The Blue Hour in Leonardo da Vinci and Poussin

(10.11.2022) Sometimes things are so obvious that one cannot see them at first. Like the blue hour in Leonardo da Vinci and in Nicolas Poussin – visible, perhaps unvisible at first sight, but made visible here.

(Picture: Joyofmuseums)

One) Leonardo

The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci implies – by way of showing shadows of objects on the table – sources of light which are not shown in the picture itself. It might be a window in the (painted) room or another source, but at any rate these sources are just implied by the picture. Which also shows a window in the background. The scenery is that of dusk or beginning nightfall (implied by the Biblical narrative).
We do not see an actual sunset or a colored sky (like for example in paintings by Titian), and one can imagine that Leonardo implies that the sun has sunk below the horizon, with a sky still being lit, so that interiors could be lit artificially, but one did not necessarily had to light them. We are looking, as is implied by the still lit sky, roughly to the West.
Leonardo has actually three (or even four sources of light interact in the real refectory): we have natural light (as painted), natural or artificial light (as implied by painting), and natural as well as possibly artificial light in the refectory with the real monks eating. I am neglecting the painting opposite to the Last Supper for a moment, but we’ll come to that as well. Because Leonardo has done more than just having painted a picture on a wall. What he did could be referred to as: staging a picture in a room, with moments in which the actual light was interacting in subtle ways with the light as painted in the picture. I don’t know if the Last Supper has ever been analyzed in the framework of a history of light (and ›Light Art‹), but Leonardo obviously offered and still offers something which also rivals the Crucifixion opposite to the Last Supper, which is not based on the concept of expanding a room by way of simulation. Which is what Leonardo does: to simulate, to project a scenery into an actual room, a scenery which oscillates between being artificial (as a painting) and a simulation, which offers the effect of having Christ with his disciples actually there in the room with the monks eating and meditating.
Depending on the natural light falling into the refectory, and depending on sources of light actually used in the room, the Last Supper might have seemed more real or more artificial, with the evening progressing. The blue hour in Leonardo is a) alluded to by what he does (staging a picture which is set at dusk), and it is b) implied as the blue hour developing in the picture – if the picture would progress in time with the actual time in the room; and c) it is implied as the blue hour actually experienced by the monks in their real life (with the light coming in via the windows of the refectory diminishing).
Let’s assume that the night in Milan had fallen. This would mean that the Last Supper still showed a lit sky – and the picture would have seemed more artificial – being just a picture. But slightly earlier the light in the room might have interacted as convincingly with the picture that the scenery might have seemed to be an actual expansion, a sort of hologram, in the refectory with the monks eating, listening, or meditating, while – from the one corner of their eyes they might have looked at Leonardo, or at the crucifixion opposite of the Last Supper, and based on a completely different artistic concept.

(Picture: Joyofmuseums)

(Picture: Joyofmuseums)

Two) Poussin

How to paint a blue hour, if one does need one?
In case you got a tube of burnt umber and a tube of ultramarin, it is fairly simple. Just mix the two colors, and what you get is exactly the type of blue grey that you can see in the selfportrait by Nicolas Poussin shown here. A fragment of a picture in the picture can be seen, with a women wearing a diadem, and the background of the picture does seem to show an atmosphere of night, nightfall or dusk. So that one can say that, also in Poussin, the blue hour is rather implied, not actually shown, because what we are looking at is just the picture in a picture, something deliberately shown as being something artificial (and lit by artificial light, which is also implied as well as it is shown in its effect of lighting a picture in a picture as well as the artist, while the source from where this light is coming, is not shown).
I am not going to meditate on the selfportraits by Poussin here, but the patch of grey blue is reminding us that, in many, many paintings by Poussin we are actually looking to the West. With a sky that is colored (as the sky is often colored in Titian), after the sun has actually set. So what the selfportrait does show, is also a kind of reminiscence of painterly routine and convention, while at the same time, with the figure, Poussin seems to be – humourously, as it seems to me – implying that pictures in his studio might have had some life of their own, with figures interacting, without the artist being in full control of what is happening right now (or at least not anymore).
An equivalent to the Last Supper by Leonardo might be the Eucharist in each of Poussin’s series of the Sacraments, with both paintings showing darkness, lit by artifical light. Poussin decided to highlight a different aspect of the Biblical narrative. But he is also reminding us of what the Biblical narrative is getting at: a narrative progressing in one evening and night, as the narrative of the Passion, leading to the Passion, with several (or even all) of its elements having the potential of also being able to show ways to the future, or at least of being relevant for a future history of Christian religion.

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