The Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci continues to amaze centuries later. Italian experts have discovered that his famous painting The Virgin of the Rocks, of which two versions are preserved (one in the National Gallery in London and the other in the Louvre Museum in Paris), hides the drawing of a dog in the background of the painting. . But what did Da Vinci want to express with this?
In the same way as the rest of his work, his paintings are infused with symbols and social commentary of the time. Over the years, restoration and emerging technologies have revealed new details and allowed us to achieve new ways of interpreting. Sometimes these processes can solve centuries-old mysteries, such as the Mona Lisa’s eyebrows.
The Virgin of the Roses, which is currently on display at the Louvre, illustrates the Virgin Mary, the baby Jesus and John the Baptist, as well as an angel in the foreground. However, since the work was finished there was a hidden element that no one had been aware of until recently. It is a dog, which is located in the upper left part, between the vegetation and the stones in the background of the religious scene.
How the experts discovered the dog
Silvano Vinceti is the president of the National Committee for the Assessment of Historical Heritage, and explained to the media the details of this matter: “We have achieved this result with the essential help of a new method, which combines the most advanced technology with simple instruments . A special magnifying lens allowed our team to carefully examine each of the features of the work.”
“And then specific Photoshop software allowed us to cover it up, break it down and put it back together,” says Vincenti, who was at the center of the discovery of Caravaggio’s remains in Porto Ercole and the bones of the alleged Mona Lisa model. in Florence, he gave credit for this new “deed” to Roberto Biggi, a committee investigator. So there is no doubt, da Vinci placed a dog in his painting… But why?
The dog hidden in the vegetation “offers a totally different reading of Virgin of the Rocks,” Vinceti suggests.
“For Leonardo, the dog has a precise meaning, ‘do not disobey’, as he himself writes in one of his works. The leash is then an addition, since in the hunt of medieval and Renaissance times it represented a tool that allowed the owner prevent the dogs from eating the prey.
“For Leonardo, therefore, the dog on a leash is the symbol of man who must obey God, the divine commandments, Jesus, the life that Jesus perfectly incarnated to express Christian love.”
This discovery, for experts, consolidates an interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci as the custodian of a rigorous religious belief. “Until now his paintings have been approached from the point of view of painting technique and style,” says Vinceti, “but we have lost sight of the fact that Leonardo, through the composition of his paintings, achieved a storytelling in pictures.
“Leonardo could not express certain criticism against the papacy because then there were Innocent VIII, Alexander VI, the Borgia popes and above all the Inquisition,” says Vinceti.
Hence the idea that Leonardo chose to express his criticism of the papacy of his time through iconographic language: “That dog on a leash over Saint John the Baptist in the composition is Leonardo’s accusation of the corruption of the papacy that then privileged the temporal power over spiritual power.”
As da Vinci once wrote, “painting is the beauty that clothes the truth.”