Verrocchio’s bronze David, c. 1466, and a study of a young man in the pose of David from the Ferrucci sketchbook.
If it is, we have another likeness of him (though a second-hand one) in a pen-and-ink drawing of a naked young man in the exact pose of Verrocchio’s David. This drawing is now in the Louvre. It was formerly part of a sketchbook, now dispersed, belonging to the Florentine sculptor Francesco di Simone Ferrucci. On another page of the sketchbook Ferrucci notes that Lorenzo di Credi – another pupil of Verrocchio’s – has furnished him with some of Verrocchio’s ‘models’ (clay figures, drawings, templates) to copy. On yet another page, among some sketches of an angel, is a line of right-to-left handwriting that looks remarkably like Leonardo’s. The precise date of the sketchbook is uncertain: the mention of Credi cannot be much earlier than the late 1470s, and some of the pages have written material dated 1487–8.30 The drawing is unlikely to be a direct study of the young model who stood for David, but is plausibly a later copy by Ferrucci of one of Verrocchio’s own preparatory sketches for the sculpture. Thus filtered and approximated, and with some guesswork thrown in, it shows us the young Leonardo da Vinci standing naked in the studio on Via Ghibellina.
Nothing expresses more pungently, or more poignantly, the reality of the Florentine artist’s studio than the inventory of Verrocchio’s possessions left at his bottega after his death in 1488. This is not the bottega on Via Ghibellina – he had moved to a more central location near the Duomo sometime before 1480 – but the address does not really matter. I transcribe the list exactly, with its modulations intact. There was a feather bed, a white bed-cover, a mattress, a pair of sheets, a painted bed-frame, a dining-table, a bench for the table, a well-bucket, a chest to keep grain in, a jar of oil, three casks containing 14 barrels of wine, a large cask of vinegar wine (agresto), a model of the cupola (of the cathedral), a fine lute, a Bible in the vernacular, a copy of the Cento novelle, a printed Moscino, Petrarch’s Trionfi, the Pistole of Ovid, a picture of the head of Andrea, a terracotta of a baby, a large painting, a sphere, two old chests, a figure of St John, two pairs of bellows worth 15 florins, two pairs of small bellows, two heads in half-relief, an anvil, a sculpture of Our Lady, a head in profile, two porphyry pestles, a pair of pincers, a funeral monument for the Cardinal of Pistoia, a large sculpted figure, three rough-cast putti and their clay models, various hammers of various sizes, a kiln with various iron tools, a quantity of firewood of pine and other sorts, and five moulds for making cannon-balls both large and small.31
Amid the domestic lumber and artistic equipment, a couple of items catch the eye. The ‘fine lute’ confirms Vasari’s statement that Verrocchio was a musician; it is possible that Leonardo’s musical skills developed under Verrocchio’s aegis. The books also give us a sense of the mental texture of the bottega. Three of them are well-known works of a cultivated but popular sort: leisure reading. There is the Cento novelle, a collection of stories by the fourteenth-century Florentine novelist Franco Sacchetti, closely modelled on Boccaccio. There is Petrarch’s Trionfi(Triumphs): moralistic poems in terzine. And there is an edition of the Pistole, or Epistles, of Ovid, also known as the Eroides, probably in the Italian translation by Luca Pulci published in Florence in 1481. Leonardo himself later owned a copy of this, as well as a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.32 The other book mentioned among Verrocchio’s effects – the ‘printed Moscino’ – may be Leon Battista Alberti’s Mosca (The Fly), a humorous work based on Lucian’s Laus muscae (In Praise of the Fly).
