Leonardo the Painter

Leonardo’s first painting contribution, documented and recognised by all critics, is the angel that appears on the left in Andrea del Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ. More correctly, the altarpiece should be attributed to the school of Verrocchio, where the seventeen-year-old Leonardo had begun his apprenticeship in 1469¹. According to the chronicles, he had come there thanks to the friendship between his father, Ser Piero, and Andrea, and above all thanks to a portfolio of drawings that is said to have convinced the established master of the young man’s precocious ability. Vasari’s account in the Lives (1550): “one day he took some of his drawings to Andrea del Verrocchio, who was a great friend of his, and earnestly begged him to tell him whether Leonardo, by devoting himself to drawing, would make any progress. Andrea was astonished to see Leonardo’s extraordinary beginnings…”

Returning to the Baptism, it is again Vasari who credits Leonardo with the angel holding Christ’s garments and who supplies one of his colourful anecdotes: “And in this work Leonardo da Vinci, then a youth and his pupil, helping him, painted an Angel with his own hand, which was much better than the other things; and this was the reason why Andrea resolved never to touch brushes again, since Leonardo, so young in that art, had acquitted himself much better than he”.

Things are not so simple. Andrea del Verrocchio perhaps never touched his brushes again for that altarpiece, which is unfinished (see Christ’s left foot, which, had it been Leonardo’s responsibility, would be the first of his many examples of unfinished work), but he certainly did not change trade. More importantly, Leonardo’s contribution was not limited to the angel, which bears his signature in its multiple directions of movement, in the drapery, in the light that colours the hair, but can be traced in other areas of the altarpiece. In the landscape behind Christ and above the angels’ heads, for example: no observer has missed the reference to the famous drawing, autograph and dated 1473, of the Landscape of the Val d’Arno. It is a drawing of considerable importance, so much so that in a fundamental volume on Leonardo’s painting it is the first subject discussed², as if it were a “programmatic manifesto” of the conception of painting that the artist had already worked out at the age of twenty-one. “A compendium of Leonardo’s knowledge, ideas and interests at an early stage of his research” (Argan), in which painting is not the presentation of acquired notions but a means of knowledge. The trees vibrating in the light are a non-photographic record and a study of the phenomenon of refraction caused by the “humidity of the air”, by suspended vapours; the whole drawing is a scientific investigation of the movement and the states³ of water, of its capacity to build (by irrigating the fields) and to destroy (by eroding the rock). According to some scholars, finally, this is one of the first independent representations of a landscape.

In the Baptism the watercourse – the Jordan – flowing between rocks and wooded slopes is not merely a quotation or a recollection of the 1473 drawing, but a further development of it. The blue of the sky fades to white as it descends towards the horizon; haze envelops the mountains and blurs their surfaces, giving a scientifically accurate view of them. As for certain uncertainties, such as the mountain profiles wavering between rolling hills and Dolomite ruggedness, it should be borne in mind that Leonardo had to mask or cover over the work of others, as an X-ray analysis has shown, transforming earlier, incongruous castles into peaks.

Other contributions by Leonardo to this altarpiece have been seen in the hair of the other angel and in its right hand, luminous and delicate, which contrasts sharply with the left, flat and somewhat deformed; in the figure of Christ itself, reworked in oil over an earlier layer of tempera, whose limbs are anatomically much more correct than those of the Baptist; in the transparency of the water covering the feet of the protagonists, and perhaps also in the Baptist’s hair and chin. An important series of contributions, then; but Leonardo claimed as his own only the angel on the right. (Perhaps, if they had let him, or if he had had the time to redo that archaic plastic palm as well…)

More recent studies⁴ propose a later dating, to the years 1475-1478, even though by 1478 Leonardo was already independent of the school of Verrocchio. In support of this hypothesis there is a certain “stylistic maturity” discernible in the angel’s drapery, and the way it anticipates the angel of the Virgin of the Rocks. But this would leave Verrocchio’s irritated reaction to the skill of his “youthful” pupil hard to understand.

[1] Around 1472 there were forty painters’ workshops operating in Florence. Painting was a profession, like that of the goldsmiths (forty-four workshops), an industry even before it was an art. It was therefore normal for a work to be a collective product, and rare – with the notable exception of Michelangelo, who never shared his work with others – to find the figure of the artist alone before his canvas/panel. Hence a sometimes arduous task for critics: identifying the different hands that contributed to the result.

[2] From Giulio Carlo Argan, in Leonardo – la pittura, Florence 1977. It is a collection of essays by various authors, each of whom is entrusted with the analysis of one of Leonardo’s works.

[3] The inscription at the top left reads: “the day of Santa Maria della Neve, 5 August 1473”. The feast commemorates a snowfall that occurred in Rome in high summer and was held to be miraculous; an event that must have struck Leonardo’s imagination, and that allows him to refer to one of the states, the solid one, dell’acqua.

[4] Pietro C. Marani, Leonardo, Milan 1994, p. 16.

