When the Italian polymath and Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci swore allegiance to the French king in 1516 and accepted François I’s invitation to make his home in France, he brought with him three of his most famous works. Saint John the Baptist, the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and his most celebrated painting, Mona Lisa – all now hang in the Louvre in Paris.
Some Leonardo experts, however, suggest he may have arrived in France with another painting – one that remained unfinished – a work that he returned to and improved but never completed, despite keeping it near him for more than 30 years.
The mysterious Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, which Leonardo started some time in the 1480s, rarely leaves its permanent home in the Vatican Museums. Today, however, as the result of an exceptional loan agreement it is on display at the manor house at Clos Lucé – near the former royal château at Amboise on the Loire in western France – where Leonardo lived for just over two years until his death in 1519.
“Five hundred years after Leonardo da Vinci’s death, we will have the painting here for 100 days,” François Saint Bris, whose family owns the Clos Lucé, told the Observer.
“It’s extremely moving for us to have this work loaned to us. This is a singular canvas, a work in progress that comes more alive the more we look at it. In it we see the workings of Da Vinci’s brain, his techniques, his intelligence, his drawing. We hope visitors will come here to contemplate it.”
Fewer than 20 paintings by Leonardo are thought to have survived until now. Saint Jerome in the Wilderness is not the best nor, indeed, the brightest: the gloomy and largely colourless painting depicts the gaunt and penitent fourth-century saint – considered the father of the Christian church – beating his chest with a stone. At the bottom of the canvas the outline of the lion from whose paw Jerome has famously extracted a thorn lies sketched uncharacteristically ferocious, a change from its usual docile representation. READ MORE...
