The subject was one of the most popular in Renaissance art, and almost every painter of note has one or more versions of it. It dramatizes the moment when the young Mary is visited by the angel Gabriel and is told that she will become the mother of the Messiah (Luke 1:26–38). The text was the subject of much exegesis by commentators and preachers, who expounded the five ‘attributes’ of the Virgin during the colloquy narrated by Luke – conturbatio, or disquiet (‘she was troubled’); cogitatio, or reflection (she ‘cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be’); interrogatio, or enquiry (‘How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?’); humiliatio, or submission (‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord’); and meritatio, or worth, which describes her beatified status after the angel has departed. It can be shown that different Annunciation paintings focus on different ‘attributes’. Thus Filippo Lippi’s in San Lorenzo clearly expresses Mary’s disquiet, as does Botticelli’s in the Uffizi (the one criticized by Leonardo for its overdone gestures – too much conturbatio, in other words), while Fra Angelico’s in San Marco focuses on her humility.81 These show an interesting interrelation between the theology of the pulpit and the visual vocabulary of the studio, but Leonardo’s Annunciation seems less easy to pin down: the raised left hand suggests a remnant of conturbatio, while the expressionless smoothness of the Virgin’s face suggests the onset of humiliatio. There is thus a glimmering of a psychological dynamic, of those accidenti mentali or mental events which Leonardo sought to express in mature works like the Last Supper and the Virgin and Child with St Anne. We sense an unfolding story, an implied before and after, within the depicted moment. This is also conveyed by that problematic right hand: it holds open the book that the Virgin was reading before the angel arrived. This gives a suddenness to this archetypal event: the angel’s visit is still a momentary interruption.
This book is itself a traditional part of Annunciation iconography: Mary is reading an Old Testament prophet on the coming of the Messiah. The look of the page is meant to suggest Hebrew, but the text is in fact visual rhubarb – meaningless combinations of letters. If you look closely you can see that one of the lines simply reads ‘m n o p q’. The riotous spring flowers and grasses of the foreground are also conventional. The Feast of the Annunciation was on 25 March, and was associated with springtime (the biblical location of the episode, Nazareth, means in Hebrew ‘flower’). The lily in the angel’s hand reflects this, and was particularly emphasized in Florentine art because the city’s coat of arms featured lilies. In one aspect Leonardo’s treatment was apparently not standard, however. The preacher Fra Roberto Caracciolo spoke of painters having ‘licence to give angels wings to signify their swift progress in all things’,82 but it appears there were conventions on this. Leonardo gave his angel short, strong wings – real birds’ wings – but these were later lengthened by an unknown and not very sympathetic hand. The extension, in a dull chestnut-coloured paint, stabs into the deeper plane of the landscape, which is vestigially visible through the paint surface of the addition.
Among the various Madonna and Child compositions emanating from the Verrocchio workshop in the early 1470s, one has a particular claim to be by the hand of Leonardo. This is the Madonna of the Carnation, now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. The Madonna is generically in the Verrocchio mould – the pale, rather Nordic, look; the blonde ringlets; the downturned eyes – but she has particular affinities with the Virgin of Leonardo’s Annunciation. They wear the same dusky blue dress set off by red sleeves, and the same golden mantle. The brooch, with its suggestive topazy gleam, is a Leonardo trademark of the future, as in the Benois Madonna and the Virgin of the Rocks. Perhaps most characteristic is the drama of the landscape glimpsed through the loggia behind her – a range of rugged, serrated, rocky peaks quite unlike the more staid Tuscan backgrounds found in other workshop productions, but such a feature of Leonardo’s later paintings like the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, the St Anne, and the Mona Lisa.
Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna of the Carnation.
In the foreground, almost brushed by the mother’s elbow, is a vase of flowers. This serves to identify the Munich panel as the one that Vasari describes in his life of Leonardo as a ‘very fine’ Madonna with ‘a carafe of water with some flowers in it’. The word caraffa precisely describes the kind of wide-bellied glass bottle depicted in the painting. Vasari goes on to praise the ‘dewdrops of water’ on the flowers, which are ‘more convincing than the real thing’, but the painting is in poor condition and this detail is no longer apparent. Vasari unquestioningly attributes the painting to Leonardo, and places it within the ambit of his years with Verrocchio. He also says that it was later in the possession of Pope Clement VII. Clement was the illegitimate son of Giuliano de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s younger brother; Giuliano was one of Verrocchio’s patrons, and it is possible that the painting was commissioned by him. Kenneth Clark thought the painting ‘charmless’, but had no doubt it was by Leonardo – it ‘has the unpleasant vitality of immature genius’.83
The intrinsically Leonardian details, the correspondences with the Annunciation, the early attribution by Vasari: these make a strong case for the Madonna of the Carnation as a genuine Leonardo of the early 1470s. Another Verrocchiesque Madonna and Child which is sometimes claimed as his is the Madonna of the Pomegranate in the National Gallery at Washington, DC, also called the Dreyfus Madonna after a previous owner. It is a very sweet painting, but there is nothing to relate it specifically to Leonardo. Clark thought it an early work by Lorenzo di Credi. The softness and roundness of the modelling are very reminiscent of Lippi, and suggest once again the influence of Botticelli in the formation of the Verrocchiesque style.
