Another reason for suspecting the Anonimo’s statement about Lorenzo and Leonardo is that the phrasing would correctly describe Lorenzo’s patronage of the young Michelangelo some ten years later. Thus Vasari: ‘Michelangelo always had the keys to the garden [of San Marco]… He lived in the Medici household for four years… He was given a room, and ate at Lorenzo’s table, and received an allowance of 5 ducats a month.’61 All this is backed up by other sources: the four years would be c. 1489–92. It may well be that the Anonimo, writing half a century after the event, mixed things up, and believed it was Leonardo who was the recipient of these benefits. I do not want to remove Leonardo completely from the inspiring ambience of Lorenzo’s sculpture-garden. He may well have had access to it – the sculptural overtones of the portrayal of St Jerome may be a direct result of it, as is argued by Pietro Marani and others. But the broader idea that Leonardo was a favoured protégé of Lorenzo’s is not borne out.62
Leonardo’s career with Verrocchio certainly brought him into contact with the Medici – the preparations for the Milanese visit of 1471; the painting of standards and banners for the giostre; the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, whom Lorenzo much admired; the Pistoia altarpiece in memory of a Medici bishop. But once he steps out of the circle of Verrocchio’s bottega the nature of the record seems to change. In 1476 he is involved in a homosexuality case with embarrassing overtones for the Tornabuoni family – the family of Lorenzo’s mother. The following year another scandal results in the exile, personally approved by Lorenzo, of Leonardo’s pupil or servant Paolo. In 1478 Leonardo undertakes but fails to complete an important commission for the Signoria (the San Bernardo altarpiece). In 1479 he sketches the hanging body of Giuliano de’ Medici’s assassin, but is not apparently commissioned – as Verrocchio and Botticelli had been – to produce a full-scale piece of Medici propaganda. None of these on their own would count as evidence of Lorenzo’s negative view of Leonardo, but taken together they seem to add up to that.
Further indication emerges in 1481, when Lorenzo dispatches various artists to Rome, as part of the new mood of amity between Florence and the papacy. The artists chosen to assist in the decoration of the newly built Sistine Chapel are Perugino, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Cosimo Rosselli. Their joint contract to paint ten storie or scenes from the Bible is dated 27 October 1481. This was an immensely prestigious commission, as well as a very valuable one: Ghirlandaio received 250 ducats for his Calling of St Peter and St Andrew.63 Leonardo may have been passed over for purely practical reasons (he was not a fresco painter; he was busy with another commission), but it adds to my feeling that he was not among Lorenzo’s favourite painters: that he was considered too unreliable, too difficult, and perhaps too openly homosexual to represent Florence in this role of cultural ambassador. So at least it may have seemed to him in October 1481, as those other – in his eyes inferior – artists packed their bags and headed off for Rome.
Late in his life – probably in Rome in about 1515 – Leonardo wrote, ‘Li medici mi crearono e distrussono.’64 This can be translated either as ‘The Medici created me and destroyed me’ or as ‘Physicians created me and destroyed me.’ The first interpretation could indeed imply that Leonardo was supported by Lorenzo at the beginning of his career, and thus ‘created’ by the Medici, but to say he was also ‘destroyed’ by the family would be a curious statement to make in 1515, when he was living in Rome at the expense of Lorenzo’s son Giuliano, with whom he was on very good terms. The line has a perfectly valid meaning without invoking the Medici at all. Leonardo elsewhere describes physicians as the ‘destroyers of lives’ (destruttori di vite), and he was in general critical of the profession. He was by then in his early sixties, and his health was failing. A pun on medici and Medici may be somewhere in his mind as he writes this, but the line cannot be taken as evidence of Lorenzo’s active patronage.
This chapter is a tissue of negative evidence, which is never very readable, but I think it worth questioning the customary casual assertion that Leonardo in Florence was a protégé of the Medici. His brilliance must have been noticed but one senses a note of exclusion: a young man who doesn’t quite fit.
There is a tiny profile drawing by Leonardo which looks very like a portrait of Lorenzo. It is one of those ‘Windsor fragments’ taken from sheets in the Codex Atlanticus.65 On stylistic grounds it is dated to c. 1485 or later: in other words, it was drawn in Milan. It may therefore be a recollection of the man, but is not a sketch done dal vivo.