The mention of a portrait or self-portrait (‘a picture of the head of Andrea’) in the inventory is tantalizing. It is unlikely to be the half-length oil-portrait in the Uffizi, showing a dark, thin-lipped man with a rather dour expression. This is often said to be a portrait of Verrocchio, but it more probably depicts Verrocchio’s sometime pupil Perugino – its similarity to the signed self-portrait of Perugino in the Collegio di Cambio in Perugia is striking.33 There is a woodcut portrait of Verrocchio in Vasari’s Lives, apparently showing him in middle age. Some of these woodcuts, produced en masse in the late 1560s, are pure guesswork as portraits, but in this case the image leads us to another. The face has strong similarities to a powerful pen-and-ink portrait in the Uffizi which is certainly of the Verrocchio school (see page 86). This may well be a portrait of Verrocchio: it would show him around the age of forty. It is not a handsome face – broad, double-chinned, faintly epicene – but the intensity of the gaze is startling. This drawing is not itself the item listed in the inventory (which is described as a quadro, and was therefore a painted portrait), but it may be connected with it. It is as near as we get to a likeness of Leonardo’s teacher.
LEARNING THE TRADE
Many wish to learn how to draw, and enjoy drawing, but do not have a true aptitude for it. This is shown by their lack of perseverance, like boys who draw everything in a hurry, never finishing or shadowing…
Paris MS G, fol. 25r
While serving as a junior worker or dogsbody in the studio, and perhaps as a model, Leonardo was also a pupil or discepolo, receiving specific instruction from Maestro Andrea. A contract drawn up in 1467 gives us an idea of what the apprentice expected to be taught. In it the Paduan painter Francesco Squarcione undertakes to teach his pupil ‘the principle of a plane, with lines drawn according to my method’, and how to ‘put figures on the said plane’ and ‘place objects there, as namely a chair or a bench or a house’, and how to represent a man’s head in foreshortening in isometric rendering’, and the ‘system of a naked body’.34 Thus broadly the pupil would learn the techniques of perspective and of figure-drawing. Squarcione also promises to ‘keep him with paper in his hand’ and to ‘provide him with models’. These ‘models’ would be Squarcione’s own drawings, as well as real objects and people. The pupil spent much time copying from the master’s ‘model book’.
Paper was expensive, and pupils also practised with a coated wood panel and a metalpoint stylus. In his famous handbook, the Libro dell’arte, Cennino Cennini recommends ‘a little boxwood panel, nine inches square’. This should be smoothed down ‘with cuttle such as goldsmiths use’, and then coated with bone-ash moistened with saliva: for the bone-ash use chicken bones, he advises, ‘just as you find them under the dining-table’.35 Leonardo’s earliest drawings on paper show him habitually using a leadpoint or silverpoint stylus before filling the lines in with pen and ink.
Draughtsmanship – disegno – was the foundation of this artistic education. This is stressed by Vasari, who specifies that Ser Piero arranged for Leonardo to ‘study drawing’ with Verrocchio, and it was stressed by Leonardo himself when he became a maestro with pupils of his own. According to Paolo Giovio, ‘Leonardo would not permit youngsters under the age of twenty to touch brushes and colours, and would only let them practise with a lead stylus, diligently following the best examples of the ancients, and imitating the force of nature and the lineaments of the body with the simplest lines.’36 That this reflects the practice in Verrocchio’s busy commercial studio is unlikely – Leonardo was certainly painting before he was twenty – but it echoes the strict grounding in metalpoint draughtsmanship that he learned from Verrocchio. He had as good a master as he could get: Verrocchio was probably the finest draughtsman of his generation in Florence. Vasari’s famous collection included some of Verrocchio’s works, ‘done with the greatest patience and judgement’, among them ‘several female heads with lovely expressions and hair, which Leonardo was always imitating for their beauty’. Various examples of these survive. Vasari’s ‘always’ is not merely rhetorical: a black-chalk portrait by Verrocchio in the British Museum is closely echoed in Leonardo’s sketches for Leda, done more than thirty years later.37
Vasari also owned some Leonardo drawings, including early studies of drapery, done on linen, which he describes as among Leonardo’s exercises as a studio-pupil: ‘He made clay models, draping the figures with rags dipped in plaster, and drew them painstakingly on fine Rheims cloth or prepared
linen. These drawings were done in black and white, with the point of the brush, and the results were marvellous, as one can see from the examples I have in my book of drawings.’ Several of these early drapery studies survive. Some can be related to drapery in the Uffizi Annunciation, which is probably Leonardo’s earliest complete painting (c. 1470–2).38 A drawing at Christ Church College, Oxford, is a study for the angel’s sleeve in the Annunciation; it is a fragment from a larger folio which probably once contained a sketch of a head (perhaps the angel’s head), some traces of long curly hair being visible at the right margin. The sleeve can also be compared to that of the San Gennaro angel, a small terracotta statue recently attributed to Leonardo (plate 8).
