a Roman Catholic minor basilica in Florence, Italy, the mother church of the Servite order. It is located at the northeastern side of the Piazza Santissima Annunziata....

in Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

and its theme had long preoccupied Leonardo.

History

In 1498, Leonardo probed into incorporating these figures together by drawing the Burlington House Cartoon

The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist

The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist, sometimes called The Burlington House Cartoon, is a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, believed to have been executed c.1499-1500. The drawing is in charcoal and black and white chalk, on eight sheets of paper glued together. Because of its...

(National Galler 2008, a curator at the Louvre

Louvre

The Musée du Louvre – in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre – is one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement...

discovered several faint sketches believed to have been made by Leonardo on the back of the painting. Infrared reflectography was used to reveal a "7-by-4 inch drawing of a horse's head", which had a resemblance to sketches of horses that da Vinci had made previously before drawing "The Battle of Anghiari". Also revealed was a second sketch 6 inch-by-4 inch depiction of half a skull. A third sketch showed the infant Jesus playing with a lamb, which sketch was similar to that which is painted on the front side. The Louvre spokesperson said that the sketches were "very probably" made by Leonardo and that it was the first time that any drawing had been found on the "flip side of one of his works". The drawings will be further studied by a group of experts as the painting undergoes restoration.

Freud's interpretation

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

undertook a psychoanalytic examination

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...

of Leonardo in his essay Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood
Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood
Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood is an essay written by Sigmund Freud about Leonardo Da Vinci's childhood. It consists of a psychoanalytic study of da Vinci's life based on his paintings.-The Virgin and Child with St. Anne:...

. According to Freud, the Virgin's garment reveals a vulture

Vulture

Vulture is the name given to two groups of convergently evolved scavenging birds, the New World Vultures including the well-known Californian and Andean Condors, and the Old World Vultures including the birds which are seen scavenging on carcasses of dead animals on African plains...

when viewed sideways. Freud claimed that this was a manifestation of a "passive homosexual" childhood fantasy that Leonardo wrote about in the Codex Atlanticus

Codex Atlanticus

The Codex Atlanticus is a twelve-volume, bound set of drawings and writings by Leonardo da Vinci, the largest such set; its name indicates its atlas-like breadth. It comprises 1,119 leaves dating from 1478 to 1519, the contents covering a great variety of subjects, from flight to weaponry to...

, in which he recounts being attacked as an infant in his crib by the tail of a vulture. He translated the passage thus:
According to Freud, this fantasy was based on the memory of sucking his mother's nipple. He backed up his claim with the fact that Egyptian hieroglyphs represent the mother as a vulture, because the Egyptians believed that there are no male vultures and that the females of the species are impregnated by the wind.

Unfortunately for Freud, the word 'vulture' was a mistranslation by the German translator of the Codex and the bird that Leonardo imagined was in fact a kite

Kite (bird)

Kites are raptors with long wings and weak legs which spend a great deal of time soaring. Most feed mainly on carrion but some take various amounts of live prey.They are birds of prey which, along with hawks and eagles, are from the family Accipitridae....

, a bird of prey which is also occasionally a scavenger

Scavenger

Scavenging is both a carnivorous and herbivorous feeding behavior in which individual scavengers search out dead animal and dead plant biomass on which to feed. The eating of carrion from the same species is referred to as cannibalism. Scavengers play an important role in the ecosystem by...

. This disappointed Freud because, as he confessed to Lou Andreas-Salomé

Lou Andreas-Salomé

Lou Andreas-Salomé was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and author. Her diverse intellectual interests led to friendships with a broad array of distinguished western luminaries, including Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud, and Rilke.- Early years :Lou Salomé was born in St...

, he regarded Leonardo as 'the only beautiful thing I have ever written'. Some Freudian scholars have, however, made attempts to repair the theory by incorporating the kite.

Another theory proposed by Freud attempts to explain Leonardo's fondness of depicting the Virgin Mary with St Anne. Leonardo, who was illegitimate, was raised by his blood mother initially before being 'adopted' by the wife of his father Ser Piero. The idea of depicting the Mother of God with her own mother was therefore particularly close to Leonardo's heart, because he, in a sense, had 'two mothers' himself. It is worth noting that in both versions of the composition (the Louvre painting and the London cartoon) it is hard to discern whether St Anne is a full generation older than Mary.

Content and Composition

Leonardo's painting is at once both pleasing, calm yet confusing upon closer examination. The composition of the three figures is fairly tight, with the Virgin Mary clearly interacting actively with the infant Jesus. However, upon closer examination of the positioning of the Virgin and St.Anne one realizes that the Virgin Mother is sitting on St.Anne's lap. It is unclear what meaning this could have and what meaning Leonardo intended to project with that pose. There is no clear parallel in other works of art and women sitting in each other's lap are not a clear cultural or traditional reference that the viewer can relate to. Additionally, although the exact sizes of neither the Mother Virgin nor St.Anne are known, it can be easily extrapolated from the painting that St.Anne is a significantly larger person than Mary. This subtle yet perceptible distortion in size was utilized by Leonardo to emphasize the mother daughter relationship between the two women despite the apparent lack of visual cues to the greater age of St.Anne that would otherwise identify her as the mother.