Relentless pursuit of perfection
New technology reveals early versions of famous works painted over by dissatisfied masters
The greatest art has a wonderful sense of certainty. Think of the imperious, all-creating hand in Michelangelo’s painting of the Almighty in the Sistine Chapel, reaching out to give Adam the touch of life. That look, that gesture — how exactly right they seem. Surely they could only come from a painter as sure of himself as the Almighty.
Of course, it wasn’t really like that. Michelangelo wasn’t a god, however much he may seem like one. The eloquent pointing hand was done in many careful, patient dabs of the brush and palette. Some of these painted over what was already there, some added a touch of shading or tone or outline. It’s quite likely some were accompanied by a muttered Italian curse, when Michelangelo’s hand slipped.
Now those false starts are being uncovered, thanks to new technology. Infra-red scanners and particle accelerators have revealed that Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks looked quite different in its first incarnation. Van Gogh’s Patch of Grass landscape of 1887 actually conceals an earlier portrait.
The latest discovery is a startling one. It seems Leonardo’s famous painting The Lady with an Ermine hides two earlier versions. The first shows the lady on her own, the second shows her cradling a long thin grey animal. Why the changes? Some say they may have been in response to a patron’s request, but I prefer to think Leonardo changed his mind for an artistic reason. Perhaps he wanted a contrasting colour to offset the red and blue of the lady’s costume. Grey was his first choice, but it turned out to be not quite right. Or perhaps the lady was a tender-hearted soul who liked animals (a rare sentiment then), and Leonardo felt he had to show this.
Either way, the guiding thought was “This isn’t quite right yet.” It’s a worry shared by many if not most of the great creators. We tend to forget this, because their works usually bear no trace of the difficult birth. Also, we’re in love with the myth of artists creating in a single stroke, in the white-heat of inspiration. There are enough examples to make the idea plausible. Think of Mozart writing a symphony in six days, or Goethe waking at night and scribbling a poem down without waiting to straighten the paper. Or Picasso drawing two jazz musicians in a single line, without lifting the pen from the paper.
But even these spontaneous creators had second thoughts. Mozart tells us his string quartets dedicated to Haydn were the result of “long and arduous labour.” Picasso mulled over Guernica for months, if not years, as the numerous satellite studies of bulls and girls with lamps show. And Goethe gestated Faust for more than half a century.
This motivation for this “mulling over” varies. In the case of Mozart, or a painter such as Kandinsky, the labour is one of refinement, a mix of craftsmanship and trying things out. In the case of Picasso and Goethe, it’s a different question: “How can I make this richer and more many-layered?” That’s the motivation at work in Marcel Proust’s endless revisions of his novel À la recherche du temps perdu. The manuscript is full of marginal scribblings, and additions pasted on to other pasted-in additions, like an ancient palimpsest.
In some creative artists, the imperious urge to accrete and complicate gets out of hand. The composer Pierre Boulez is so addicted to “proliferating” his pieces that most of them are in a perpetually unfinished state. Leonardo was one of these types. He himself said that “a work of art is never finished, only abandoned.” Sometimes a creative artist lets a work go out into the world, and then tries to reclaim it, to make it just that bit better. Coleridge and Debussy both scribbled corrections and refinements on their works after they’d been published. Some can’t bring themselves to release a work at all, and persevere until death does them part. Proust was one such case, as was the Austrian novelist Robert Musil. Trying to work out their “final intentions” from the mass of additions and corrections is an almost impossible task.
All this shows that revising and second thoughts are actually the norm, for anything bigger than a quick sketch or a four-line poem. Only God can create “in one go.” Human beings have to create in stages, one laborious step at a time. Thanks to the labours of literary scholars, and new technologies such as particle accelerators, we can retrace those steps.
I have mixed feelings about this. Of course it’s fascinating to learn about the labour that led to a great work, and it increases our admiration for the artist. But one of the main aims of that vast labour was to conceal itself. The creator struggled, so we don’t have to. Tearing away the lovely illusion so we can see the mechanism whirring beneath seems a perverse way to treat a masterpiece.