Oil painting was already established – a technique imported from the Netherlands – but was still mainly used as a finish, modifying the opaque tempera layer with a rich transparent film or glaze. It was a decorative adjunct to tempera work.47 Leonardo is on a technical cusp: he begins within the tempera tradition, but is soon enthused by the richness of oils, of which he became a master. He recognized the subtleties of modelling and shading which oils offered. The quick drying of tempera meant that you had to depict shadow by lines (‘hatching’ and ‘cross-hatching’), but with oils there was a new dimension of layered brushwork with which to achieve depth of tone and optical complexity – that ‘smoky’ look, or sfumato, which is one of his trademarks. And, crucial for Leonardo’s perfectionist style, there was no need to hurry.
The discepolo must also be versed in the arcana of colours – the materials which yielded them, the manner of preparing them, the effects of blending them. Some colours were from local earths (ochres, umbers, sienas), some were from plants (vegetable black), and some were products of noxious but fairly simple chemistry (lead white, lead–tin yellow). These provided a working basis for the painter’s palette. A traditional mix for flesh tones was yellow ochre, vegetable black and lead white; Cennino calls this verdaccio.
But for the brilliant hues sought by the painter and his customers more exotic materials were needed. The pre-eminent pigment of early Italian painting was the vivid poetic blue called oltremare, or ultramarine, made by grinding lapis lazuli (‘stone of azure’: the Latin lazulus derives from the Persian lazhward). This ‘stone’ is a naturally occurring silicate rich in sulphur. The word ‘ultramarine’ sounds as if it refers to a blue more intense than sea-blue, but simply means that it came from ‘beyond the seas’. It was imported stuff, and fearfully expensive, and so became a byword for the value, and hence prestige, of a painting. The contract for Ghirlandaio’s Adoration of the Magi (1485) stipulates that ‘the blue must be ultramarine of the value of about 4 florins an ounce’ – though this sort of approach was dying out and cheaper substitutes like Prussian blue and azurite were becoming common.48
Other important mineral-based pigments were green malachite, widely used for landscape and foliage,49 and the brilliant red vermiglio, or vermilion, obtained from grinding cinnabar (red mercuric sulphide). The word comes from the Latin vermiculus, a little worm, because the red of cinnabar was compared to the red dye extracted from an insect, the kermes. Another insect was the source of ‘lac’ or ‘lake’, which was added to powdered pigments to produce a sheeny glaze.
Recipes for producing particular colour-effects fill the popular manuals like Cennino’s Libro dell’arte and Ghiberti’s Commentarii, and there are many in Leonardo’s manuscripts. In the Codex Atlanticus, written with the ornamental flourishes associated with Leonardo’s earlier writing, we find:
Take green [i.e. malachite] and mix it with bitumen, and this will make the shadows darker. And for lighter shades mix green with yellow ochre, and for even lighter green with yellow, and for the highlights pure yellow. Then take green and turmeric together and glaze everything with it… To make a beautiful red take cinnabar or red chalk or burnt ochre for the dark shadows, and for the lighter ones red chalk and vermilion, and for the highlights pure vermilion, and then glaze with fine lake.50
These raw materials explain why the painter was a member of the Arte dei Medici, Speziali e Mercai, the Guild of Physicians, Apothecaries and Mercers. The apothecary dealt in exotic stuffs of all sorts: you went to him for spices, drugs, herbs, potions and pharmaceuticals. Old-fashioned Italian pharmacies still refer to themselves as spezierie, spice-shops. From these pungent premises the painter purchased his visual spices. Also specializing in the supply of pigments in Florence were the Ingesuati friars of San Giusto alle Mura. Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Michelangelo are documented as customers, and so is Leonardo, who in the summer of 1481 paid 4 lire for ‘one ounce of azzuro [azurite] bought from the Ingesuati’.51
All this was required technical knowledge for the prentice painter, but there were other, less palpable, forms of knowledge he must learn. As well as a workshop or art factory, the bottega was a haunt of artists, a forum of discussion and gossip, a hotbed of new techniques and ideas. This was the university of the unlettered Leonardo.
