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Lot Essay
A bravado demonstration of masterful draftsmanship, Jenny Saville’s Componimento inculto expresses the emotional intimacy between mother and child on a monumental scale. The titular reference is to a phrase from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks meaning ‘wild composition,’ made in reference to the Italian Master’s rapid, intuitive drawings where one figure is drawn with multiple pairs of appendages. Saville replicates Leonardo’s style here, her hybrid and superimposed forms blurring and tangling together across the composition. From a series of work made between 2010 and 2011, Componimento inculto was made to confront the artist’s new identity as a mother: Saville relates that “I had kids and that changed everything—there was a shift between the heavy, singular objects, basically of bodies, to multiplicity. So I’m watching a body grow and a body moving around, and then one year later I had another child, so I had two babies within one year and two weeks. So I was doing drawings because I was so busy with the kids and I just started drawing one on top of the other, on top of the other, and the multiplicity of lines became more descriptive to me about humanity or human bodies moving, in terms of my kids. Then that related me to old master drawings again” (J. Saville, quoted in S. Groom, “Jenny Saville Now,” Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2018, online [accessed: 4/12/2025]).
Componimento inculto exhibits an exemplary sense graphic grace, each line an essay in poise and artistic economy. Confronting such an intimate subject, Saville looks back to the great masters of the Florentine High Renaissance who revolutionized the sacred depiction of Mary with the infant Jesus, a subject known as the Madonna and Child. Saville sought out the most exceptional artists of the period, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and studied the two incessantly, absorbing every line and form which the old masters made in their innovative compositions. She was particularly drawn to Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child in Casa Buonarroti, Florence, and Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist at the National Gallery, London. Both Michelangelo and Leonardo added a dynamic sense of movement into their works, allowing the infant to move vigorously across the Virgin’s lap, innovating from the typically staid and formal style of previous artists. The artist has a deep connection to Leonardo’s composition, as her parents owned a small reproduction of the drawing which she remembers studying for long hours growing up. She later said of the work: “I call it the Black Mass drawing — [it] is, I think, the greatest drawing ever made in the history of art. It really pre-empts everything that happens in art all the way up to abstraction. I never tire of looking at it. I have it around me all the time. You see it in Giacometti, you see it in Auerbach now, this sort of energetic mass of forms” (J. Saville, quoted in N. Durrant, “Jenny Saville on learning from Leonardo da Vinci,” The Times (London), November 8, 201, online [accessed: 4/12/2025]).
Using only charcoal and red pastel, Componimento inculto transmits a certain primal energy which flows between mother and baby. The work depicts two figures, yet each figure is interpreted then reinterpreted in successive iterations, denoting both the kineticism of the forms and the intermediacy of the composition. Saville achieves here a style which builds from Francis Bacon’s distinctive figures in motion, while also recalling Michelangelo’s conceptual non-finito works, where the seeming lack of completeness in a work achieves a dynamic contrast between matter and spirit. The red pastel parallels some forms, particularly in the face of the foremost infant and the clasping hands at center right, while also juxtaposing other elements, as in the vigorous sloping red line which passes over the mother’s face. Saville’s distinctive style thus achieves to delineate the essential liminality experienced by a mother when first caring for an infant child. Positioning her work within the long tradition of mother-and-child representations, Saville injects the subject with an original truth and passion, offering a refreshing and potent female perspective.
One of today’s most celebrated figurative painters, Jenny Saville has achieved a style so contemporary and yet so classic, her formal and conceptual ambiguity and blurred, hybrid forms calmly bridging the conflict between modernism and the figurative tradition. The art historian Linda Nochlin wrote that “Jenny Saville has indeed returned painting to its origins at the same time as she has made it new....above all, she has recreated painting in the image of our own ominous and irrational times, and that in itself is no small achievement” (L. Nochlin, quoted in S. Groom, op. cit.). Her reverence toward and inspiration from the Florentine Old Masters led to her being honored by the city with a five-venue retrospective in 2021, her works placed in dialogue with Michelangelo and Leonardo across the revered Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Museo di Casa Buonarroti, Museo degli Innocenti, and Museo Novecento. Opening this June, the National Portrait Gallery, London, will host Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting, the largest museum exhibition in the United Kingdom dedicated to the artist.
Componimento inculto exhibits an exemplary sense graphic grace, each line an essay in poise and artistic economy. Confronting such an intimate subject, Saville looks back to the great masters of the Florentine High Renaissance who revolutionized the sacred depiction of Mary with the infant Jesus, a subject known as the Madonna and Child. Saville sought out the most exceptional artists of the period, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and studied the two incessantly, absorbing every line and form which the old masters made in their innovative compositions. She was particularly drawn to Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child in Casa Buonarroti, Florence, and Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist at the National Gallery, London. Both Michelangelo and Leonardo added a dynamic sense of movement into their works, allowing the infant to move vigorously across the Virgin’s lap, innovating from the typically staid and formal style of previous artists. The artist has a deep connection to Leonardo’s composition, as her parents owned a small reproduction of the drawing which she remembers studying for long hours growing up. She later said of the work: “I call it the Black Mass drawing — [it] is, I think, the greatest drawing ever made in the history of art. It really pre-empts everything that happens in art all the way up to abstraction. I never tire of looking at it. I have it around me all the time. You see it in Giacometti, you see it in Auerbach now, this sort of energetic mass of forms” (J. Saville, quoted in N. Durrant, “Jenny Saville on learning from Leonardo da Vinci,” The Times (London), November 8, 201, online [accessed: 4/12/2025]).
Using only charcoal and red pastel, Componimento inculto transmits a certain primal energy which flows between mother and baby. The work depicts two figures, yet each figure is interpreted then reinterpreted in successive iterations, denoting both the kineticism of the forms and the intermediacy of the composition. Saville achieves here a style which builds from Francis Bacon’s distinctive figures in motion, while also recalling Michelangelo’s conceptual non-finito works, where the seeming lack of completeness in a work achieves a dynamic contrast between matter and spirit. The red pastel parallels some forms, particularly in the face of the foremost infant and the clasping hands at center right, while also juxtaposing other elements, as in the vigorous sloping red line which passes over the mother’s face. Saville’s distinctive style thus achieves to delineate the essential liminality experienced by a mother when first caring for an infant child. Positioning her work within the long tradition of mother-and-child representations, Saville injects the subject with an original truth and passion, offering a refreshing and potent female perspective.
One of today’s most celebrated figurative painters, Jenny Saville has achieved a style so contemporary and yet so classic, her formal and conceptual ambiguity and blurred, hybrid forms calmly bridging the conflict between modernism and the figurative tradition. The art historian Linda Nochlin wrote that “Jenny Saville has indeed returned painting to its origins at the same time as she has made it new....above all, she has recreated painting in the image of our own ominous and irrational times, and that in itself is no small achievement” (L. Nochlin, quoted in S. Groom, op. cit.). Her reverence toward and inspiration from the Florentine Old Masters led to her being honored by the city with a five-venue retrospective in 2021, her works placed in dialogue with Michelangelo and Leonardo across the revered Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Museo di Casa Buonarroti, Museo degli Innocenti, and Museo Novecento. Opening this June, the National Portrait Gallery, London, will host Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting, the largest museum exhibition in the United Kingdom dedicated to the artist.