Leonardesque painter, mid-16th century
Jesus and the young Saint John kissing
Oil on canvas, 62.5 x 50 cm
with frame, 77 x 66 cm
The work under examination, an oil on canvas by a painter from the Leonardesque circle in the mid-16th century, depicts the encounter between the Child Jesus and the young Saint John, captured in a moment of tender affection as they exchange a kiss. This subject, imbued with profound symbolic and devotional charge, attests to the extraordinary influence that Leonardo da Vinci's teachings exerted on Lombard and European painting of the 16th century. The intensity of the gestural dialogue and the softness of the modeling suggest a direct derivation from a Leonardesque prototype, no longer extant today, but whose existence is postulated by critics precisely due to the impressive number of variants and copies produced between Lombardy and Flanders. The composition focuses entirely on the two infant figures, immersed in a dark background that enhances the plasticity of their bodies and the luminosity of their flesh tones, following a chiaroscuro sensibility that closely recalls the sfumato of the master from Vinci.
A close stylistic comparison allows us to place this work within a dense network of iconographic references. The anatomy of the children and the soft rendering of their skin show significant analogies with Bernardino Luini's Child Jesus, preserved in the Bavarian State Painting Collection, where the pursuit of epidermal realism and the sweetness of physiognomic features follow the same aesthetic canons. The popularity of this compositional scheme is evidenced by the production of Bernardino Luini and his workshop: in particular, in the Madonna and Child with the young Saint John in a private collection, the intertwining of the bodies and the embrace between the two little ones are almost superimposed on the work analyzed here, demonstrating how Luini was one of the main custodians and disseminators of the Leonardesque language. Even the version from Luini's workshop at the Prado Museum confirms how the theme of the kiss between the Redeemer and the Baptist was widely diffused and requested by contemporary patrons.
Even more revealing is the parallelism with Jesus and the young Saint John by Marco d'Oggiono, now part of the Royal Collection in London. In this painting, the muscular tension and the torsion of the bodies seem to draw with philological fidelity from an original painting or drawing by Leonardo, serving as a visual bridge to understand the genesis of the painting under examination. This model was not confined within Lombardy's borders but crossed the Alps, influencing Flemish masters of the caliber of Joos van Cleve and Quentin Massys. Van Cleve, in particular, reinterpreted the same subject in numerous variants, as evidenced by the canvases preserved at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, where the solidity of the Leonardesque-based bodies merges with the descriptive precision of Northern Europe.
The painting in question stands out for an executive quality that manages to fuse the sacredness of the encounter with a everyday naturalness, devoid of rigidity. Although Bernardino de' Conti, in his Madonna at the Brera, inserts the detail of the imminent kiss into a larger composition, our canvas opts for thematic concentration, focusing exclusively on the physical and emotional contact between the two divine cousins. The delicacy with which one hand rests on the other's shoulder and the slight touching of lips imbue the image with a premonition of future sacrifice, making the work not only a demonstration of Lombard pictorial skill but also a fundamental piece for reconstructing the "Leonardism" that profoundly marked the figurative culture of the High Renaissance.