A painter closely associated with the emergence of the Verrocchio style is Sandro Botticelli. He was an independent painter, but his earliest works are Madonna and Child panels much in the Verrocchio mould – or perhaps Verrocchio’s are in the Botticelli mould: we have no knowledge of Verrocchio’s training as a painter, and he was probably ready to learn from the younger artist, who had been trained by the great Filippo Lippi, and who became, after Lippi’s death in 1469, the master of his illegitimate son Filippino. Botticelli must be an important influence on Leonardo’s fledging as a painter in the late 1460s and early 1470s – an influence one could argue from the angel of the Annunciation, which has something of the stylized balletic look one associates with Botticelli. He was seven or eight years older than Leonardo. He was a rather highly strung man, and became a devotee of Savonarola, though Vasari also paints him as a habitual practical joker.
Leonardo left few comments on his artistic contemporaries, but he does comment on Botticelli. The tone is surprisingly critical. He speaks dismissively of Botticelli’s ‘dull landscapes’, and he is doubtless thinking of Botticelli’s unrealistic, mythological forests when he says, ‘Do not, as many do, paint all kinds of trees, even when equally distant, the same kind of green.’ Another tilt is found in Leonardo’s humorous complaint about lack of ‘decorum’ in an Annunciation: ‘I saw some days ago a picture of an angel making the Annunciation, who seemed to be chasing Our Lady out of the room, with movements which displayed the kind of offensiveness one might show to a hated enemy, and Our Lady seemed as if she was going to throw herself in despair out of the window.’ This probably refers to the Annunciation that Botticelli painted for the Guardi family chapel in about 1490, where the angel could be interpreted as crouching aggressively, though the interpretation is mischievous. A similar wilful criticism is found in a note about perspective which begins, ‘Sandro! You do not say why these second things seem lower than the third.’ This refers to Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity of 1500, where hierarchical ranks of angels are placed in defiance of the laws of perspective.52 All this carping seems uncharacteristic. It may have a psychological element: a desire to outshine an early influence, to define himself by his difference. Imitation for Leonardo was a form of weakness.
Another painter in the purlieus of the bottega was Pietro Vanucci, known as Il Perugino – ‘the Perugian’. Born near Perugia in the late 1440s, he had studied under an Umbrian master – probably Piero della Francesca – before coming to Florence, so he was not a junior apprentice like Leonardo. He is
Colleagues in Florence. Upper left: probable portrait of Andrea del Verrocchio by one of his pupils. Upper right: Sandro Botticelli, probable self-portrait from his Adoration of the Magi, c. 1478. Lower left: Pietro Perugino, self-portrait, 1500. Lower right: Lorenzo di Credi, self-portrait, 1488
accorded the prefix ‘Mag’ (i.e. magister or maestro) in a Florentine document of 1472. Like Leonardo, he swiftly made the transition to oil painting. Perugino’s name is coupled with Leonardo’s in a rhyming chronicle by Giovanni de Santis, the father of the painter Rafaello, or Raphael:
Due giovin par d’etade e par d’amori
Leonardo da Vinci e ’l Perugino,
Pier della Pieve, ch’e un divin pittor…
This describes Leonardo and Perugino as ‘two young men, equal in age and equal in love’, though of the two it is Perugino who is singled out as the ‘divine painter’.53
The other well-known pupil of Verrocchio was a handsome young goldsmith’s son, Lorenzo di Credi. Born in about 1457, he was younger than Leonardo and junior at the studio. The earliest of his accepted works, the Madonna and Child with St John the Baptist and St Donatus in Pistoi
a, was begun in about 1476. One of the predellas of this altarpiece was a small Annunciation which is obviously based on Leonardo’s painting of the subject, and was possibly a collaboration between them.54 In 1480 Credi’s widowed mother stated in her tax return that Lorenzo earned a wage of 12 florins a year at the studio. This would be a basic wage, augmented by payments for specific work on specific commissions. After Verrocchio’s departure for Venice in the early 1480s, Credi was in effective charge of the workshop, and he was named by Verrocchio as his heir and executor.55 According to Vasari, Verrocchio ‘loved’ Lorenzo more than any of his other pupils – perhaps an idea of homosexuality is being trailed here: how justly we do not know. The frequent claim that Leonardo was ‘introduced’ to homosexuality at Verrocchio’s studio is unsubstantiated.