*
Also from this period is the famous collaboration between Verrocchio and Leonardo, the dramatic Baptism of Christ, now in the Uffizi (Plate 7). It was painted for the church of San Salvi – Verrocchio’s elder brother, Simone di Cione, was the abbot there, and was probably instrumental in the commission.84 Vasari makes it out to be Verrocchio’s last painting:
Andrea was working on a panel-picture showing the baptism of Christ by St John, for which Leonardo painted an angel holding some garments, and despite his youth he did it so well that the angel was far better than the figures painted by Andrea. This was the reason why Andrea would never touch colours again – he was ashamed that a boy understood their use better than he did.
This is a portable sort of anecdote, and should not be taken at face value. Leonardo was probably about twenty-one when the painting was done, and not therefore a ‘boy’. It is pretty certain he also painted the misty distant landscape in the background: the left-hand side of the landscape echoes the topography of the ‘Madonna of the Snow’ drawing in the Uffizi, the date of which – 5 August 1473 – ties in well enough with the Baptism.
I am never very happy with the conventional idea, launched by Vasari and spun more or less continuously since, that Leonardo’s kneeling angel is the best thing about the painting and knocks his teacher’s work into a cocked hat. This seems pure ‘Leonardolatry’. The two central figures, which are exclusively Verrocchio’s, are very powerful – the features of the Baptist gaunt and hard-bitten; Christ with a humble, half-ugly ordinariness (the face-type an import from the Netherlands, like the blonde Madonnas). I am also struck by the beauty of Christ’s feet, as seen through the prism of the baptismal river, or really a stream, that runs over a bed of reddish-brown rock. The Leonardo angel is certainly exquisite, with his tightly curled golden hair and his alert turning movement. It shows already a subtlety of moulding and movement far beyond that of his master, who remained wedded to sculptural modes. (The figure of the Baptist is closely related to Verrocchio’s bronze Christ at Orsanmichele.) But the human drama, the tragic foretelling, the sense of great strengths greatly tested – these are all Verrocchio’s. If his painted figures lack something in technique, they lack nothing in the raw power of the scene. Beside them Leonardo’s angel seems brilliant but perhaps slightly
facile: a prize-winning essay by a young virtuoso.
THE DRAGON
The Annunciation, the Madonna of the Carnation, the Baptism of Christ: just three devotional works among many that emanated from Verrocchio’s studio, but each of them touched with the lustrous brush of the young Leonardo da Vinci. Other works belonging to this first Florentine period are mentioned by the early biographers but are now lost. Particularly to be regretted is the loss of the work described by the Anonimo Gaddiano as ‘a painting of Adam and Eve in watercolours’. According to Vasari, Leonardo was commissioned to do this after painting the angel in the Baptism. He says it was ‘a cartoon for a tapestry to be woven of gold and silk in Flanders and sent to the King of Portugal, showing Adam and Eve when they sinned in the earthly paradise’. Both biographers state that Leonardo’s cartoon was now – i.e. in the 1540s – in the house of Ottaviano de’ Medici. Vasari’s description of it seems to be first hand, and what entranced him was the depiction of the Garden of Eden:
For this he drew with the brush in chiaroscuro, with the highlights in lead white, a luxuriant meadow of grass with animals in it, done with such care and such fidelity to nature that nothing in the world could be more inspired or perfect. There is a fig-tree, shown foreshortened, with its leaves and its branches depicted with such loving care that the mind reels at the thought that a man could have such patience. And there is a palm-tree, where the radiating shapes of the palms are caught with such marvellous skill that no one without Leonardo’s understanding and patience could have done it.
Vasari adds an interesting note that the painting had been given to Ottaviano de’ Medici by Leonardo’s uncle. This cannot be Uncle Francesco (who had died in 1507, and who was anyway unlikely to have been hobnobbing with any Medici), but it could be Alessandro Amadori, canon of Fiesole, who was the brother of Leonardo’s first stepmother, Albiera. Leonardo continued to know him long after Albiera’s death in 1464, and late in life was wondering ‘whether the priest Alessandro Amadori is still living or not’.85 It is possible that Leonardo gave his Adam and Eve cartoon to Amadori when he left Florence in 1482, just as he gave the unfinished Adoration of the Magi to his friend Giovanni de’ Benci. The technique of the cartoon – drawn with a brush in chiaroscuro and highlighted with lead white – is similar to that of the Adoration, which also features a beautifully drawn palm-tree.
Also at this time Leonardo did ‘a painting in oils showing the head of a Medusa attired with a coil of serpents’: apparently his first work on a classical theme. It is mentioned by the Anonimo and by Vasari (though only in the second edition of the Lives), and is perhaps the work listed in the Medici collection in about 1553 as ‘a picture on wood of an infernal fury, by the hand of Leonardo da Vinci, without ornament’.86 No trace remains of it, though it was for a long while confused with the Medusa tondo by Caravaggio.