THE ADORATION
In early 1481 Leonardo was commissioned to paint a large altarpiece for the Augustinian monastery of San Donato at Scopeto, a village outside the city walls not far from the Prato Gate. It was a rich monastery, which also purchased works by Botticelli and by Filippino Lippi. From 1479 its business affairs had been handled by Ser Piero da Vinci, who is likely to have been involved in the commission, and perhaps in the rather tricky details of the contract. In so far as the contract seems unsatisfactory from Leonardo’s point of view, one discerns an element of exasperated difficulty – something has to be done to get Leonardo on his feet, and this is the best that Ser Piero can manage.
The initial agreement was made in March 1481; it stipulated that Leonardo should deliver the painting ‘within twenty-four months, or at the most within thirty months; and in case of not finishing it he forfeits whatever he has done of it, and it is our right to do what we want with it’. These terms are not unusual, but suggest that Leonardo already has a reputation for unreliability. The form of payment, however, is unusual. He does not apparently get any cash in advance. Rather, he receives ‘one-third of a property in the Val d’Elsa’ which had been bequeathed to the monastery by ‘Simone, father of Brother Francesco’. The property is inalienable (‘he can make no other contract on it’), but he has the option, after three years, of selling it back to the friars, ‘if they so wish’, for the sum of 300 florins. With this property comes a complication: Leonardo is obliged to pay ‘whatever is necessary to furnish a dowry of 150 florins for the daughter of Salvestro di Giovanni’. This entailment was probably part of the original bequest by Simone father of Francesco – paying a dowry for some poor family of one’s acquaintance is a form of charity found often in wills of the period. Leonardo also undertakes to provide ‘the colours, the gold and all other costs arising’ at his own expense.66
The upshot of this curious contract is that the monastery offers to pay Leonardo 150 florins (the agreed value of the property minus the debt entailed with it). This payment is in arrears (he cannot sell the property for three years), and does not include any provision for expenses. The final sum is not bad, but the circumstances are inconvenient. The property in the Val d’Elsa – a rustic region to the south of Florence – is the only thing he receives up front: perhaps he went to live in it.
By June, three months after the initial agreement, the difficulties of the situation are becoming apparent. He has had to ask the monastery to ‘pay the above-mentioned dowry, because he said he does not have the means to pay it, and time was passing, and it was becoming prejudicial to us’. For this service his account with the friars has been debited 28 florins. It is further docked for sums advanced by the monastery to purchase colours for the work. Also in June, we learn, ‘Maestro Leonardo the painter’ has received ‘one load of faggots and one load of large logs’ as payment for decorating the monastery clock. In August he ‘owes us for one moggia [about 5 bushels] of grain which our carter carried to him at his own house’. (This house is presumably the property in Val d’Elsa.) And on 28 September – the date of the last document in the series – he ‘owes us for one barrel of vermilion wine’.67
These are the realities of Leonardo’s circumstances in 1481: he cannot afford to buy his paints; he buys grain and wine on credit; he does odd jobs for the monastery and is paid in firewood. And, as the nights draw in, the first lineaments of the altarpiece begin to take shape on a panel of poplar wood.
The product of this c
ontract, and of these straitened circumstances, is the Adoration of the Magi, the last and greatest of his early Florentine works (Plate 10). It is the largest of all his easel paintings: 8 feet tall and nearly as wide (2.46 x 2.43 m). The dimensions, and the unusually square format, presumably reflect the space available above the altar of San Donato.
The painting was never delivered (which is perhaps just as well, as the monastery was completely demolished in the early sixteenth century). It was left unfinished when Leonardo departed for Milan in early 1482. According to Vasari, he left it for safe-keeping at the house of his friend Giovanni de’ Benci, the brother of Ginevra. It passed into the Medici collection sometime before 1621, when it was listed among the paintings at the Palazzo Medici. It is now one of the most famous paintings in the Uffizi, though it is more accurately an underpainting. The complex composition has been blocked in, but much of the detail is perfunctory: it is a work still in draft. The paint media are lamp-black mixed with diluted glue, and lead white. There is some over-painting in brown, though it has recently been questioned if these marks are Leonardo’s. The painting’s overall tawny-brown tonality is due to discoloration of later layers of varnish.
