The mask-like facade perfectly blends in with the residential neighborhood street while the interior is a beautiful textural combination of Chicago Common brick and exposed concrete. Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando incorporated the shell of a 1920s apartment building, transforming the space into a multi-level art and architecture gallery. It was my first time inside this building within a building, which opened in 2018. “This weekend I finally went to Wrightwood 659 to see Romanticism to Ruin, an exhibit about two lost works by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Photo Credit: Rachel Freundt / Architecture and History of Chicagoland Blog Photo Credit: Rachel Freundt / Architecture and History of Chicagoland Blog Reconstructing the Garrick: Adler & Sullivan’s Lost Masterpiece. We may never know the answers, but we can be fairly sure that in the painting we now know as 'The Virgin of the Rocks', we see Leonardo responding to and reacting against the sculpted altarpiece for which he designed his painting.Reconstructing the Garrick: Adler & Sullivan’s Lost Masterpiece.
#The lost masterpiece free
Since the domes of the chapel and the altarpiece along with God the Father, angels and seraphs had already created a heavenly context, might this have led Leonardo to put his Virgin on the earth, among the rocks? And given that a cult statue of the Immaculate Virgin already existed in the altarpiece, did this free Leonardo to depart from existing images of the Immaculate Virgin? Was Leonardo inspired to create his own rocky environment to compete with (and surpass) Del Maino’s sculpted landscape? Knowing that Del Maino’s statue of the Immaculate Virgin adoring the Christ Child in a rocky landscape was probably placed on the upper tier of the altarpiece immediately above Leonardo’s 'Virgin of the Rocks' raises intriguing questions. Comparing the Paris and London Virgins of the Rocks shows us how Leonardo responded to Lombard sculpture. This chimes closely with the altarpiece, in which blue and gold dominate, and with the chapel’s gold, blue and white colour scheme. Apart from the greyish flesh tones, the whole picture is designed around two colours: the browns of the rock moving towards golden ochre in the lining of the Virgin’s and Angel’s cloaks, and the blue of the Virgin’s and Angel’s cloaks leading towards the water and the distant mountains. He discards the red and green of the Angel's drapery from the Louvre version. The 1483 contract included a list of 16 items to be gilded and painted by the three artists: Remarkably, all the sculpted items listed in the 1483 Contract re-appear in these surviving Del Maino altarpieces, so that we can visualise how their various components may have been arranged around the two central features of the wooden statue of the Virgin and Leonardo’s painting. It is likely that echoes of the San Francesco Grande commission can be found in the Del Maino workshop’s subsequent altarpieces at Ponte, Sernio, Morbegno and Ardenno in the Valtellina north of Milan. The written evidence of the contract is complemented by the visual evidence of a group of surviving altarpieces carved by Giacomo Del Maino and his sons. The local painters Ambrogio and Evangelista de’ Predis and the newly arrived Leonardo da Vinci were to paint and gild the whole wooden altarpiece, including a blank panel at the centre where an image of the Virgin was to be painted, with two further flat panels to be painted with angels. Del Maino’s sculpted altarpiece may have vanished, but the contract from 25 April 1483 survives, along with a crucial list itemising each component.
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