After some problems of attribution (Lorenzo di Credi, the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio), this small panel has been restored to Leonardo’s hand. The placing of the figures – apart from the Child’s head and halo – is typically Leonardesque. He wrote in the Treatise on Painting: “when you want to portray someone, portray him in bad weather, towards evening, placing the sitter with his back against one of the walls of that courtyard. Notice in the streets, towards evening, the faces of men and women when the weather is bad, how much grace and sweetness is seen in them. Therefore you, painter, will have a courtyard fitted out with walls painted black.” The courtyard, being an open space, must also be covered with an awning to obtain the “good light” and the “perfect air”. The delicacy of the flesh tones and the choice of colours for the garments are certainly Leonardo’s, and even if the Madonna and Child do not seem closely bound to each other, either psychologically or in their gestures, there are undeniably many features that point to the later Madonna of the Carnation. Note, for example, the Virgin’s hand and the diadem she wears at her neck, and the folds of flesh on the Child’s arm. The landscape in the background is too sub-Alpine/Bellinian (it seems that Leonardo had just returned from a journey to Treviso in the company of Verrocchio), but the mountains already appear softened and faded by the density of the air.

As for the game of attributions, we quote only the most extreme opinion: “[painting] executed from Verrocchio’s drawings by the weak, but already very practised hand of a very low-ranking Flemish painter”.¹ For some it is entirely the work of Leonardo, for others his is the main contribution to a painting from the school of Verrocchio.

The scheme is fairly traditional: an interior, with two-light windows opening onto a mountainous landscape with typically Leonardesque sfumato, an absorbed Madonna, a rather lively and, once again, plump Child. What is new for Leonardo is the medium used, oil. It would cause some damage, perhaps because it was too rich, such as the raised lines on Mary’s head and widespread craquelure. New, too, is the use of colours, combined for liveliness and harmonised to heighten the visual effect of each. Note the bright yellow of the lining of the Virgin’s mantle beside the olive green of the Son’s cushion; the upper part of the mantle, with white shading set against the reddish sleeve. For what reason, if not a colouristic one, was the lining meant to be visible?

The crystal vase with flowers seems an exercise in style, and much more attention has been paid to the transparency of the glass than to the somewhat vague corollas. The passion for transparency is not new: it could also be seen in the lectern of the Annunciation and in Ginevra de’ Benci’s chemise. In this painting too a flower-symbol appears: the carnation is said to allude to Christ’s future Passion. And here too, some problems with children: the near-deformity of the infant, a plumpness emphasised by the furrows pressed into the Son’s back by the Mother’s fingers, the off-target gaze. Its movement can be praised, explained by the effort of grasping the flower, but the little left arm seems to come out of his ear. The sparseness of the hair is due to a destructive restoration. The Madonna of the Carnation is not listed as an unfinished work, but the point could be argued.

[1] Lermolieff, 1891.

In this painting too, as in the Baptism of Christ, there appears a disturbing tree: an impossible Araucaria excelsa, native to Australia, above the archangel’s wings. Were it a larch, it would be too orderly. Even the cypress furthest to the right, it has been observed, seems an expedient to solve the problem of the corner of the house: but it is out of place and out of proportion.

The attribution of the Annunciation to Leonardo rather than to other names (Ghirlandaio, Verrocchio in collaboration with Credi, Leonardo for the archangel and Credi for the Virgin) has divided the critics, who have used equally valid arguments to support opposing theses. Some have praised the city visible in the distance, shrouded in mist; others have pointed out that Leonardo’s backgrounds always show landscapes devoid of human works (but what of the two bell towers, however tiny, in the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci?). Those who praised the botanical accuracy scattered across the meadow were met with the objection that these are not real, botanically identifiable flowers, but merely floral allusions. The pen drawing in Christ Church, Oxford, which reproduces the drapery of the archangel’s sleeve, was considered first a preparatory study, then a copy after the painting.

Striking is the range of possible authors that have been put forward, due in part to the traditional and well-tried layout of the scene depicted. In the end, with more attention paid to the light pervading the painting than to its details, the view that prevailed was that of a young and still immature Leonardo, somewhat naive (or impetuous?) in certain solutions. It is not only a matter of the cypress mentioned earlier. The figure of the Virgin, set too far from the lectern, has undergone a lengthening of the right arm that also affects the fingers of the hand, while in the search for movement of the torso the left shoulder has disappeared. The archangel’s wings are too stylised – or rather, the wing in the foreground is, while the other is a sketch – and the hand holding the lily has fingers on a par with those of the Virgin’s right hand. Yet the light is something innovative, whether twilight or morning, diffused like the little white cloud that someone has called impressionist. It is the light indicated by Leonardo, in the Treatise on Painting, as preferable for painting landscapes, “when the sun is hidden by clouds, for then the trees are lit by the universal light of the sky and the universal shadow of the earth”. How, then, are we to account for the shadow cast by the archangel, so dark that it allows no hint of painting? It could be a – rigid – application of the relationship between light and shadow laid down in the Treatise: “Shadow is the privation of light, and solely the opposition of dense bodies set against the luminous rays… shadow is of greater power than light, for it prohibits and entirely deprives bodies of light”.