We know nothing of Leonardo’s relations with Perugino or Credi. Neither is mentioned in his manuscripts – nor for that matter is his teacher, Verrocchio. Carping criticism or lofty silence: we do not get much sense of gratitude to the artists from whom and with whom Leonardo first learned his craft.
Finally the apprentice is ready to paint, which in practice means he is ready to paint some part of a painting. It is a truism of the Renaissance workshop that paintings were collaborative, and that a work ‘by’ a certain artist was often only partly painted by him, the rest being done by assistants and apprentices working under his supervision. Sometimes there were contracts that restricted the amount of delegation. One of Piero della Francesca’s contracts stipulated that ‘no painter may put his hand to the brush’ except Piero himself, and Filippino Lippi had to agree that his fresco in the Strozzi chapel in Santa Maria Novella would be ‘all by his own hand, especially the figures’.56 But in general it was accepted that a studio painting was not exclusively the work of the maestro.
One of the most charming products of Verrocchio’s studio is the small panel painting of Tobias and the Angel in the National Gallery, London. It was painted around 1468–70. The story of Tobias (or, in Italian, Tobiolo) is found in the apocryphal Book of Tobit: it tells of a boy’s quest to heal his father’s blindness, and of the guardianship of the angel Raphael during his adventures. It has the lineaments of a legend or fairy tale, and a comforting undertone of family values, and it had become a popular pictorial theme. Verrocchio’s Tobias is one of several from this time: there are very similar versions by the Pollaiuolo brothers and by Francesco Botticini, all featuring the fish and the dog which are part of the story. The Pollaiuolo painting, in oils, is the earliest of the three; Verrocchio follows its composition.57 He has given the two figures more energy and movement – the wind catches at their cloaks; the tassel of Tobias’s belt mingles wittily with a tiny tree in the distance. But the angel’s wings are not as good as the Pollaiuolos’, and the background is perfunctory – Verrocchio had no real feeling for landscape.
According to art historian David A. Brown, it is precisely this technical limitation which provides the clue to the painting’s combined authorship: ‘Verrocchio’s way of representing nature was inexpert, but contrary to expectation the creatures in the London panel, like the human figures in it, outclass those in the Pollaiuolo painting.’58 The animals, in other words, are too good for Verrocchio. The fish’s scales shimmer in tones of grey and white; though done in traditional tempera technique, a sense of light and surface is brilliantly caught. And the little white dog that skips along beside the angel: it is the same breed in both paintings – a Bolognese terrier – but in the Verrocchio painting it is alive, alert, trotting. Its long silky fur straggles and flows, painted with such finesse that the dog is diaphanous. You can see the line of the previously painted landscape beneath it. The animal seems to hover like a hologram just above the picture surface: a fairy-tale dog (Plate 4).
The dog and the fish are palpably not the work of Verrocchio himself, whose robust, sculptural style is seen in the two principal figures. They are the work of an assistant, and that assistant is surely Leonardo da Vinci. A comparison of the dog’s fur with the hair of Leonardo’s angels of the early 1470s shows close similarities. There is probably also a contribution by Leonardo in the curls of Tobias’s hair, which has the same unruly quiff as the angel of Leonardo’s Annunciation. Microscopic analysis shows left-handed brush-strokes in the curls above Tobias’s ear. Other Verrocchio paintings
Verrocchio’s Tobias and the Angel.
may contain early Leonardo brush-strokes in some fold of drapery or some corner of the landscape, but these are the first discernible contributions – a little dog, a fish, a cascade of curly hair, all done with that delicate, shimmery touch which would be perfected over the years, but which seems already to be the trademark of this remarkable apprentice.
SPECTACULARS
On 7 February 1469 a giostra, or joust, was held in Florence in honour of the twenty-year-old Lorenzo de’ Medici: his rite of passage into public life and a celebration of his forthcoming marriage to Clarice Orsini (a Roman bride, and at this stage an unpopular choice). He rode through the streets with his troupe of cavaliers, from the Palazzo Medici to the tourney-lists in Piazza Santa Croce. The splendour of his accoutrements goes without saying – the silks and velvets and pearls, the chased armour, the white charger given him by the King of Naples – but let us look for a moment at the banner which flutters above him, specially designed for the occasion: a ‘standard of white taffeta’. The poet Luigi Pulci describes the design on it. It was ‘decorated with a sun above and a rainbow below, and in the middle a lady standing in a meadow, wearing a robe in the antique style [drappo alessandrino] embroidered with gold and silver flowers’. In the background was ‘the trunk of a bay-tree with several withered branches and in the middle a single green branch’.59 The bay-tree (lauro) puns on ‘Lorenzo’. His father was ailing – he would be dead by the end of the year – but Lorenzo was the puissant new growth on the family tree.
