This Da Vinci Painting Has Finally Been Solved

The painting you are looking at was created more than five centuries ago by Leonardo da Vinci, but just a few years ago a detail was discovered that had remained hidden all this time. Art historian Kelly Grovier published an article on the BBC revealing a small detail that would expose one of the most subversive messages Leonardo ever hid in his entire body of work. This detail is located just above the right hand of the Virgin Mary, a small plant with a very peculiar shape, which Leonardo painted with a purpose very different from what you might imagine. This work is called the Virgin of the Rocks and the first thing we need to clarify is that there is not one but two versions. The first was painted by Leonardo da Vinci around 1483 and is now held at the Louvre in Paris, while the second was started in 1495, completed 13 years later and is now at the National Gallery in London. In both paintings we see the same scene, the Virgin Mary is at the centre kneeling in a rocky grotto, to her right the child John the Baptist and to her left the archangel Uriel holding the infant Jesus. The four figures form a perfect pyramid surrounded by imposing rock formations and beside them we find a calm pond that separates us from them. Curiously this scene does not appear in any passage of the bible, the story actually comes from an apocryphal tradition that imagined Jesus and John meeting by chance as children, while their families were fleeing the massacre of the innocents ordered by King Herod. But what is truly strange about this painting is not the scene it depicts, but the place where Leonardo chose to set it. In 1483, the confraternity of the Immaculate Conception of Milan commissioned Leonardo to paint the central panel of their altarpiece. What they expected Leonardo to paint was a traditional image, the virgin and child enthroned surrounded by a choir of angels celebrating the doctrine that gave the confraternity its name, that Mary, like Christ, was conceived without sin. However, what Leonardo delivered was something Leonardo painted a gloomy, desolate grotto, a landscape of rocks sculpted by time, so overwhelming that the sacred figures almost seem secondary. But the most puzzling thing of all is that in the work we see no evident allusion to the Immaculate Conception. Historians have spent centuries wondering why Leonardo made that decision, but the answer could lie in something that happened to him shortly before he began to paint. Leonardo recorded in his notebooks an episode that marked him profoundly. During an excursion through the mountains, while wandering among shadowy rocks, he came across the entrance to a great cavern. At that moment he stopped in awe, and according to his own words, he felt two contradictory emotions at the same time. On one hand, fear of the threatening dark cave, but at the same time, the desire to see if there was something marvellous inside. Leonardo finally decided to enter, and what he found inside changed his way of understanding the world. Inside this cavern, Leonardo found a fossilised whale and a great number of ancient seashells embedded in the rock, hundreds of kilometres from the sea. For Leonardo, this was a great mystery. From that moment on, he could not stop asking himself how marine creatures had reached the peaks of those mountains, and considering the official explanation of the church, his questions became even deeper. For the church, the great flood described in the old testament was the answer to why those marine creatures were found there. According to the biblical passage, the waters rose to such a point that they dragged the shells up to the summits, and when they receded, they left them there. But as you might expect, that explanation did not convince Leonardo. We even know that the subject haunted him just before starting this painting. In his notebooks, he recorded that in 1482, while working on a statue for the Duke of Milan, some peasants brought a sack full of shells to his workshop, found in the mountains of Palma and Piacenza, and as he observed them, Leonardo came to the conclusion that those creatures had not been dragged there by any flood. For Leonardo, those shells had been born there, which meant that those mountains, at some remote point in the past, had been the bottom of the sea, and that was only possible if the earth was far older than what the church taught. We must keep in mind that at this moment in history, this was a heretical idea, even speaking about it in public could be considered dangerous, so Leonardo decided to hide it in one of his paintings, and this is where we arrive at the detail I told you about at the beginning. Just above Mary's right hand, there is a palm tree. At first glance, it seems like just another element of the vegetation, it even has a perfectly acceptable religious reading since palms prefigure the ones that would be thrown before Christ at his entrance into Jerusalem, the Sunday before his crucifixion. But let us look at that palm tree more closely. Its leaves, spread out like a fan, especially sharp in this first version at the Louvre, imitate with astonishing precision the contours of an open scallop shell, and that cannot be a coincidence. In Leonardo's notebooks, we constantly see how one image transforms into another, as for example in this drawing, where the spiral of a nautilus shell ends up becoming a woman's hairstyle. Leonardo's imagination was capable of finding correspondences where no one else could see them, so a palm tree whose leaves are identical to the ridges of a scallop is exactly the kind of double image Leonardo mastered. But if this still does not convince you, there is something more. The scallop was not just any symbol, it was an emblem directly associated with Mary, and specifically with the doctrine of her immaculate conception. A decade earlier, Piero della Francesca had painted the Virgin beneath a shell-shaped dome from which hung a pearl-shaped egg, because according to the belief of the time, pearls were born supernaturally from a drop of the purest dew. A miraculous and immaculate conception, just like Mary's, and if you are wondering where the pearl is in the Virgin of the Rocks, the answer is that Leonardo did not paint one, but 20. At the exact centre of both versions, there is a brooch holding Mary's mantle in place, and surrounding the central stone of that brooch is a halo of 20 dazzling pearls. If you follow the trajectory of the hem of her mantle, you will see that it guides your gaze directly from those pearls to the scallop-shaped palm tree. If we take all of this into account, it is easy to find a connection. The shell, the pearls, the immaculate conception. Leonardo did include the confraternity's doctrine in his painting, he just did it his own way, fusing it with the symbol of his most dangerous discovery, the seashells in the mountains that proved the church was wrong about the creation of the world. And finally, there is one last detail that could confirm that none of this was accidental. But before telling you what it is, I would like to remind you that, if you would like to have this work in your collection, you can now purchase it from our website. In our catalogue, you will find more than 1000 carefully selected works, so you can choose your favourites and begin your art collection in your own home. Shipping is free worldwide, and by purchasing from the store, you will be supporting me enormously and continuing to create videos like this every week. I will leave the link in the description so you can place your order once you finish watching the video. Now, when Leonardo painted the second version, years later, we can see that he changed every type of plant that appeared in the first one. Every flower, every leaf, and every species was replaced with a different one, except the palm tree. Leonardo not only kept it, but made it look even more like a scallop. Its leaves, more stylised in the London version, resemble even more closely the striated grooves that radiate from the hinge of a shell. Of all the plant elements in the painting, the only one Leonardo considered untouchable was precisely the one that could hide his secret. Unfortunately, we will never know if Leonardo did this with that intention. But after hearing all the arguments, it is quite plausible that Leonardo wanted to include that plant with a second purpose in mind. As always, I would love for you to leave me in the comments whether you believe this painting truly holds a double intention, or if on the contrary, it is nothing more than a decorative element of the painting. I will be reading your opinions in the comments. Thank you for watching the video until the end, and I will see you in the next video.