The first thing to note about this predella panel is its size, extremely small, which explains its workmanship, quite different from that of an easel painting such as the Florence Annunciation. The attribution was long disputed, with Lorenzo di Credi as the weightiest alternative. The Virgin’s head can be compared with a drawing by Leonardo in the Galleria degli Uffizi. Likened to a “rapid sketch” confined within a few centimetres of space¹, and judged a spontaneous work, it turns out to be almost more laboured than the Florentine altarpiece, with numerous repaintings, especially on the archangel’s face and the Virgin’s mantle. The green carpet on which the messenger kneels, moreover, shows fewer flowers: these, however, have the merit of being rendered with greater truth to nature and with differences between specimens of the same species, unlike the stereotyped, printed-looking daisies of the other Annunciation.

[1] Giuseppe Marchini, in Leonardo – la pittura, cit., p. 36

For this portrait, since few doubts remain about the attribution (to the names traditionally in contention, Verrocchio and Credi, has been added that of Leonardo’s Lombard pupil, Boltraffio, but without much success), writers have concentrated on identifying the woman depicted. Knowing who she was may not be of fundamental importance, but it could help in understanding some details. Leaving aside the easy assonance between Ginevra and ginepro, the juniper that covers almost the whole background, there is the precise testimony of the Anonimo Gaddiano (“in Florence he portrayed from life Ginevra d’Amerigho Benci, which he finished so well that it seemed not a portrait but Ginevra herself”) and letters proving a friendly relationship between Leonardo and Amerigo and Giovanni Benci.

The first secular work entirely by Leonardo¹, it portrays a young woman of about sixteen with a rather expressionless and markedly pale face. As for the lack of expression, which has led some – in a skilful exercise of criticism in reverse – to argue that Ginevra could not be the work of the same hand and mind as the Mona Lisa, one may recall the suggestions and precepts of the Flemish school on portraiture. The pallor is said to have been a characteristic of the historical Ginevra, whose poor health was lamented by her husband, Luigi di Bernardo di Lapo Nicolini, to justify to the tax office his financial situation, ruined by costly and prolonged medical expenses.

The tree surrounding the head seems a difficult choice, which does not help to set off the hair (the case of the Lady with an Ermine is different: she too is against a dark background but has auburn hair, whereas the Belle Ferronière is black on black), and it accentuates the whiteness of the skin. It could have been a request of the patron, but it is hard to imagine Leonardo, however young, being so compliant as to accept suggestions on how to compose a picture. Back to Ginevra’s biography, then: the portrait is said to have been made on the occasion of her marriage, and the juniper would be a symbol of virtues such as fidelity and chastity, besides containing the assonance already mentioned. Someone² has maintained that the plant in the background cannot be identified with certainty: this is the moment to look at the back of the painting. There appears a sprig of juniper, easily recognisable, encircled by a branch of laurel and one of palm. A scroll declares: “Virtutem forma decorat”. “Beauty adorns virtue.” The laurel is supposed to allude to Ginevra’s poetic ambitions (in reality we know only that Lorenzo de’ Medici dedicated two sonnets to her). And the palm? Here we run into some obscure aspects. It so happens that the coat of arms made of laurel and palm fronds was that of Bernardo Bembo, father of the more celebrated Pietro, Venetian ambassador to Florence, a frequenter of the Medici and, according to some, the real patron of the painting. Ginevra and Bernardo were good friends. And so one is led to wonder whether the juniper is really a symbol of virtue, while the hypothesis has been put forward that Ginevra’s pale face reveals lovesickness.

The back of the painting, with the coat of arms brutally cut off at the bottom, reveals that the panel has been shortened by about a third of its height. It was probably also cut at the sides, to leave the portrait its rectangular format, and this frees us from easy enthusiasm for the bold placing of Ginevra’s bust, which occupies almost all the available space. This amputation, however, deprives us of her hands: were they clasped in an admirable composition or an unfinished sketch, or did they hold a flower with compromising symbolism? A drawing at Windsor is considered a preparatory study for the portrait of Ginevra. The position of the arms would correspond to the pose of the bust, but Berenson (who noticed the flower, or rather its stem) raises some doubts about the dating and attributes it to a more mature Leonardo.

[1] On this panel there are Leonardo’s fingerprints, left in an attempt to soften the colour, to spread it without brushmarks. They could, it is true, belong to anyone, but they reappear in the Lady with an Ermine.

[2] Rosen, in his Die Natur in der Kunst (1903).

One should not be struck by the plumpness of the Infant, nor by his outsized proportions. The heart of the painting lies in the playfulness of the gesture, in the interlacing of three hands around a flower. The laughing, and not merely smiling, face of the Virgin is an almost unique novelty in the vast iconography of the Madonna and Child. The Virgin’s apparent age is also innovative, for she seems little more than a child, and perhaps for this reason she is able to play with her son even though she knows his fate. One might suppose that the initial idea of a “cheerful” moment in the relationship between the two influenced the choice of the model, a Madonna who, moreover, has devoted a good deal of time to her very elaborate hairstyle. A Mary who is not too solemn, who for a moment forgets all the sorrow the future holds in store for her. Revolutionary, almost secular. And yet even in this island of serenity the symbol of the Crucifixion appears: the flower that catches the Child’s attention is a crucifer, with four well-separated petals. No hypothesis of symbolism, on the other hand, about the leaves in the left hand.

