Renaissance art actualizes the painterly discovery of perspectival space with the ensuing ability to represent an imaginary that extends from the surface of the canvas to distant horizons. Its painters engage and immerse the viewer’s perceptual field within measured opto-narrative worlds. Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Virgin of the Rocks is a paradigmatic in this respect; in the foreground is the configuration of its four protagonists, the Madonna and child Jesus with the infant John the Baptist and an angel. Its narrative subject is the adoration of the Christ child by the infant John the Baptist. This triangular composition is set against a complex background of rocks and flora, and a distant landscape of mountains and water. Historians believe that Leonardo’s vision was influenced by his memory of a mountain excursion that he wrote about: ‘I came to the mouth of a great cavern, in front of which I stood sometime astonished. Bending back and forth, I tried to see if I could discover anything inside, but the darkness within prevented that. Suddenly there arose in me two contrary emotions, fear and desire – fear of the threatening dark cave, desire to see whether there were any marvellous thing within.’

In the installation LvD.VotR.AR viewers can enter this ‘marvelous thing within’ and physically explore the evocative cavern of rocks and plants that Leonardo Da Vinci created in his painting. By means of digital visualization and optical position tracking technologies, an augmented reality (AR) environment is constructed whereby the visitors, using handheld tablets, can step beyond a cut-out of the foreground figures and then explore a purely virtual space wherein that cavern is presented life size and in three dimensions. The finely detailed virtual 3D rendering of Leonardo’s rocky floral cavern occupies an approx. seventy square meters empty floor area, with a drawing on the ground that shows a polygonal contour map of the virtual cave that one is wandering about in. 

In creating this virtual reconstruction of Leonardo’s cavern, the computer graphic model references the two versions of  Virgin of the Rocks that Leonardo Da Vinci created, one being in the Louvre in Paris and the other in the National Gallery in London. This artwork does not propose to be a literal reconstruction of Leonardo’s painting, but rather as a narrative re-visioning whose AR technologies enable an aesthetics of immersive engagement and embodied experience that in many ways is synchronous with the perspectival discoveries made during the Renaissance.