There's a new bit of Leonardo da Vinci art discovered recently. There are some sketches
that one art critic calls "doodles" on the back of "The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne" in the Louvre Museum, Paris.
Here's the story from London Times of 19 December 2008, titled
"Three near-invisible drawings discovered on back of Da Vinci masterpiece."
Following you'll find an overview:
Here's the essence of the story, which narrates the
. . . discovery of three previously unknown drawings on the back of one of Leonardo’s major works. A curator spotted the sketches on the back of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne when it was taken down in September for restoration.Sylvain Laveissière pointed out some grey marks that had previously been dismissed as stains. To him they resembled a horse’s head and a human skull.
When the painting was photographed with an infra-red camera at the Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France, he was proved right. On the wood on which the work was mounted was an 18cm by 10cm (7in by 4in) equine head and a 16.5cm by 10cm skull, complete with orbital and nasal cavities, jaw and teeth. The camera detected a third drawing, a 15cm-high infant Jesus with a lamb, which was invisible to the naked eye.
The London Times article has embedded in it a good, two-minute video interview with their chief art critic, Rachel Campbell-Johnston, with some good visuals and oral commentary. Her educated English accent is a pleasure to listen to, and even more fun is the critic's obvious excitement--in that understated British way--at the new finding.
That's evident and a pleasure to share, even though she and everybody else recognizes that these undiscovered drawings essentially are the working sketches of a practicing artist and never intended as finished, public art.
Think of them as notebook renderings.
We can ask ourselves, what ideas are we working on, and working out, in our notebooks and sketchbooks today?
I drove downtown today for the weekly meeting of my Rotary Club, which meets in the sunrise hour.
It was a 12-degree Fahrenheit temperature (with wind chill it “Feels like minus 2”) yet a beautiful Midwestern winter morning—dawn came up as I went in—no one out on the streets but people going to work. It was a crisp, cold, clear morning with pale stars still in the skies when I first rose.
Regarding work, the morning paper and the radio announced today a layoff of 126 people at a major high-tech company here, 25% of its workforce. Since a significant percentage of the company’s workforce, about 30-40 people, are alumni of the Ball State University Information and Communication Sciences program I work in, it will be of close interest to see if they escape the cuts.
It is a cold, dark winter for many of us this year. So it was comforting to read some classic wisdom literature this same morning:
“Dawn rises for the righteous,and joy for those upright in heart.”
Psalm 97:11
Beyond the philosophic foundations of these words from an ancient song,
the symbolic structure and the morning's scenes led me to these thoughts--
We are in it together in this cold, bright world.
Dawn will rise for the people,
and together we will move forward and prosper,
to live the abundant life properly willed for us.
The leadership of the country needs to call
on the people to rouse themselves
and set to work.
It’s up to us to right the ship of state
and to set ourselves on a new, corrected course.
We’ll get there.