Leaving aside the usual attribution disputes, it must be noted that the painting is unfinished, and that it was damaged in the transfer from panel to canvas. The unfinished state affects above all the Madonna’s face, beautiful nonetheless: eyes not clearly defined, the smile marred by an incomplete hint of teeth, the neck scratched¹. The Child’s right hand, too, is at the sketch stage.

[1] We report only in a note Berenson’s demolition of this Madonna: “bald forehead, puffy cheeks, toothless mouth, bleary eyes, wrinkled throat”. It is well known how much he detested Leonardo the painter; at least as much as he admired his drawings.

No dispute over authorship, at last, and no doubt that the work is unfinished. It is precisely this that makes it precious, because it suggests how Leonardo’s working method was perfectly in keeping with his aspiration to embody the many-sided man able to move in a thousand fields, from the military arts to engineering and from painting to philosophy (even though he called himself an “unlettered man”). When struck by an intuition he would suspend the work in hand, and in this way he finished few. Vasari tried to justify him: “It is clear that Leonardo, through his understanding of art, began many things and never finished any of them, since it seemed to him that the hand could not attain the perfection of art in the things he imagined, for he conceived in his mind certain difficulties so subtle and so marvellous that they could never have been expressed by the hands, however excellent they might be”. We know, on the other hand, that Leonardo even managed not to begin at all a work¹ commissioned from him through his father’s good connections.

Let us observe a small detail: on the white of the gesso ground, visible in a rectangle on the right, appears Alberti’s façade of Santa Maria Novella (completed in 1470). Leonardo made notes on the panel to be painted, since he would cover them over later anyway. And while painting St. Jerome’s body he practised anatomical studies – see the tendons of the neck, which (perhaps) the cardinal’s mantle would have hidden. And he amused himself, too: the lion’s semicircular tail, arranged to outline a stone, would have been reduced in a final version because, as we see it in this unfinished state, it steals too much of the scene.

[1] It was an altarpiece for the altar of the Chapel of San Bernardo in Palazzo Vecchio, seat of the government of Florence. There is no record that Leonardo ever returned the considerable advance he had received.

It seems that the reason the St. Jerome was left unfinished was the commission Leonardo received in 1481 for a more demanding work, a large altarpiece for the monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It was to be delivered within twenty-four to thirty months, but was never finished; and probably not because of the journey to Milan, but precisely for the “justificatory” reasons put forward by Vasari in the passage quoted just above. In this case the complexity of the composition and the play of shadows had already reached, at the drawing stage, such a level that perhaps it was not humanly possible to go further, and colour, instead of adding meaning to the work, might have been a hindrance. Giorgio Castelfranco¹ wonders whether the subsequent painting stage would have preserved “the admirable freshness of the first sketch. Would the very large group have attained greater poetic evidence, or would it have become overblown and muddled?” The brush drawing is not based on a previous cartoon, architectural motifs apart. It is made up of continual adding, redoing, erasing, improvising, sketching intuitions that crowd together following Leonardo’s figurative and narrative frenzy.

The figures (human and equine) that appear and partly bustle about in the scene number about sixty. The upper left part is occupied by ruins that are studies in perspective (see the drawing of about 1481, in white lead and silverpoint, in the Uffizi), as well as, obviously, symbols. According to one school they represent the remains of King David’s palace, of whom Christ is both descendant and root; according to another they are the ruins of the old world collapsing after the Incarnation. Leonardo loaded the Epiphany with meanings until it became a watershed in history. The skirmishes between horsemen, in a narrative flashback, would be those that took place among the Magi when they were still bitter enemies, who were to find peace only in Bethlehem, once they had witnessed the Nativity, an event bringing universal peace. The horizontal separation of the planes, with the Adoration – a mixture of veneration and wonder – occupying the first, is a division between old and new, between war and the hope of peace. Too much material even for “most excellent hands”.

[1] G. Castelfranco, Leonardo da Vinci, Milan 1952

The dating of the second altarpiece, despite the due “circa”, is replaced by some critics with “1503-1506”. In any case it is a work begun, suspended and resumed years later, and never finished, in which Leonardo’s contributions weigh less than those of the brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista De Predis. The story of the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks is complex, the product of documents that are sometimes difficult to interpret and of a great deal of conjecture. There is a contract dated 21 April 1483 between the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, Leonardo da Vinci and the De Predis brothers for the painting of panels to be placed on the altar of San Francesco Grande, a Milanese church since destroyed. The central one was to be painted by Leonardo, the two side panels by each of the brothers. Other documents mention an (undated) request for money from Leonardo and Ambrogio, then one addressed by Ambrogio alone in 1503 to the King of France, who was then also Duke of Milan, and a settlement reached in 1506.