Another lost early work of Leonardo’s survives only in a long anecdote told by Vasari. The passage reads like an episode from an Italian novella, and it is quite possible the painting it refers to is pure fiction, but the story is told at length, and with a good deal of circumstantial detail, and one cannot help feeling that there may be something in it. It begins convincingly enough: ‘The story goes that when Ser Piero da Vinci was at his house in the country, one of his farmworkers paid him a visit…’ The peasant had made a ‘buckler’ or circular shield (rotello) from a fig-tree he had cut down, and he asked if Ser Piero could take it to Florence to have it painted. Ser Piero was glad to oblige the man, ‘who was very adept at snaring birds and catching fish, and was much used by Ser Piero in these pursuits’. He duly brought the buckler to Florence, and asked Leonardo to paint something on it. Leonardo examined it with an air of disdain – it was ‘warped and crudely made’ – but a few days later he set to work:
He straightened it in the fire, and handed it over to a wood-turner who worked it up from the rough and clumsy thing it was into something smooth and even. Then, having given it a coat of gesso, and prepared it according to his own methods, he began to consider what he could paint on it, so as to terrify anyone who encountered it, like the head of the Medusa once did. To this purpose Leonardo collected lizards, geckos, crickets, butterflies, locusts, bats and other strange creatures of this sort, and brought them to a room of his own to which no one but himself was admitted, and taking and adapting different parts of these creatures, he made a most fearsome and horrible monster… and this he painted, showing it emerging from the dark cleft of a rock, belching forth venom from its mouth and fire from its eyes and smoke from its nostrils.
He took so long over this work that the stench of dead animals in his room was unbearable, but ‘Leonardo did not notice this because of his great devotion to his art.’ By the time he had finished it, both his father and the contadino had forgotten all about it. Leonardo sent to his father to tell him it was ready:
And so, one morning, Ser Piero went along to that room of Leonardo’s to get the buckler, and knocked at the door. Leonardo came to the door and told him to wait a moment, and then he went back into the room, and arranged the buckler on an easel, and shaded the window so the light was dim, and then he invited him in to see it. On first sight of it, taken completely by surprise, Ser Piero gave a sudden start, not thinking it was the buckler and that what he saw was painted on it. He began to back away, but Leonardo stopped him, and said, ‘The work has served the purpose it was made for, so now you can pick it up and take it away, because it has done what was expected of it.’ And Ser Piero thought the whole thing quite marvellous, and loudly praised Leonardo’s capricious imagination.
This marvellous anecdote is unprovable but in its essentials quite plausible. It is a Florentine story – within Vasari’s narrative it is placed together with the painting of the Baptism of Christ, the lost Adam and Eve, and the Madonna of the Carnation: thus in the early 1470s chez Verrocchio. The setting is interesting. We are in the workshop – Leonardo straightens the ill-made buckler ‘in the fire’, and prepares it with gesso ‘according to his own methods’ – but Leonardo has also his private studio: ‘a room of his own to which no one but himself was admitted’. This probably reflects accurately enough the arrangements at the bottega – anyway by the mid-1470s, when Leonardo would have had the status of chief assistant. The story also has a strong sense of Leonardo as fantasist, hatching up this gothic creature – this animalaccio, as Vasari calls it – in the privacy of his room. One recalls a comment in the Trattato della pittura: ‘If the painter wishes to depict creatures or devils in hell, with what an abundance of invention he teems.’87
The story is further shored up by some dragon studies at Windsor, and a drawing of a dragon fight in the Louvre, both belonging to the 1470s, and by a passage in the Trattato where Leonardo recommends precisely the kind of combinatory technique that we hear of in the Vasarian anecdote: ‘You cannot fabricate any animal that does not have parts that are recognizable as belonging to other animals. If therefore you wish to make… a dragon, take for its head that of a mastiff or a setter, for its eyes those of a cat [etc.].’88 Lomazzo speaks of a painting by Leonardo of a dragon fighting a lion, ‘done with such art that no one who looks at it can tell which of them will be the victor’. He adds, ‘I once had a drawing taken from this picture which was very dear to me.’ There is a dramatic drawing of just this subject in the Uffizi, thought by some to be a copy of an original Leonardo drawing.89 These dragon studies – some actual, some rumoured – cannot be taken as evidence that the painted shield of Vasari’s story ever existed, but they show that Leonardo was no stranger to the theory and practice of painting dragons.
The story is also suggestive of the prickly, competitive relationship between the painter and his father. Leonardo enjoys playing a trick on Ser Piero: he makes him jump with his revelation of the dragon. The father in turn plays an underhand trick, for the story ends with him surreptitiously selling the shield: ‘He bought another buckler from a pedlar, painted with a heart pierced by an arrow, and gave i
t to the peasant, who was grateful for the rest of his days. Later, secretly, he sold Leonardo’s buckler to some merchants in Florence for a hundred ducats.’ Ser Piero profits financially, as usual, but is somehow the loser in another sense: he comes out of the story like Wilde’s cynic, ‘who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’.
Leonardo Da Vinci Page 13