Nikola Benin
This is one of Leonardo’s most mysterious and complex paintings . It’s a rare survival of one of his large-scale painted works, and a key example of many of the techniques and innovations with which he transformed Italian painting in late 15th century
Leonardo has used his inventive technique, now called aerial perspective, to give the impression of a vast landscape setting. He realised that we perceive the same colours differently depending on their distance from us; green appears blue if viewed from far off. By painting the mountains in the background blue, he tricks us into believing they are in the far distance. He softened their edges so they appear hazy, another technique that mimics the effects of vision in reality. The cool blue-green also contrasts directly with the rich, warm red-brown of the earth.
The figures emerge softly from the darkness of the grotto. Leonardo created this effect by painting very subtle, rather than stark, transitions between light and dark. This created a blurry effect around the edges of forms – look at the Virgin’s temples and nose for example – a technique later called sfumato. As with ’aerial perspective', this idea was a result of his experiments into vision and perception in this period. Leonardo built up his figures using layers of black and white underpainting, showing his knowledge of the way we perceive shapes through the effect of light and shadow on their surfaces.
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