This complicated affair leaves two questions open: for which patron did Leonardo paint the Louvre Virgin, and who painted the London Virgin? We have already said that the London version has little of Leonardo about it. The Child is banally executed, with the face of a bald adult and not very expressive compared with that of the Louvre altarpiece; the grey flesh tones do not belong to Leonardo, but fit perfectly within Ambrogio De Predis’s range of colours. More Leonardesque are some of the plant motifs and the drawing of the unfinished rocks beneath the angel. It would seem that De Predis, since Leonardo had returned to Florence leaving the altarpiece at a stage of execution comparable to the Adoration of the Magi, completed it in his own way, leaving his colleague a few small spaces to fill (including the angel’s unfinished hand), in order to collect the agreed fee. The Confraternity would thus have found itself with something close to a fake, while Leonardo was painting independently and even completing the Louvre Virgin. On behalf of a patron capable of exerting heavy pressure, and with a deadline to meet. The former would have been Ludovico il Moro, and the important date that of the marriage of il Moro’s niece to the Emperor Maximilian of Austria, to whom Ludovico sent (an unusual, and documented, gift) an altarpiece. Thirty-five years later Maximilian’s granddaughter married Francis I and moved to France, taking the painting with her. With the international intrigue closed, everyone can compare the two Virgins and assess their differences: in colour, in the emptier spaces and in the lesser attention to detail of the London one.

The dating of the second altarpiece, despite the due “circa”, is replaced by some critics with “1503-1506”. In any case it is a work begun, suspended and resumed years later, and never finished, in which Leonardo’s contributions weigh less than those of the brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista De Predis. The story of the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks is complex, the product of documents that are sometimes difficult to interpret and of a great deal of conjecture. There is a contract dated 21 April 1483 between the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, Leonardo da Vinci and the De Predis brothers for the painting of panels to be placed on the altar of San Francesco Grande, a Milanese church since destroyed. The central one was to be painted by Leonardo, the two side panels by each of the brothers. Other documents mention an (undated) request for money from Leonardo and Ambrogio, then one addressed by Ambrogio alone in 1503 to the King of France, who was then also Duke of Milan, and a settlement reached in 1506.

This complicated affair leaves two questions open: for which patron did Leonardo paint the Louvre Virgin, and who painted the London Virgin? We have already said that the London version has little of Leonardo about it. The Child is banally executed, with the face of a bald adult and not very expressive compared with that of the Louvre altarpiece; the grey flesh tones do not belong to Leonardo, but fit perfectly within Ambrogio De Predis’s range of colours. More Leonardesque are some of the plant motifs and the drawing of the unfinished rocks beneath the angel. It would seem that De Predis, since Leonardo had returned to Florence leaving the altarpiece at a stage of execution comparable to the Adoration of the Magi, completed it in his own way, leaving his colleague a few small spaces to fill (including the angel’s unfinished hand), in order to collect the agreed fee. The Confraternity would thus have found itself with something close to a fake, while Leonardo was painting independently and even completing the Louvre Virgin. On behalf of a patron capable of exerting heavy pressure, and with a deadline to meet. The former would have been Ludovico il Moro, and the important date that of the marriage of il Moro’s niece to the Emperor Maximilian of Austria, to whom Ludovico sent (an unusual, and documented, gift) an altarpiece. Thirty-five years later Maximilian’s granddaughter married Francis I and moved to France, taking the painting with her. With the international intrigue closed, everyone can compare the two Virgins and assess their differences: in colour, in the emptier spaces and in the lesser attention to detail of the London one.

A large notice at the entrance to the room should warn visitors to the Sala delle Asse that what they are about to see is only a crude academic copy of the original, and clearly indicate where Leonardo’s hand can still be discerned. The conception of the room’s decoration, an interlacing of rigorous geometry disguised as vegetation, was new for its time. The dominant tree species, in homage to il Moro, is of course the mulberry; but there also appears a plant always dear to Leonardo, the bulrush.

A second notice should tell the story of the most unfortunate and pompous of the restorations, that of 1902, if only to do justice to the impossible mission of the 1954 one. On 10 May 1902 the “restoration” of the vault was officially presented to the public; it had been strongly promoted by the architect and member of the Kingdom’s parliament Luca Beltrami, carried out by the painter Ernesto Rusca and generously financed by the lawyer Pietro Volpi. To his reckless praise of the operation (“a Leonardo rejuvenated”, to be held up as an example for the conservation of the Last Supper), Beltrami added in an article of his no technical detail, no mention of what had been found of Leonardo beneath the plaster that had concealed the decoration. No photographs were taken. Rusca took one octagon as a model and repeated it like the module of a printed fabric; in his “creative” fury he went as far as outright forgery, replacing the inscription celebrating the arrival of Louis XII after il Moro’s flight (not very patriotic) with one praising the patron Volpi, his late wife, to whose memory the work was dedicated, and, rightly, his own name. For his part, Beltrami had rejected as “work carried out during the Spanish domination” the only surviving fragments by Leonardo’s hand – on the walls – and had them covered by the boards he had so brilliantly reinvented. They show a thick, gnarled trunk working its way between layers of rock, managing to lift the stones and force a passage: a testimony to Leonardo’s taste for the forces of nature and for the representation of the movement they can unleash.

In 1894 the deputy Beltrami had deplored the “free will of restorers, who do not always take due care, and do not always give serious assurance of carrying out the work entrusted to them properly. Of these restorations, generally no record remains…”¹ Professor Beltrami, director of the Office for the Conservation of Lombard Monuments, as well as deputy and then senator of the Kingdom, a liberal-conservative: a fine tangle of politics, the politics of restoration, and Restoration. To stay in Milan, and given that Beltrami, besides inventing the bizarre Torre del Filarete, also had a hand in Piazza della Scala, starting by demolishing the “case rotte” (broken houses), the last reminder of the lordship of the Della Torre, one is reminded of the Theatre that had given the square its name, currently under restoration…

[1] Speech of 2 June 1894, in Atti Parlamentari, Chamber of Deputies, Leg. XVIII, p. 9646. Quotation taken from the degree thesis of S. Sicoli, Faculty of Letters, Milan, Academic year 1975-76.

