Leonardo da Vinci's Saint John the Baptist in Milan

An event promoted and organised by Eni and the Milan city council, in cooperation with the Louvre.

The event
Leonardo da Vinci
Programme
Video
Details
Gallery
Links

Leonardo in Milan, San Giovani Battista

From 27 November to 27 December 2009 Palazzo Marino will open its doors to the public for another extraordinary event, repeating the previous experience dedicated to Caravaggio, with a monographic exhibition of the highest order.

Promoted and organised by Eni and the Milan city council, in cooperation with the Louvre and with the patronage of the Italian Ministry of Arts and Heritage, curated by Valeria Merlini and Daniela Storti, the exhibition: Leonardo in Milan From the Louvre to Palazzo Marino an extraordinary showing of the painting San Giovanni Battista by Leonardo da Vinci will offer to the public free access, for the entire month, to admire and absorb one of Leonardo da Vinci's greatest masterpieces.

The loan of San Giovanni Battista is part of a wide-ranging collaboration between Eni, the Milan city council and the Louvre, and once again makes the city of Milan and Palazzo Marino protagonists, a year after the showing of the Conversione di Saulo by Caravaggio, of a public exhibition of unquestionable value

The painting San Giovanni Battista is one of the most enigmatic works of Leonardo da Vinci and marks a high point in his artistic achievement. The aim of this exhibition is to show the work in optimum circumstances, in terms of space and lighting, repeating the monographic approach that characterised last year's success with the Caravaggio work from the Odescalchi collection.
Leonardo's San Giovanni Battista was completed in the artist's studio, in 1517, in Cloux in France, where he was to spend the last years of his life. The painting has only been seen in Italy once before, also in Milan, in 1939, on the occasion of an exhibition dedicated to the work of Leonardo, before it returned to France where it is on permanent display.
The exhibition will offer visitors a preparatory path, with a display of panels, images and videos providing background information to facilitate a greater understanding of a painting in which the magnetic gaze of the subject, with its enigmatic smile – which so recalls the even more celebrated Mona Lisa – and the spiritual recall symbolised by the harmoniously blended hand gesture.

Leonardo da Vinci and the principal episodes of his life, as told by Carlo Peretti, the noted scholar of the life and work of the Italian genius.

Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 in Vinci, a small hamlet of a few houses ranged around a medieval castle at the foot of Montalbano.
The village, which is half way between Florence and Pisa, has all the appearance of being quite cut off from the world but is, in fact, at the crossroads of important communication routes.
At the age of seventeen or eighteen he moved to Florence where his father, a notary, had secured for him an apprenticeship in the studio of Verrocchio. The road he took, on foot or horseback, of some forty kilometres along the banks of the Arno, still exists.
It was the same road that in all probability had led him to Pisa and the attractions of an unusual landscape in which the rocky formation of the surrounding mountains often take on the primordial character that can be seen in the background of the Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre, the first Milanese painting, commissioned in 1483 when the artist was thirty years old.
Leonardo spent twelve years of systematic training and intense experimentation in Florence and soon came under the protection of his almost contemporary Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-1492), a refined humanist, shrewd merchant, astute statesman and able politician, but above all an incomparable diplomat, in other words, a master of communications. For the young Leonardo, Lorenzo was a fascinating example of the techniques of communication, for whom the persuasive effectiveness of the word was based on eloquence and psychology. These were tools with which Leonardo would refine his own visual language, adopting a form of "speaking" imagery that, with the Adoration of the Magi, painted in 1481 (when he was twenty-nine) highlights the intensity of animated gesture and an iconographic impact that is like a silent film.
All of the work of Leonardo the painter and theorist of painting, and so every manifestation with which he gave voice to the idea that art should be seen as a form of creative awareness, and therefore of science and philosophy, is a lesson that we continue to draw even today. It is an immediate lesson that, whether in traditional media, those that in historical enquiry are still irreplaceable, and new electronic media, that provide an incomparable support also to historical research but are only now beginning to demonstrate their real value and efficacy, having overcome an initial, inevitable novelty phase.

Then again also Leonardo like to play games. Sigmund Freud noted as much in 1910 when he observed that "even the great Leonardo, spent a great part of his life in an infantile state. It is said that all great men conserve something of the infantile, and he continued to play into adult life and this was why he seemed at times disturbed and incomprehensible to his contemporaries."

