The Young Leonardo

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The Young Leonardo

Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence
Leonardo da Vinci is often presented as the “Transcendent

Genius,” removed from or ahead of his time. This book, how-
ever, attempts to understand him in the context of Renais-
sance Florence. Larry J. Feinberg explores Leonardo’s origins
and the beginning of his career as an artist. While celebrat-
ing his many artistic achievements, the book illuminates his
debt to other artists’ works and his struggles to gain and
retain patronage, as well as his career and personal difficul-
ties. Feinberg examines the range of Leonardo’s interests –
including aerodynamics, anatomy, astronomy, botany, geol-
ogy, hydraulics, optics, and warfare technology – to clarify
how the artist’s broad intellectual curiosity informed his art.
Situating the artist within the political, social, cultural, and
artistic context of mid- and late-fifteenth-century Florence,
Feinberg shows how this environment influenced Leonardo’s
artistic output and laid the groundwork for the achievements
of his mature works.
Larry J. Feinberg is the Director and CEO of the Santa Barbara

Museum of Art. He is the editor of two reference volumes on
the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Italian Paintings
before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago and French and English
Paintings from 1600 to 1800 in the Art Institute of Chicago. He has
also been the co-organizer and catalog author for several major
exhibitions, including The Medici, Michelangelo, and the
Art of Late Renaissance Florence; Gustave Moreau: Between
Epic and Dream; and From Studio to Studiolo: Florentine
Draftsmanship under the First Medici Grand Dukes.
The Young Leonardo
Art and Life in
Fifteenth-Century
Florence
LARRY J. FEINBERG
cambridge university press
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C Larry J. Feinberg 2011
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First published 2011
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data
Feinberg, Larry J.
The young Leonardo : art and life in fifteenth-century Florence / Larry J. Feinberg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-107-00239-5 (hardback)
1. Leonardo, da Vinci, 1452–1519. 2. Artists – Italy – Biography. 3. Florence
(Italy) – Civilization. 4. Florence (Italy) – History – 1421–1737. I. Title.
n6923.l33f45 2011
709.2–dc22 [B] 2011011501
isbn 978-1-107-00239-5 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of

urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and
does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or
appropriate.
Contents
Figures page vii

Acknowledgments xi
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1. Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2. Florence and Cosimo the Elder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3. The Cultural Climate of Florence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
4. First Years in Florence and the Verrocchio
Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
5. First Works in Florence and the Artistic Milieu . . . . . . . . . 33
6. Early Pursuits in Engineering – Hydraulics and
the Movement of Water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
7. The Bust of a Warrior and Leonardo’s Creative
Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
8. Early Participation in the Medici Court . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
9. Leonardo’s Personality and Place in Florentine
Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
10. Important Productions and Collaborations in the
Verrocchio Shop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
11. Leonardo’s Colleagues in the Workshop. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73
12. Leonardo’s Madonna of the Carnation and
the Exploration of Optics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
v
vi Contents
13. The Benois Madonna and Continued Meditations on

the Theme of Sight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
14. The Madonna of the Cat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
15. Leonardo, the Medici, and Public Executions . . . . . . . . . . . 99
16. Leonardo and Ginevra de’ Benci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
17. Leonardo as Portraitist and Master of the Visual Pun . . . 113
18. The Young Sculptor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
19. The Madonna Litta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
20. The Adoration of the Magi and Invention of the High
Renaissance Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
21. The Adoration and Leonardo’s Military Interests . . . . . . . . 139
22. Leonardo and Allegorical Conceits for
the Medici Court . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
23. Early Ideas for the Last Supper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
24. Leonardo and the Saint Sebastian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
25. Saint Jerome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
26. First Thoughts for the Virgin of the Rocks and the
Invention of the Mary Magdalene-Courtesan Genre . . . 171
27. Milan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
28. Leonardo and the Sforza Court . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Bibliography with Endnotes 189

Index 201
Figures
1 View of the town of Vinci page 4

2 Filippo Lippi, Adoration of the Christ Child 19
3 Leonardo da Vinci, Study of the Virgin Nursing with St.
John the Baptist, Figure and Head Studies, Heads of a Lion
and Dragon 21
4 Leonardo da Vinci, Optical Studies and Resting Dog 31
5 Workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio (including
Leonardo da Vinci), Tobias and the Angel 35
6 Leonardo da Vinci, View of the Arno Valley 36
7 Leonardo da Vinci, Devices for Raising Water (including the
Archimedes’ Screw) and Other Studies 41
8 Leonardo da Vinci, Devices for a Diver, for Walking on
Water, and Various Studies for Machines 43
9 Leonardo da Vinci, Cross-Section of a Man’s Head, Showing
Three Chambers for Reception, Processing, and Storage
(Memory) of Sensory Impressions 44
10 Leonardo da Vinci, Bust of a Warrior in Profile 48
11 After Andrea del Verrocchio, Darius 48
12 Leonardo da Vinci, Bust of a Man 49
13 Leonardo da Vinci, Bust of a Man 50
14 Leonardo da Vinci, Head of an Old Man 51
15 Workshop of Verrocchio, Portrait of Tomás Valdéz 52
16 Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci, Study for
a Joust Standard for Giuliano de’ Medici 57
17 Leonardo da Vinci, Aristotle and Phyllis 61
18 Francesco Melzi (?), Profile Portrait of Leonardo da Vinci 62
19 Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of an Old Man 63
20 Leonardo da Vinci, St. John the Baptist 68
vii
viii Figures
21 Lorenzo di Credi, Virgin and Child with Saints John and