One of the very few male portraits by Leonardo known to us, and the only one to survive. Of course, for this small panel too there is no certainty of attribution; indeed, for years it was considered not to be by Leonardo. It did not appear, for example, in the list of Federico Borromeo’s donation to the Accademia of Milan, whereas the Lady with a Pearl Hairnet did. The removal of a repainting in the lower part brought back to light the hand holding the sheet of music, and from there it was possible to trace the sitter, Franchino Gaffurio¹, a good friend of Leonardo. Matters would be more complicated, extending to disputes of Byzantine subtlety (one tradition even held it to be the portrait of Ludovico il Moro); here it is more interesting to observe the strange atmosphere of stillness in the portrait, a moment of concentration before the singing begins. Leonardo was lavish with suggestions on how to depict movements and use shadows and lights to bring figures to life, and he admitted how difficult it was to depict a state of mind. The musician’s gaze may seem unrealistic, staring into space; perhaps he is reading the music within himself and anticipating its performance. It would have been too easy to have him lower his eyes and read the sheet. Anatomically, the shape of the eyes closely recalls that of the angel in the Louvre Virgin of the Rocks.

The painting, as can easily be seen, is not finished.

[1] Gaffurio composed an Angelicum ac divinum opus, and on the sheet appear the letters “Cant… Ang…”, which can be completed as “Cantum Angelicum”. Perhaps it is not much, for a definite identification.

A pure profile portrait considered too poor to be by Leonardo, except by a few critics. Firmly believed to be Leonardesque because of its long physical proximity to the Portrait of a Musician, it was thought to depict Ludovico’s wife, Beatrice d’Este. Once the initial identification of the musician with Ludovico had collapsed for obvious physiognomic reasons, the most fanciful hypotheses began as to who the lady was: Bianca Maria Sforza, Isabella of Aragon, a certain Signora Trotti, Domitilla Trivulzio, Bianca Giovanna (an illegitimate daughter of il Moro), Anna Maria Sforza, Cecilia Gallerani (grown up; but that band of hair under the chin is suspect)… We shall refrain from listing who proposed the various names.

Franco Russoli calls her a “dewy maiden of mellow beauty” and, above all, lacking the “divine Leonardesque ambiguity”.

The painting, finally, seems to have been completed, and it has been removed from the Leonardo catalogue almost unanimously¹. It is mentioned here for reasons of physical proximity, in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, with the Musician.

[1] Cf. Pietro C. Marani, Leonardo, cit., p. 10

The (fairly) recent exhibition of this painting in Milan drew huge crowds, and few admirers can have doubted that it is by Leonardo. As with most of his work, however, opposing camps have formed over its attribution in this case too. If a statistical criterion applied, at any rate, most critics favour Leonardo’s hand, at most with some assistance. The school is certainly Lombard and Leonardesque.

The young woman has a particular, “serpentine” pose, with the shoulders turned in the opposite direction to the face, which gives depth to the figure. She seems caught at the moment of turning to answer someone’s call, as if she had been asked why she was going off with that little animal in her arms, from whom she had taken it or to whom she was taking it. The creature in question, not exactly relaxed (the left paw is not resting but ready to seize), has been identified in turn as a weasel, a stone marten, a ferret, a pine marten and an ermine. Its toes cannot be counted; to belong to the mustelids it should have five, but there seem to be four. In any case, it is now accepted that it is an ermine (a little fat: tamed?) because in this way it can be taken as a symbol of purity and chastity, and with a rather hasty translation an assonance can be created between the Greek term galée¹, meaning ermine, and Gallerani, the possible name of the young woman portrayed. Cecilia Gallerani, the sixteen-year-old mistress of Ludovico il Moro, despite her somewhat defiant expression, could hardly have brought il Moro a weasel, symbol of cunning, or a predatory stone marten as a gift.

The painting has been extensively reworked. The strange band of hair under the chin has replaced the original curls, the background has been redone and the outlines have been gone over and altered. What remains original is the face (apart from a pinkish glaze) and the animal. Which, as we said, is a little sturdy, like many of Leonardo’s infants. Cecilia’s much-praised (elegant, tapering) right hand has excessive fingers; the left is a typical Leonardesque non-finito.

[1] It would be worth verifying how well the ancient languages were known at the court of il Moro. The fact that Pietro Bembo had studied it, mentioned when discussing Ginevra Benci, was exceptional enough to find its way into the chronicles and the encyclopaedias. The term, however, means “weasel, stone marten, cat”. And Berenson spoke of a Lady with a Ferret

The title given to the painting is the result of a misunderstanding: someone, during a cataloguing, confused it with the portrait of the mistress of Francis I, whereas it is that of a mistress of Ludovico il Moro, probably Lucrezia Crivelli. But no one can have failed to notice that in the Lady with an Ermine an inscription appears at the top which few have questioned: “LA BELLE FERRONIERE – LEONARD D’AWINCI”. A strange note, written not on the back of the painting but prominently displayed. So is this, once again, the beautiful Cecilia?

