Description:
man; interior; death/mourning; costume/uniform
Label Text:
The Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci spent his last years in France, having been lured to service at the French court by King Francis I. This deathbed scene, showing the artist expiring in the king's arms, is one of the great legends of art history, symbolizing the transference of Renaissance art ideals from Italy to France in the early 16th century. Ingres became the most fervent champion of those ideals in the 19th century, painting a number of works with historical subjects--Joan of Arc, for example, and other French kings--in which he consciously evoked the style of Leonardo and other early Italian Renaissance artists. This subject, commissioned by a French count to accompany a scene from the life of Henry IV, exists in several versions. Ingres had been unsatisfied with the first painted version and reworked the composition for the museum's painting, which remained in his studio until his death in 1867. In the left background, Ingres included Leonardo's most famous painting, the "Mona Lisa," among the witnesses to the solemn event.
This canvas is a later variant of a painting done in 1818 for the Comte de Blacas, a prominent statesman who was the French ambassador to Naples and then Rome. Blacas, an ardent amateur of art, admired Ingres and helped him acquire important commissions. The Death of Leonardo da Vinci belongs to a group of paintings executed in the troubadour style [define] between 1814 and 1825. Among them are such prominent works as Raphael and the Fornarina of 1814 (Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA) and Paolo and Francesca of 1818 (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Angers), both of which likewise exist in multiple versions. The troubadour paintings, usually small in scale, are rich in narrative and detail, vibrant in color, and eloquent in their manipulation of line.
The Death of Leonardo da Vinci, like Raphael and the Fornarina, focuses on the life of a famous artist, an immensely popular theme, but one that is here given a political resonance. [Or, “The death of Leonardo had been a subject for paintings from the late seventeenth century onward, most famously in Francois-Guillaume Menageot’s version shown in the Salon of 1781 (now where), but Ingres gives the topic a particular political resonance.”] Leonardo died on May 2, 1519, at the Chateau du Clos-Luce, near Amboise. While it is documented that Francis I wept upon hearing of Leonardo’s death, there is no proof that he was present at the event. Ingres, however, depicts a story taken from Vasari’s Vite of 1551, which relates that Francis arrived at the last moment to catch the expiring genius in his arms.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1950.98 |