Donato 69
22 Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci, Baptism of
Christ 70
23 Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo, Shooting of Saint
Sebastian 71
24 Leonardo da Vinci, Annunciation 75
25 Leonardo da Vinci, Drapery Study 76
26 Leonardo da Vinci, Study of a Female Head 77
27 Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child with a Carnation 81
28 Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child with Flowers (Benois
Madonna) 84
29 Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child, Profile Studies,
Technical Sketches, and Schematic Studies of Eyes with Visual
Rays 85
30 Detail of Schematic Studies of Eyes with Visual Rays in
fig. 29 86
31 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Machines (verso of fig. 32) 87
32 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Heads and Machines 88
33 Leonardo da Vinci, Sketches of a Child Holding and Playing
with a Cat 90
34 Andrea del Verrocchio, Boy with Dolphin 91
35 Leonardo da Vinci, Study for a Virgin and Child with a Cat 92
36 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies for a Virgin and Child with a
Cat 93
37 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies for a Virgin and Child with a
Cat 94
38 Leonardo da Vinci, Study for a Virgin and Child with a Cat 95
39 Leonardo da Vinci, Study for a Virgin and Child with a Cat
(verso of fig. 38) 96
40 Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child with a Cat 97
41 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of the Hanged Bernardo di
Bandino Baroncelli 101
42 Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci 106
43 Reverse of Ginevra de’ Benci, fig. 42 107
44 Lorenzo di Credi (attributed to), Portrait of a Lady
(Ginevra de’ Benci?) 109
45 Leonardo da Vinci, Study of a Lady with a Unicorn 111
Figures ix
46 Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (Lady with

an Ermine) 114
47 Leonardo da Vinci, Rebuses 115
48 Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna of the Yarnwinder 116
49 Detail of “Yarnwinder” rebus at upper left of fig. 47
(reversed for legibility) 117
50 Leonardo da Vinci (attributed to), Bust of the Young Christ 122
51 Andrea del Verrocchio, Detail of Head of Christ in
Crucifixion 123
52 Leonardo da Vinci, Study for the Head of the Virgin 126
53 Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (with Leonardo da Vinci),
Nursing Virgin with Goldfinch (Madonna Litta) 126
54 Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of the Magi 131
55 Detail of Figures to the Right of the Virgin and Child in
the Adoration of the Magi, fig. 54 132
56 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies for the Adoration of the Magi 133
57 Leonardo da Vinci, Figure Studies for the Adoration of the
Magi 134
58 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Hands for the Adoration of the
Magi 135
59 Leonardo da Vinci, Perspective Study for Background of the
Adoration of the Magi 136
60 Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of the Magi 137
61 Leonardo da Vinci, Design for a Colossal Crossbow 141
62 Leonardo da Vinci, Allegory with Fortune and Death 146
63 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Figures of Fortune and Fame,
Shields around a Flaming Tree Stump 147
64 Leonardo da Vinci, Study for an Adoration of the Christ
Child 152
65 Leonardo da Vinci, Designs for an Adoration of the Christ
Child 153
66 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Four Male Figures,
Half-Length Studies of Christ and St. John, Studies of Figures
in Conversation at a Table 154
67 Leonardo da Vinci, Head of Judas 155
68 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies for the Last Supper 156
69 Leonardo da Vinci, St. Sebastian 160
70 Leonardo da Vinci, St. Sebastian Tied to a Tree 161
x Figures
71 Leonardo da Vinci, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness 165

72 Workshop Assistant, after Leonardo da Vinci, Study of a
Studio Model for Saint Jerome 168
73 Leonardo da Vinci, Detail of Sheet of Sketches with a
Nativity 172
74 Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks 173
75 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Saint Mary Magdalene 175
76 Francesco Melzi, Flora 177
Acknowledgments
The origin of this book lies in the engaging lectures delivered by