If it mattered, one might point out the hairstyle of both women. The parting is identical, and it also resembles that of the Mona Lisa. It might be disturbing, in the Ferronière, the stiff band of hair around the ear: but it is a retouching made long after the original painting.

The discussions about who the sitter is, always interesting, distract from the reality of the painting, which presents compositional and technical problems. Is the wooden parapet original, or was it added to hide the lady’s hands? Is the craquelure marking the face a technical mishap (a miscalculated ratio between oil and pigment) that Leonardo should already have overcome by that time? What is beautiful to look at is simply the lady’s gaze, a challenge she calmly directs at the painter, sure of winning. What the stakes were, however, is hard to know. Unless the Belle Ferronière was the repeatedly portrayed mistress of Leonardo himself. A platonic mistress, of course, always the same: from Letizia to Gioconda.

The history of this work, so celebrated from the very time it was being made, is unfortunately that of its decay and of its many restorations, not always beneficial. In 1517-1518 Antonio de Beatis judged it “most excellent, although it is beginning to deteriorate, whether because of the dampness of the wall or some other oversight”. Vasari, in 1568, found the painting “so badly damaged that nothing can be seen any more but a blurred stain”. In 1584 Lomazzo would blame the deterioration on the use of oil “instead of good fresco, and on an unsuitable priming”, but he was wrong, because Leonardo’s technique was to use two preparatory layers: one on the plaster, based on calcium carbonate, and the second of lead white, on which he applied the tempera. The same technique was adopted by Mantegna for part of the Camera degli Sposi. In 1726 the first restoration, trusting Lomazzo, was a kind of repainting in oil that made the situation worse. Today, after the long restoration work completed in 1999, the Refectory admits no more than twenty-five visitors at a time, who may stay only fifteen minutes after being “purified” of dust and pollutants.

The work is striking for the facial expressions and gestures of the figures. In the iconography of the Last Supper (a subject found in many convents) Leonardo has captured not the moment of the bread broken and offered by Christ as his own body, but the one in which he announces the coming betrayal of which he will be the victim. Thus the various expressions shift from incredulity to astonishment, from horror to anger and fainting. At the far right (as seen by the viewer) a discussion flares up; for the curious, Judas is in the group on the left, drawing back into the shadow of Peter, who leans towards Christ, and of the half-fainting John, the first beside Jesus. And Jesus does not even seem disappointed or disheartened. When he says “one of you will betray me” he is announcing a simple matter of fact.

The making of the Last Supper had a colourful witness in Matteo Bandello, and a passage of his describes well Leonardo’s restlessness, his irregular progress, his perpetual dissatisfaction: “He would also often go early in the morning to climb onto the scaffolding, for the Last Supper is somewhat high above the ground; he would, I say, from sunrise until dusk never put the brush down, but, forgetting to eat and drink, paint continually. Then he would let two, three or four days go by without putting his hand to it, and yet he would sometimes stay there one or two hours a day and only contemplate, consider and, examining within himself, judge his figures”¹. At other times he would interrupt work on the famous equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza (never begun, except on paper and as a model), return to the refectory, add two or three brushstrokes and leave.

[1] Matteo Bandello, Le Novelle, in the dedication of the 58th novella.

There are numerous drawings by Leonardo that can be considered preparatory for this composition, or that contain elements carried over into it almost entirely. The most famous is the cartoon in the National Gallery, London, executed in charcoal and white lead around 1498, which also offers remarkable examples of painterly sfumato. For some critics this drawing is preferable to the Louvre painting. It is a work in its own right, certainly not “the” cartoon intended to be pricked for transfer onto the panel by pouncing. Something must have failed to convince Leonardo, who in this work was pursuing a difficult equation between movement and harmony of the figures. He left it to Bernardino Luini to copy. The most disturbing element was probably the placing of the two heads, of the Madonna and St. Anne, at the same height; in the panel St. Anne towers over the group and forms the apex of a pyramidal composition. The infant St. John has disappeared, and the Child is playfully mistreating a lamb (he is trying to ride it, holding it by the ears; needless to say, it prefigures his sacrifice); the Madonna tries to restrain him, tenderly anxious, while St. Anne wears the Mona Lisa smile of one who knows how useless it is to oppose destiny.

Another reference drawing is the red chalk showing a storm over a valley (Windsor, Royal Library). It contributes much of the background, in which there appear rocks that seem to belong to ancient geological eras: no trace of civilisation; in their harshness they belong to the dawn of creation. And they place the group outside time. In this treatise on geology – note the rock strata at the Virgin’s feet – someone has found the tree on the right incongruous. Rather strangely, in fact, not even a blade of grass can be seen in the foreground, let alone flowers; and Leonardo devoted far more patience to detailing the pebbles than to finishing St. Anne’s foot. The robes, too, and other minor parts of the painting are unfinished.