And, at a distance of five centuries, today he seems even more disturbed and incomprehensible, largely the result of having been more studied than understood. We have rediscovered his genius, but we have lost the man. During a visit to Pavia in January 1490, in the company of the architect from Sienna Francesco di Giorgio Martini where they were to provide some advice on the construction of the city's cathedral, Leonardo, who at the time was thirty-two, was attracted by the genial layout of the rooms of one of the city's most celebrated brothels and made a drawing of the floor-plan as a model for a "whorehouse". It can be found in the pages of one of his manuscripts of the period.
On the same page, at the same time, Leonardo annotated: the catena aurea (the golden chain), which is the title of the great Thomist commentary on the gospels. A small but sure sign of how the real Leonardo, can finally re-emerge in the new millennium. He died the first time in France on 2 May 1519, and many other times in the writings of his successors. The very same successors that proclaimed his immortality.

Carlo Pedretti Director of the Hammer Centre for Leonardo da Vinci Studies.

Milan, Palazzo Marino
Sala Alessi
Piazza della Scala 2
Free admission
24-Hour Information Service
Tel. 02.45.07.69.10

Opening hours

Every day from 11:00 am to 7:30 pm
(last entrance at 7:00 pm)
Thursday to Saturday from 11:00 am to 10:30 pm
(last entrance at 10:00 pm)
On 24th December closing at 6:00 pm

Schools and group visits

Opening hours: Every day from 9:00 am to 11:00 am
Reservation mandatory
Tel. 02 65.97.728

A telephone booking service is active from Monday to Friday from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm and from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm.

Press Offices

Exhibition Press Office
Lucia Crespi, tel. 02 89.41.55.32 - 02 89.40.16.45
lucia@luciacrespi.it

Eni Press Office
Tel. 02.52.03.18.75 - 06.59.82.398
ufficio.stampa@eni.com

Municipality of Milan Press Office
Tel. 02 88.45.01.50
comunicazione.ufficiostampa@comune.milano.it

Organization Contact Information
ALEART - Cinzia Manfredini
Tel. 0372.22.046 - mobile 348.27.21.574
c.manfredini@aleartprogetti.com

The glance
The almost squinting but fascinating glance of the Baptist immediately captures our attention, calms our worries and encourages us to reflect. It is not a straightforward glance, San Giovanni doesn't just look at us: he leans toward us with an evident change in his point of balance. The gesture of his torso is a clear reference to the fact that the saint is addressing us and wants to draw us in.

The smile
The smile is that of the blessed, the smile of one who is acquainted with the divine mystery, in that he is also its messenger and the smile of San Giovanni is extremely content.
It is not, as one might be tempted to think, a blasphemous smile. Rather, it is the smile of an initiate, in contact with divine truth; an angel who announces to us the coming of Christ and who is, at the same time, joyous. The smile as a testament of faith, the smile of a prophet, of one who speaks in the name of Christ, before Christ; an annunciation.

The hand
The right hand points to heaven and is the third gesture of the Baptist, showing his three fingers, a symbol of the trinity. This robust figure, in all his ambiguity is the symbolic announcer of the Truth. The gesture of the right hand is what in rhetoric is known as the deictic, in other words that which indicates the message of the painting. Once included in the hazy mirror, thanks to the magic of the glance and filtered by the seductive, sedative and sensual effect of beauty, thanks to an interior meditative process, the index finger of the Baptist projects us out of ourselves, and out of the mirror, towards divine heights, taking us back to an entity so superior that it cannot be represented.

The skin
The spotted skin is difficult to make out, and many scholars have mistaken it for the skin of a camel, which is what the sources indicate. In fact, the spots have emerged clearly as a result of reflectography. The element of the spotted skin was included by Leonardo in a symbolic sense, there is no other justification for the deliberate act of distancing himself from an iconographic tradition that went back for centuries, which foresees the use of the skin of a camel. The spotted skin is that of a lynx, a symbolic animal that alludes to prophetic vision and that can be included in a broader category which, in the sixteenth century imagination, is analogous to the panther. Perfumed animals that attract other animals precisely by their irresistible smell, like the panther (and the lynx) become an image of Christ; the good preacher who calls the faithful to himself with the perfume of his words.