Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #3 T. J. Clark's "The Chill of Disillusion"

Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks (1483-1486)

In this series, “Top Ten Exhibition Reviews,” I’ve emphasized description as a key critical component. Another important element is comparison. The best critics are always comparing. One of the most memorable exhibition reviews I’ve ever read is T. J. Clark’s “The Chill of Disillusion” (London Review of Books, January 5, 2012, a review of the National Gallery’s 2012 Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, in which he thrillingly compares the two versions of Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks. Clark puts us squarely there, in the room with the two paintings: 

In the middle room of the Leonardo show at the National Gallery you can swivel on one heel and see, almost simultaneously, the two versions of his Virgin of the Rocks. They face one another across 15 yards or so. There is no reason to think the two paintings will ever share the same space again, at least in my lifetime, and maybe they never have before. For the longer one looks at the pictures and puzzles over what scholars have to say about the scrappy documents that mention them, the less likely it seems that Leonardo painted the one in sight of the other. 

Clark contrasts, among other things, certain details: the drapery (“The most striking case is the way the Virgin’s robe meets the ground. In Paris it crumples slowly, heavily, elaborately: one feels the material falling and spreading as the result of its own weight and consistency. And it is gently analogised with the folded rock strata below. All of this is gone in version two”); the light (“In the Paris painting – we are sometimes advised to despair in the face of its dirt and discoloured varnish, but again, the present showing coaxes the object back to life – there is a time of day, I think, a sunset touch; and the condition of the atmosphere is worked out in the detail of light in the foreground. Experts talk about the later version going further with Leonardo’s mature investigations of modelling and materialising the illuminated body – the contours and orientation of the Virgin’s face are good examples – and they are right; but the substance, the cold three-dimensionality, is abstract. The light is not of this world”); the river and mountain landscape (“In the Paris painting it is otherworldly, yes, but for that very reason familiar. Its space and atmospherics are those of the Alps going north from the Lakes, the wild Chiavenna we know Leonardo delighted in; and the onset-of-sunset glow reminds us of everything in non-supernatural experience that regularly transfigures things and makes them mysterious – makes nature not ours. Substituting glacial blue for pale yellow, as I reckon Leonardo did in 1508, is putting a (marvellous) lantern slide in place of a true act of memory and imagination”).

As he proceeds, it appears Clark prefers the Paris version. Regarding the cold unworldly light of the London picture, he says, “what goes by the board in London is the very thing we may value most in Italian painting: the sense of the sacred belonging to a reality we recognise, and one whose strangeness is built from the strangenesses of nature.” Then, suddenly, he pivots: 

I go too far. The London picture is prodigious. The point of description cannot be to demote or belittle it – in a sense I think we have never, since Wölfflin, given the painting its due – but to grasp what kind of prodigy it is. 

He considers another detail – the unfolded yellow lining of the Virgin’s cloak. He writes,

In the Paris picture (whatever the changes brought on by time) there was a connection, I am sure, between the yellow fold and the light in the sky. The lining, spellbinding as it is – separate from and superior to its being a condition of some stuff in the sun – is a dream condensation of the yellows of late afternoon. In Paris the lining still has softness: it is conceivable as folded, touched by human fingers. The yellow emerges, at first quite gradually, from under the stretched canopy of blue. It is the inside of a garment spilling out. We may see it as a concentration of the landscape light, but also as a way of bringing that far light closer – optically, seemingly accidentally – in a manner that viewers can accept as actually happening, here among the rocks.

Then he asks, “Does any of the above apply to the fold in London?” His reply:

I doubt it. The lining in 1508 participates in the painting’s overall crystalline abstraction – its nearness without tangibility. It is of the essence of the London panel – the key to its invention of a new kind of pictorial space – that everything in the foreground, yellow, blue, marble grey, ghostly grey-green, takes on from the world in the distance only the river’s bleak cold.

My coarse summary of Clark’s exhilarating review fails to do it justice. I know zilch about Renaissance painting. But I know great art writing when I see it. In his effort to “grasp” what kind of prodigies these two paintings are, Clark soars:

Look again at the angel in Paris with the pointing finger. There had never been a figure like it before in painting, and there never would be again. It is not just the foot on the grass and the pointing finger that are uncanny: it is the pose as a whole, spreading out laterally, half turning towards us, but meeting our eyes from an utter remoteness; and the roll of the green sleeve and the long pale arm inside its diaphanous puff of drapery; and the astonishing – unthinkable – explosion of rich red, tying the figure to a world of flesh and blood but spreading and unfolding far beyond (it feels like) the mere frame of the illusion. No wonder all this – this overflowing wish-fulfilment – had to be corrected in 1508. The London angel’s drapery is still elusive, but at least now it adheres to a possible anatomy: it does not just seem to occur as the brush tries out a new colour. Colour drains away. The angel’s shoulders come out of their carapace. The figure is clear and coherent (comparatively) but also (comparatively) unfelt. It is as if the invention had been put back inside a box – robbed of its first fairytale unfolding.

Wow! That “the astonishing – unthinkable – explosion of rich red, tying the figure to a world of flesh and blood but spreading and unfolding far beyond (it feels like) the mere frame of the illusion” is amazing. The whole piece is amazing – a review that’s every bit as good as the two masterpieces it describes. 

Postscript: I hasten to add that “The Chill of Disillusion” is not the only Clark piece I treasure. Others include “Grey Panic” (Gerhard Richter), “The Urge to Strangle” (Henri Matisse), and “Relentless Intimacy” (Paul Cézanne). All are “Top Ten” material.