According to Vasari, Leonardo laboured for four years on this portrait. “Leonardo undertook to paint for Francesco del Giocondo the portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife, and after toiling over it for four years he left it unfinished…”¹ Continuing his description of the picture, however, Vasari dwells on eyelashes that do not exist. Brilliant, unless it refers to an entirely unknown portrait, is the slip of the Anonimo Gaddiano: “he portrayed Pier Francesco del Giocondo from life”. That said, the Mona Lisa is one of the very few works whose entire authorship has never been seriously questioned. The others, leaving aside cartoons and drawings, are the Last Supper (beware, though: it is documented that numerous assistants worked on it, even if their contributions cannot be detected, given the poor condition of the painting) and unfinished works such as the St. Jerome and The Adoration of the Magi.

At the not inconsiderable age of five hundred years, the picture is holding up extremely well: it has never been repainted, it is still on its original poplar support, and it boasts an extraordinary craquelure. No one has dared to remove the layer of varnish that protects it, even though it darkens it somewhat. It is the most famous painting in the world (so described by 85.6 per cent of those interviewed in a survey conducted for the purpose), a popular myth born of the attempts to solve the enigma of Mona Lisa’s smile and gaze. It cannot be said that she has a face of incredible beauty; and if she really were Lisa Gherardini, born in 1479, she would be a rather faded twenty-four-year-old.

Better not to touch on the literature about the identity of the woman portrayed². The most widely accepted hypothesis is that she is a woman who existed more for Leonardo than in herself, a kind of mental model, always the same as time went by. On the other hand, one cannot fail to notice the resemblance to the Belle Ferronière/Lucrezia Crivelli, and hence to Cecilia Gallerani. Better to pay a little more attention to the background: once again rocks fading into the mist, a winding river, a bridge that one might try to identify. But one would have to look for it in Lombardy, perhaps on the Adda, and not in the Arno valley. Naturally, nothing prevents the background from not corresponding to the region of origin of the picture’s sitter.

[1] The left hand, for example, is not very finished.

[2] The history of the picture, however, has some mysterious features. In Leonardo’s notes – and he did keep a record of fees and expenses – there is no mention of a contract, an advance or a payment for this portrait, which was supposedly executed on commission. In Leonardo’s vast output of drawings there is not a single one that relates to the Mona Lisa, so much so that one critic tried in vain to see a reference to it in the “study of hands” mentioned in connection with the portrait of Ginevra Benci. The picture was never delivered to the client: Leonardo took it with him to France, and Francis I bought it, paying as much as 4,000 gold scudi.

A much earlier dating, around 1490, has also been proposed for this sketch. Carlo Pedretti wonders¹ whether it might not be an early work, “comparable in technique and style to the sketches for the Adoration of the Magi and the St. Jerome”, or a work from the last years of the fifteenth century, recalling the solidity of certain Lombard images, or else an even later rethinking by Leonardo of his own youthful experience. A fairly wide range of proposals, and Pedretti leans towards the last. For reasons of technique and style, for the form moulded by light.

It is a fascinating face, only slightly marred by a poorly resolved eye. The hair, merely sketched in, nonetheless manages to convey the idea of a breeze stirring it. Some have wished to see in it a study for the lost painting of Leda, of which numerous preparatory drawings survive, but the meditative attitude is better suited to a Madonna than to a profane subject. Pedretti again, who laments the exclusion of this portrait from the Leonardo catalogue by many scholars: “Perhaps, in all its earthly thinness, this is Leonardo’s most sublime work, more sublime even than the Mona Lisa or the Last Supper, a work that was conceived to live outside time and space”.

[1] In his essay included in Leonardo – la pittura, cit., p. 152.

The greatest doubts about attribution, for this painting, may stem from its being “finished to the limit of all technical possibility”¹. A fair number of scholars consider it the work of Leonardo’s school or workshop; others consider the conception of the figure to be his, and point out some naïveties in the execution.

The pose recalls figures already seen in Leonardo, and certain “serpentine” poses. Even the more than dark background is not new. The face seems familiar, as does the unsettling smile. The hand with its finger pointing upwards is almost the same as in the drawing for the Madonna, St. Anne and the Child, with the same function of evoking a future event of salvation.

Leonardo had certainly forgotten his master, Verrocchio. The first painting mentioned in this survey was the Baptism: Verrocchio’s bony, ill-favoured St. John is cancelled and removed by this ephebe, well-fed and equivocal, suspended between a languid masculinity (like many of Leonardo’s angels, though angels are known to have no sex) and a heavy femininity.

St. John’s androgyny may correspond to the canons of ideal beauty and youth celebrated by Lorenzo the Magnificent, the Platonic ephebe as an unattainable model. More unsettling still is the esoteric and alchemical idea of the announcement of Paradise made by a figure in which – at last – opposing natures are joined, mystery and knowledge, divine grace and beauty. The Baptist’s smile, finally, is born of the encounter and dialogue between two opposites, light and shadow, in a play of sfumato and chiaroscuro; a metaphor of the light that appears in the darkness, just as in the biblical texts. It is also one of the cornerstones of Leonardo’s pictorial research: “shadow is of the nature of darkness, light is of the nature of brightness; the one conceals and the other reveals; they are always joined in company with bodies”.

[1] Angela Ottino Della Chiesa, in L’opera pittorica completa di Leonardo, Milan 1967.