PARIS — An intense and contentious restoration of the last great work by Leonardo da Vinci goes before the public today at the Louvre Museum, revealing The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne in the full panoply of hues and detail painted by the Renaissance master 500 years ago.
The 18-month-long restoration of the painting on which the artist labored for 20 years until his death in 1519 will go a long way to raising Saint Anne to its place as one of the most influential Florentine paintings of its time and a step toward the high Renaissance of Michelangelo.
The cleaning has endowed the painting, which portrays the Virgin Mary with her mother, St. Anne, and the infant Jesus, with new life and luminosity. Dull, faded hues were transformed into vivid browns and lapis lazuli.
“It’s unbelievable, so beautiful. Now you have that same feeling as when you enter Michelangelo’s restored Sistine Chapel. Look at the blue,” one visitor, Odile Celier, 66, said Wednesday.
The exhibit brings together some 130 preparatory drawings and studies by da Vinci and his apprentices — something curator Vincent Delieuvin likened to “a police investigation” — tracing the painting’s conception and revealing to experts today the entire development over the last 20 years of the artist’s life.
The display of sketch books and mathematical diagrams hold clues to not just unlocking the art behind the painting but also, for the man who was more famous in his day as an engineer, the years of scientific research that defined his work.
“The exhibit is a science workshop,” Delieuvin said. “For Leonardo, art is founded on theoretical knowledge of nature and its functioning.”
One notebook that spills with mathematical sketches shows the progression over several years as the artist painstakingly studied light refracting from opaque objects. It decodes the technique that made da Vinci famous. The St. Anne painting is a glowing example clearly seen in the blue opaque mantle with its almost imperceptible play on light and shadow.
The key to the hazy realism of the tree, too, with the subtle contrast of light in its leaves was found by infrared used during the restoration. To get this effect, the artist first painted the entire tree structure in full and only afterwards painted the foliage on top.
Another notebook presents detailed analysis of water and air compression that shows the thinking that went into creating the sweeping blue and gray mountains that rise up behind St. Anne and child.
Seventeen years ago, the Louvre abandoned an attempt to clean the painting for fear the solvents were affecting the sfumato, a painting technique that da Vinci mastered.
Museum officials eventually gave the green light for the cleaning in 2009. Last year, two of France’s top art experts, Jean-Pierre Cuzin and Segolene Bergeon Langle, resigned from the Louvre advisory committee responsible for the restoration, amid reports they were angry that restorers were cleaning the work to a brightness da Vinci never intended.
The museum confirmed last year’s resignations but said it could give no further details.
However, on seeing the final product, Bergeon Langle, France’s national authority on art restoration, has partly buried the hatchet.
In an interview in the Louvre’s in-house magazine, she said she has been reassured on some aspects that bothered her. But she also said she remained unhappy about other points of the restoration. She notably criticized the decision to remove a white patch on the body of the infant Jesus, which she said was painted by da Vinci himself.
A discovery that restorers stumbled across during the cleaning of the painting points to another mystery, this one in da Vinci’s hometown of Florence and linked to his missing masterpiece The Battle of Anghiari, also known as “The Lost Leonardo.”
After infrared photography was used to scan the Louvre work, the exhibit shows that two pictures were found that had been secretly hidden in the painting for hundreds of years.
One, drawn by a lefthanded artist, is thought to be by da Vinci, who was lefthanded.
It is a depiction of the hatchings on a horse’s head, similar to that in the mural of The Battle of Anghiari.
Curator Delieuvin would not speculate on the finding — or another more dramatic discovery linked to the lost work revealed earlier this month in Florence.
There, researchers said they may have discovered traces of this lost mural by da Vinci by poking a probe through cracks in a 16th-century fresco by Giorgio Vasari painted on the wall of the Palazzo Vecchio, one of the city’s most famous buildings.
The research team leader Maurizio Seracini of the University of California said The Battle of Anghiari could be hidden behind the fresco done by Vasari years later.
The Louvre exhibit, “Saint Anne, Leonardo da Vinci’s Ultimate Masterpiece,” runs to June 25.
Front Section, Pages 6 on 03/29/2012