Leonardo da Vinci's 'Angel' lands in Westwood

It is said that Queen Victoria got rid of Leonardo da Vinci's drawing "Angel in the Flesh" as part of a 19th century effort to purge pornographic -- or at least erotic -- images from the British Royal Collection. Now that Leonardo's modest slip of blue paper is on view (for barely more than a week) at the Italian Cultural Institute in Westwood, its first U.S. visit, another possible explanation emerges.

"Angel in the Flesh" is one ugly drawing. Maybe Vickie was just acting on an opinion of aesthetic dismay.

Drawn late in Leonardo's life, probably between circa 1513 and circa 1515 when he was living at the Vatican in Rome (he died in France in 1519 at age 67), the black chalk or charcoal rendering shows an angelic adolescent with deep-set doe eyes, pouty collagen lips and a cascade of fluffy hair. The feminine boy, vaguely tipsy, looks like he might have just rolled out of bed -- which, given the crude rendering of an erect phallus in the torso's sketchier lower extremities, is entirely possible. (Leonardo's student and reputed boyfriend, Salai, may have been the drawing's model.) A poorly foreshortened -- and unfinished -- right arm is raised to point toward heaven, a gesture that adds a funny homoerotic twist to Leonardo's lascivious depiction.

Ugly or not, the drawing is of historical interest simply because it is by a linchpin of Italy's High Renaissance. "Angel in the Flesh" has been connected to paintings of the annunciation of the Virgin Mary in the Uffizi and St. John the Baptist prefiguring Christ's martyrdom in the Louvre. Given Leonardo's homosexuality, the drawing's bleary fusion of the sacred and the profane within a distinct Catholic context is of considerable note.

To beef up the spare presentation at the ICI, Bill Viola's 2002 video, "The Last Angel," also plays on a flat-screen monitor in the gallery. To a swelling rumble on the soundtrack, a diver's body breaks the shivering surface of water and suddenly vanishes, as if transitioning between states of being (birth? death? consciousness?). But the work's solemn, dramatic mystery doesn't hit quite the right note for "Angel in the Flesh" nearby. Instead, the ICI would have done better to borrow from the Broad Art Foundation Jeff Koons' life-size porcelain sculpture of John the Baptist clutching a penguin and pig, a cheerfully atrocious knickknack derived from the Louvre's Leonardo. Queen Victoria would certainly have understood.

The drawing is accompanied by a second sheet, cut up in the 16th century but its parts reunited here, which shows a clever mechanical apparatus for a theatrical production about Orpheus. The presentation is on view until Saturday.

-- Christopher Knight

Photo: Leonardo da Vinci 's "Angel in the Flesh." Credit: Italian Cultural Institute

Comments

[Donald Frazell]

Dang hatin on the old dude,arent ya, CK?
I have never cared for Leonardo that much, few of his inventions ever worked, they are more for nerdy types because they looked cool than true engineering types. And his painting was overrated, usually experimenting badly, and failing. Most everything, from the incredibly overated Mona Lisa to the Last Supper started fading or in the Last Suppers case falling apart, shortly after completion. The Mona Lisa is completedly faded out, like a duratrans in a fast food joint faded by the sun, but green instead of cyan. It supposedly had remarkable flesh tones when made.

but the old boy sure could draw, I love his sketches and drawings by far over anythign else he did. Thats why his machines look cool, though completely impractical. Michelangelo was the top genius of the Renaissance, and everything he did worked, and lasted. From his Pieta to David to Sistine celing to his design of St Peters, and his battlefield fortifications were great in their day.

Leonardo was all intellect, with shriveled emotional depth, and no spiritual. Therefore stunted, as the interaction of all three make them stronger and deep. Line is melody, mostly of the mind, and so in with the art school types, as color is passion and cannot be taught, but lived. Line cant either, but can be appreciated easier. Look at Hockney cant draw a lick, but actualy has a great sense of space and now, color. He is great at the designing end, but his portraits are terrible, though stage designing let his color and space sense flourish.

Check out my answer to LACMAs issues on my blog below, they can be done cheaply, and much more humanly, with color. Lord knows that is a lost art thse days, the harmonic sense of building through color is completely gone now, that takes years to feel, it cannot be rationalized or "conceptualized". What garbage that is
have a nice day!

art collegia delenda est