One of the greatest geniuses of the Renaissance era, Leonardo da Vinci combined the talents of artist and scientist, inventor and thinker. Only around a dozen of his original paintings have survived down to the present day. The two pictures in the Hermitage collection are a particular pride of the museum. The Benois Madonna is an early work by the artist. For its time this was a truly cutting-edge piece. If it were not for the golden halos, the painting might pass for a genre scene of a young Italian woman playing with her son. Mary’s clothing and hairstyle follow Florentine fashion of the late 15th century. Painted from a specific model, her facial features are far from ideal. She is showing the child a flower and he is reaching out for the unfamiliar object, clumsily trying to grasp it while holding on to his mother’s hand with his own small one to prevent her taking this new plaything away. Mary seems not to suspect that the flower – a bitter cress with petals arranged in the form of a cross – is a symbol of the coming Crucifixion. The emphatically physical, corporeal nature of the personages, the naturalness of their poses and gestures, and the tangible quality of the medium of light and air – everything here produces an illusion of life. Leonardo was first among the Italian artists make illumination in a painting specific. One of the sources of light here is the small window in the wall; the other is located outside the picture space – in front and to the left. Between them they generate a complex play of light and shade in the scene that involves the figures as well. Leonardo’s painting obtained its present name, the Benois Madonna, from that of its last owner, the wife of the court architect Leonty Benois. In 1914 this masterpiece was acquired for the Hermitage.
Rosalba Carriera was a Venetian Rococo painter. In her younger years, she specialized in portrait miniatures. It is for this that she was able to build a career in portraiture. Carriera would later become known for her pastel work, a medium appealing to Rococo styles for its soft edges and flattering surfaces.
This beautiful and mysterious portrait depicts one of the most romantic and tragic female figures of the fifteenth century. At the age of only nineteen Mary of Burgundy was the sole heiress to the huge territories of the Duchy of Burgundy, and thus the wealthiest and most eligible woman in Europe. Remarkably, and against all the odds in an age of dynastic marriage politics, she found real happiness in her betrothal to the young Archduke (later Emperor) Maximilian of Austria, who described her as ‘the most beautiful woman’ he had ‘ever seen’. Her happiness was, however, to be cut short by her untimely death less than five years later in a hunting accident.