Leonardo’s brilliance in this respect prefigured the Mannerists, who make so much of drapery. ‘He took it beyond mere academic exercise,’ says Alessandro Vezzosi: he ‘brought out all its latent abstraction and force’.39 Enlargements of these drapery studies look like versions of the rocks and mountains of his later landscapes. The subject continued to exercise him:
One of Leonardo’s drapery studies on linen.
there is a chapter in the Trattato della pittura entitled ‘On Dresses, Draperies and Folds’. A drapery ‘must fit the body and not appear like an empty bundle of clothes’ – thus ‘inhabited drapery’. And he continued to refine the visual distinctions:
Thin cloths, thick cloths, new and old cloths; with pleats broken up and with pleats entire; soft ruffles, shaded and less shaded, reflected and not reflected, expeditious and confused, according to their placing and their colours; garments according to rank, long and short, flying and stiff according to the movements, such as fit the figure and such as flutter upward or downward.40
Another early Leonardo drawing suggestive of the Annunciation is a study of a lily (Plate 3). It is crisply done in black chalk gone over with pen and ink, and given a sepia wash heightened here and there with white. It resembles the lily in the Annunciation, but is not an actual study for it as it slants the other way. It looks closer to the lily in Verrocchio’s Madonna and Child with Two Angels (National Gallery, London), but the painting has been cropped and only part of the flower is visible. The drawing has some faint lines in the lower third of the paper, hard to see in reproduction: these seem to be geometric studies of perspective, reinforcing the context of apprenticeship in which the drawing was done.
Also part of the apprentice’s curriculum was modelling in clay and terracotta. Vasari says that ‘in his youth’ Leonardo ‘made in clay several heads of laughing women, of which plaster casts are still being made, as well as some children’s heads executed as if by a mature artist’. No trace remains of any ‘laughing women’, and, though there are plenty of putti in Verrocchio’s monumental sculptures, there is nothing to suggest that any are by Leonardo.
Leonardo’s early career as a sculptor is mysterious. There is a beautiful terracotta head, a Cristo giovanotto or Youthful Christ (see page 122), which is thought to be his work, though opinions differ about whether it is an early work or from the mid-1490s (it has affinities with some studies for the disciples of the Last Supper). It may be the ‘little head’ later owned by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo:
I have also a little terracotta head of Christ when he was a boy [fanciullo], sculpted by Leonardo Vinci’s own hand, in which one sees the simplicity and purity of the boy, together with a certain something which shows wisdom, intellect and majesty. He has an air which may be the tenderness of youth but which seems also old and wise.41
Lomazzo has interesting things to say about Leonardo’s activities as a sculptor because he had seen a manuscript, now lost, in which Leonardo speaks of sculpture as the ‘sister of painting’, and says, ‘I have delighted in her, and I delight in her still,’ instancing as ‘witness’ of this his various efforts as a sculptor – ‘horses, and legs, and heads, and also human [i.e. lifelike] heads of Our Lady, and youthful Christs both full length and in part, and numerous heads of old men’.42 This passage (assuming Lomazzo is reporting the lost manuscript faithfully) makes one look in turn at the famous list in the Codex Atlanticus, dated c. 1482, in which Leonardo catalogues various works he had completed before his departure to Milan.
Metalpoint drawing of a warrior in profile, probably based on a bas-relief by Verrocchio.
