The best criticism can show something familiar in a new and revealing light. And there’s little that’s as familiar to us as Leonardo’s work; to re-purpose some lines of RS Thomas’s, his paintings ‘are tired of returning the hard stare / of eyes. The sculptures are smooth / from familiarity’. So this, from The Collected Prose: 1948-1998 by Zbignew Herbert and quoted here, caught my eye:
Looking at the paintings of Watteau, Chardin, Renoir, you see that they possess the same beauty of surface, the same tranquillity, the same grace of color. Leonardo knew too much for a painter. It seems that painting his beautiful heads, he couldn’t free himself from the thought of the skull, the brain, the network of veins, of everything he learned from the autopsy of corpses. Shouldn’t a painter know only the skin of the world? At every step, Leonardo the painter was ambushed by Leonardo the anatomist. And hence the sad wisdom and the melancholy of knowledge in his paintings.