The subject-matter is one of the most popular in Renaissance painting – the arrival of the three kings or magi to pay homage to the infant Christ at Bethlehem. Leonardo would undoubtedly have known Benozzo Gozzoli’s fresco in the Palazzo Medici and Botticelli’s version of the subject in Santa Maria Novella, commissioned by Giovanni Lami of the Guild of Moneychangers in about 1476. (This, now in the Uffizi, is the second of four surviving Adorations by Botticelli: the earliest, perhaps before 1470, is in the National Gallery in London.) Leonardo has used all the conventional ingredients, but the painting is revolutionary in its handling of the large group. This is not a procession but a stormy swirl of figures and faces – over sixty figures altogether: people and animals. In its cloudy unfinished form there is something ambiguous about this populousness: this crowd in attitudes of worship and wonder seems almost a mob. The mother and child are enclosed in space, a still point at the centre of the picture, but the press of the crowd around this space suggests also their vulnerability. Something is about to engulf them. This vortex of menace foretells the child’s story as surely as the symbolic gifts proffered by the kings.
There are some subtleties of religious interpretation.68 The roots of the central tree snake down to touch the head of Christ – an allusion to the prophecy of Isaiah: ‘There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.’ The broken architecture, with shrubbery growing out of the masonry, is a conventional allusion to the ruined ‘house of David’, which the birth of Christ will re-establish – workmen are just visible, on the stairs, busily rebuilding – but the shape of the building is specifically Florentine. Its columns and arches echo the presbytery of San Miniato del Monte, the oldest church in Florence after the Baptistery, reputedly built on the burial-site of the city’s most famous Christian martyr, Minias or Miniato. Like the façade of Santa Maria Novella in St Jerome, this visual reference anchors formative religious beliefs in a Florentine landscape.
These various components of epiphany iconography are there, but one very basic ingredient is missing. Where is Joseph? Invariably featuring in other Adorations, he is here indistinct. Is he the bearded man in the right-hand group with his hand raised to his brow in amazement? Or is he the pensive figure watching from the sidelines on the extreme left of the painting? Probably the former, but the ambiguity is paramount: the father is unidentified, submerged into the periphery. One might resist a psychoanalytical interpretation of this, but it is a motif too recurrent to ignore – Leonardo always excises Joseph from the Holy Family. He is missing from the Virgin of the Rocks (which narratively takes place during the flight from Egypt, and so ought to include him), and he is missing from the various versions of the Virgin and Child with St Anne, where the third member of the family is not the child’s father but his grandmother. One does not have to be a Freudian to feel that there are deep psychological currents here.
In early 2001 the Uffizi announced its intention to clean and restore the Adoration. This aroused an immediate hue and cry, led by the doyen of anti-restorers, Professor James Beck of Columbia University, New York.69 The painting was too delicate, its shadows and nuances too complex, its patina too intrinsic to be restored. When I spoke about this to Antonio Natali, Director of Renaissance Art at the Uffizi, he used the favourite word of the pro-restoration lobby – ‘legibility’. He spoke eloquently of the painting as a ‘buried poem’. ‘If you were studying Petrarch, would you read a few words here, a few words there? No. It is the same with a painting – you want to be able to read all of it.’
That the painting is in poor condition is not in doubt. The paint surface is covered by a dirty ‘skin’ of later varnishings: heavy mixes of glue, oil and resins. In the darker areas of the panel these have formed a thick brown patina. They also have the imbianchimento or whitening caused by oxidization: those tiny reticulations which glaze the surface – the shattered-windscreen effect. But the opponents of restoration query the idea of legibility, seeing it as a desire to ‘clarify’ something that (in the case of the Adoration, at least) the artist himself deliberately left ambiguous. The current spate of restorations, it is argued, panders to a modern taste for brightness and crispness – for photographic or electronic types of clarity. Restoration is thus a commercial decision by the galleries: a matter of marketing as much as conservation. ‘The real issue is philosophical,’ says Professor Beck. ‘Do we really want the paintings of the past to be modernized? Cleaning this picture is like a seventy-year-old person having a face-lift.’