Some of these – ‘many heads of old men’, ‘many full-figure nudes’, ‘many legs, feet, and gestures [attitudini]’ – may be sculptures or clay models rather than drawings.43
He would also have learned the techniques of moulding and carving in relief (rilievo). There is a pair of terracotta angels in bas-relief in the Louvre which are certainly products of the Verrocchio workshop, and are sometimes attributed to Leonardo because of their similarity to the painted angel in the Baptism of Christ. Vasari mentions a bas-relief in bronze by Verrocchio showing the bellicose Persian emperor Darius; it is now lost, but is almost certainly recorded in Leonardo’s expressive metalpoint portrait of a warrior in profile, now in the British Museum.44
From life-drawing and perspective studies and clay-modelling, the pupil moves finally to the profession of painting. It is not certain when Verrocchio himself began painting, nor is it known who trained him. The first documentation of him as a painter is from 1468, when he submitted designs for a series of paintings of the Seven Virtues for the Palazzo della Mercanzia, though he was probably active before that.45 The studio’s chief output was small to medium-size Madonna and Child paintings. There are many of these in the style now called Verrocchiesco; their chief antecedent is the sweet and lustrous Madonnas of Fra Filippo Lippi, and through him the Netherlandish influence. They tend towards prettiness, but have also a robust sense of volume and movement derived from Verrocchio’s work as a sculptor. On stylistic grounds the small half-length Madonna and Child in Berlin is probably one of the earliest, c. 1468. Other examples are the Ruskin Madonna in Edinburgh; the Madonna and Child with Two Angels in the National Gallery, London; the Madonna of the Sea in the Accademia, Florence; the Dreyfus Madonna in Washington, DC; and the Madonna of the Carnation in Munich. Most of these are dated to the early to mid-1470s. They are all panel paintings, done on wood; canvas was not yet in use as a support, and there is no evidence that Verrocchio & Co. ever undertook fresco work, which was a speciality of the Ghirlandaio shop.
But long before Leonardo put brush to panel he would have toiled away at the basic mechanics of painting. He must learn the suitability of various different woods for the panel – poplar, walnut, pear, service-tree. Of these, poplar was the staple of the studios – especially the white poplar known as gattice, a cheap, serviceable wood much used by carpenters and joiners. He must learn to prepare the different types of gesso, the gypsum-based white distemper which was coated on to the panel, forming the ‘ground’ on to which the paint was applied: the final layers of silky gesso sottile arrived at a smooth, brilliant-white surface with low absorbency. Over the years Leonardo would experiment with ever more sophisticated custom-made gessoes:
Coat it [the panel] with mastic and white turpentine of the second distillation… then give it two or three coats of aqua vitae in which you have dissolved arsenic, or some other corrosive sublimate. Then apply boiled linseed oil in such a way that it penetrates every part, and before it cools rub it well with a cloth to dry it. Over this apply a liquid white varnish with a stick, then wash with urine.46
Thus prepared the panel was ready for the next step of the process: the transfer of preparatory drawings on to the virgin white surface. A full-scale drawing for the whole composition was often used: the ‘cartoon’, from the Italian cartone, a large sheet of paper. The outlines of the drawing were ‘pricked’ with little holes; one sees these perforations on many drawings. The cartoon was fixed flat against the panel and dusted with finely powdered charcoal or pumice. This is the process known as ‘pouncing’ (in Italian spolveratura); ‘pounce’ is a corruption of ‘pumice’. The dust passes through the perforations of the drawing and leaves a tracing on the p
anel, which is now ready for painting.
The tradition within which Leonardo first worked was that of tempera painting, though oil painting was soon to become the dominant new medium. A tempera is any kind of binding agent which will ‘temper’ powdered colours and make them workable, but in the Quattrocento the term invariably refers to egg tempera: colours mixed with fresh egg-yolk (or, for manuscript illumination, egg-white) and thinned with water. Egg tempera dries almost instantly, though several tones lighter than when wet, and is tough and long-lasting. The lustrous fresco cycles of Florence – Masaccio’s in the Carmine, Gozzoli’s in the Palazzo Medici, Ghirlandaio’s in Santa Maria Novella – were all painted a fresco (on fresh wet plaster) with tempera. To the sounds and smells of the bottega we must add those of the chickens that produced the eggs required for the pictorial output of a busy studio.
Leonardo Da Vinci Page 10