Lorenzo’s standard was the work of Andrea del Verrocchio. It has long since disappeared, and was hardly one of his major works, but it speaks volumes about the bottega’s prestige at this moment of semi-princely succession. Lorenzo’s standard, we can be sure, was the best that money could buy. It also reminds us of the artists’ involvement in every visual aspect of Florentine civic life – not just in paintings and sculptures and architecture, but in the sumptuous ephemera of public pageants like the giostra. The Florentine calendar was awash with spectaculars of all sorts. There was carnival in the weeks before Lent, and the holy processions of Easter, and then the celebrations of Calendimaggio or May Day, which carried on intermittently until 24 June, the feast-day of the city’s patron saint, St John the Baptist. There were ‘lion-hunts’ in the Piazza della Signoria, and football matches in Piazza Santa Croce – calcio storico, as the game is now called: twenty-seven a side, and ‘played less with the feet than the fists’ – and there was the annual horse-race, the Palio, intensely contested between the city’s gonfaloni. The race-track crossed the city from the Porta a Prato to the Porta alla Croce; the Vacca tolled three times for the start; the winner’s trophy was the eponymous palio, a talismanic piece of crimson silk trimmed with fur and gold tassels. A famous jockey of the day was Gostanzo Landucci, brother of the diarist Luca.60
Portrait bust of Lorenzo de’ Medici by Verrocchio.
The Medici understood the therapy of public festivities, and under Lorenzo these spectacles were much encouraged. It might be muttered up on ‘the Hill’ that this was to distract the people while their liberties were being eroded by Medici cronyism and vote-rigging, but if there was a politic element of ‘bread and circuses’, there was also Lorenzo’s genuine relish for festivity. Carnival was becoming an ever more elaborate spectacle. There were torchlit parades of decorated wagons, the ancestors of the modern carnival-float. It was traditional for these to represent the various guilds, and many of the carnival songs were profession-related – ‘The Song of the Tailors’, ‘The Song of the Oil-Makers’ and so on – but now the fashion was for more courtly classic
al or mythological themes. Increasingly lavish and ingenious, these festive juggernauts became a kind of triumphalist political rhetoric: they were indeed called trionfi(triumphs), recalling the victory pageants of imperial Rome, but now emphasizing the power and glory of the Medici. And, as of old, bawdy songs and catches were sung – only now the smart set was requesting such numbers as the ‘Song of the Sweetmeat-Sellers’ and the ‘Triumph of Ariadne and Bacchus’, both written by Lorenzo himself, and others by his literary friends Agnolo Poliziano and Luigi Pulci. Lorenzo’s herald, Battista del Ottonaio, was a particular expert in this genre.
The supercharged pageantry of Medici jousts and carnivals was the popular theatre of the day, and all the festive hardware that went into it – the standards, banners, costumes, masks, armours, caparisons and triumphal wagons – came out of the workshops of Verrocchio and his ilk. One does not see Leonardo as the kind of jovial extrovert who revels in the mayhem of carnival, but as theatre it transfixes him. We would surely find his face among the crowd at Lorenzo’s giostra – he had perhaps worked on the standard; he was a connoisseur of horses and horsemanship; he would later be involved in giostra entertainments in Milan. I fancy we would also find him among the crowd outside the Duomo on Easter Sunday, watching the famous scioppio del carro, an incendiary rendition of the descent of the Holy Spirit in which a cartload of fireworks, hauled up from the Porta al Prato by a team of white oxen, was set off by an artificial dove propelled along a wire strung between the Duomo and the Baptistery. There is a memory of this, perhaps, in the sketch of a mechanical bird on a wire in the Codex Atlanticus, captioned ‘bird for the comedy’. The early biographers agree that Leonardo created flying-machines of this more illusionist, theatrical sort: ‘Out of a certain material he made birds which can fly.’61
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