Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Leonardo
Italian; 15th-century, 16th-century
London, England: The National Gallery
92%
The Burlington House Cartoon. c1508. Charcoal with white chalk on paper, mounted on canvas
There can be a stultifying sort of completeness (almost a hermeticism) to Florentine pictures of the High Renaissance which this large drawing, by dint not just of the facts and affordances of its medium but moreover of Leonardo's masterful deployment of them, substantially circumvents. In its toying with unfinish and implication it manages to resolve itself aesthetically more than many of Leonardo's other pictures ever do. That a fully formed upper half of the Christ Child emerges from a miasma of chalk and charcoal; that the two most prominent feet in the foreground are incomplete in completely different ways; that the general description of the two women makes it seem as though they've been plucked from separate pictures; that the background is in a constant state of threatening to appear, although it never does — but that, nonetheless, the modeling is as firm as that in any cinquecento image of this ilk, and that there's unity wherever the image's weak formal overtures fade off into the shadowed space between figures: all of that is what places this among the great Renaissance artworks. (TFS, 2025)