The technical departments of the Uffizi are in a nondescript courtyard across the street from the gallery. In a small room on the second floor, laid across three trestles so it resembles a large picnic table, is Leonardo’s Adoration. The room is small and white-tiled; there is cream-coloured paper over the windows, admitting the luce velata which is wholesome for paintings. From a hook hang a feather-duster and a supermarket carrier-bag. The vaguely chemical smell makes one think of a medical laboratory or a vet’s operating-theatre. The imagery of medicine, of the painting as a great and aged patient, is frequently evoked by restorers. The situation is somehow intimate: the painting stripped of its gallery grandeur, horizontal, awaiting intervention.
The famous restorer Alfio del Serra prowls around it, sizing it up – these are the early weeks of the process, and the controversy has caused a hiatus. Del Serra is a stocky Pistoiese in his early sixties, with cropped white hair and a short-sleeved shirt. He has the look of an artisan, which is how he likes to be considered. His list of restorations includes works by Martini, Duccio, Cimabue, Giotto, Mantegna, Perugino, Raphael and Titian. Among his recent projects have been Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Leonardo’s Annunciation. He shrugs about the controversy: it has at least given him time with the painting, time to get to know it. ‘Every restoration’, he says, ‘is a work of interpretation. There are no automatic or universal rules which can be applied in every situation. You need sensitivity, respect, knowledge – to continually ask yourself questions: that is what’s needed.’70
We crouch down and peer beneath at the back of the picture. The panel is formed of ten vertical planks or boards glued together; the transverse supports were added later, perhaps in the seventeenth century. The planks are of a fairly uniform width (about 9 inches across) but a narrower one is stuck on the left-hand edge, presumably to increase the painting to the commissioned size. Del Serra points out the problem of convessità, or bowing, in the middle boards, which threatens to crack the paint surface. This stems partly from the casual attrition of time and humidity, but also reflects Leonardo’s choice of wood 500 years ago. Del Serra explains with diagrams the importance of the original wood. To create the boards, a section of a tree trunk – in this case of the serviceable white poplar called gattice – is cut vertical
ly. The cut nearest the centre, the radiale, is the best, because the tree rings are symmetrically balanced; the outer cut, or peripherale, is not so good. Del Serra has recently restored the Annunciation, and is familiar also with the Baptism of Christ: in both cases the actual panels are in excellent condition. Those were paintings done within the Verrocchio workshop: quality materials were used. For the Adoration – an independent work, done when he was buying grain and wine on tick from his employers – Leonardo made do with the cheaper cuts. In this, adds del Serra, he was foreshadowed by Cimabue, the maestro of Giotto, who used ‘very thin pieces of wood, of the kind that the carpenter would throw away’ – in short, offcuts.
Del Serra is relaxed and unceremonious with the painting: he does not quite lean his elbow on it as we talk, but one feels that he might. He wets a plug of cotton-wool and briefly polishes a small area of the picture: the faintly sketched heads of an ox and an ass on the right-hand side, so easily missed, suddenly emerge from the gloom.
In the months to come the story of the restoration would become yet more tangled. Late in 2001 the Uffizi decided to commission a technical examination of the painting by the art-diagnostician Maurizio Seracini. After months of painstaking analysis Seracini dropped a bombshell: the reddish-brown over-painting seen on various parts of the Adoration was not done by Leonardo. The clue lay in microscopic analysis of cross-sections of tiny paint samples – that mysterious, micron-thick dimension of the paint surface. In almost every cross-section he took, he found that the top layer of brown paint had penetrated into the lower, earlier, monochrome stratum. By the time the colour was brushed on to it, the surface had cracks and fissures deep enough for the wet brown paint to seep down into them. Seracini says – and this is the crux – that this cracking could have occurred only over a significant period of time, perhaps fifty to a hundred years. The top layer was thus painted after Leonardo’s death, by an unknown artist following the cavalier tenets of his day about how to improve a painting.71
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