Professor Olan A. Rand, Jr., at Northwestern University in the mid-
1970s. In those, Mr. Rand, as he preferred to be called, insightfully
pointed out how Leonardo’s powers of observation and keen curiosity
were manifest even in his earliest Madonnas. From Professors Sydney
J. Freedberg and Konrad Oberhuber, at Harvard University, I gained
an understanding of Leonardo’s formal innovations and the ways in
which such elements of style profoundly contributed to expression and
meaning in his works. In effect, the teachings of these three scholars
provided both the grounding and impetus for my research into the
works of Leonardo and into Renaissance art in general. I am greatly
indebted to them.
Several colleagues were kind enough to read through my manu-
script and offer astute suggestions and useful criticisms. I am most
grateful, above all, to Patricia C. Bruckmann, Professor Emeritus
of English at the University of Toronto; scholar and author Steven
Naifeh; psychoanalyst Dr. John E. Gedo; Michael Hall, former Editor
in Chief of Apollo Magazine; and Gloria Groom, curator of European
Painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, for their thoughtful advice. At
the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, fellow staff members have helped
me to obtain images and reproduction rights for this book and assisted
with the preparation of the manuscript; I am most grateful to Tracy
Owens, Joseph Price, Michelle Sullivan, and Patricia Lee for their
valuable and uncomplaining aid. Cambridge University Press deftly
and sensitively edited my manuscript and has provided expert guid-
ance throughout the publication process. I wish to thank Publishing
xi
xii Acknowledgments
Director Beatrice Rehl as well as project managers Brigitte Coulton

and Barbara Walthall of Aptara, Inc.
Finally and foremost, I am grateful to my wife, Starr Siegele, for
her unstinting and sustaining support. It is to her that I dedicate this
book.
Introduction
S ince his own time and for the next five hundred years
the name Leonardo da Vinci has been synonymous with
“genius.” Others who have shared that title – Charles Darwin and
Albert Einstein, for example – usually excelled in one particular field
or area of science. Leonardo has seemed to loom above them all in
his range of interests and apparent expertise, which included art, aero-
dynamics, anatomy, astronomy, botany, geology, hydraulics, optics,
physics, and numerous technologies of warfare. However, our admi-
ration for this omnivorous curiosity has led to some misconceptions
about his legacy. The truth of the matter is that Leonardo’s scientific
contributions, unlike those of Darwin and Einstein, were negligible,
and many of his inventions, although clever and even prophetic, could
not have actually functioned. Of his many scientific and industrial
interests, he appears to have mastered only certain, basic aspects of
engineering, and only in the practice of art did he exceed the accom-
plishments of most of his contemporaries. Only in art was he truly a
successful innovator.
In pointing out this reality, our intention is not to “explode” the
“mythology of Leonardo” – certainly, his brilliance and inspiring cre-
ativity should not and cannot be diminished. Rather, we are attempt-
ing to reconcile traditional accounts of the “Transcendent Genius,”
who purportedly received his ideas from on high, with the life of a man
who had more than his share of struggles with his world, his family,
and, occasionally, with himself. Leonardo’s genius rested primarily in
his powers of observation, in his ability to discern the subtle complexi-
ties of nature and to study with keen comprehension the works of oth-
ers, making instant and optimal use of their contributions. More often
than not, his artistic and mechanical inventions were reactions – to
1
2 The Young Leonardo
natural phenomena that he found particularly inexplicable and intrigu-

ing or to those paintings and sculptures that he considered to be novel
in some respect. Generally speaking, he responded much better to
challenges than he did to contractual obligations and timetables. He
rarely displayed the patient attitude and methodical approach of a sci-
entist; it has been noted that he hardly ever devoted more than a page
or two in his notebooks to the investigation of any particular problem
or question.
Although Leonardo did little to advance the scientific fields in
which he was engaged, the knowledge he gained through his research
profoundly informed his artworks. His investigations into light and
optics resulted in his creation of the evocative, smoky pictorial effect
called sfumato. His study of the movement of water not only lent
authenticity to his landscapes but also invigorated his renderings of
hair, garments, and flora. His investigations of the cardiovascular sys-
tem contributed to the physiological accuracy of his portrayals of
human emotion.
Often exaggerating for expressive effect, he applied the underlying
processes he perceived in nature to the world that he portrayed in
microcosm in his art. There, rocky outcroppings seem to form, ex-
pand, and erode before our eyes. So exquisitely sensitive are his render-
ings of sky and skin that Leonardo suggests their molecular excitation.
Such aesthetic manipulation also produced the controlled dynamism
of his groundbreaking Adoration of the Magi and the timeless suspen-
sion of the Mona Lisa. Centuries before Darwin, Leonardo presented
a natural world in evolution. And, believing in the divine design of
that world, he sought, long before Einstein, a Renaissance equivalent
to the modern, unified-field concept – the ultimate reconciliation of
all contrasting forces and ideas. Leonardo tirelessly (and literally) drew
analogies between the seemingly disparate phenomena of the visible
realm.
In Florence, under the rule of the shrewd, mercantile Medici fam-
ily, the young Leonardo found a life much at odds with the idealized
existence that he imagined and painted. Then as now, politics tended
to trump talent, and so the youth’s obvious gifts did not guarantee
a career or survival. Fortunately, his father’s respected position as a
Medici notary compensated to some degree for Leonardo’s illegiti-
mate birth and, consequently, inferior social status, and there are rea-
sons to believe that he always enjoyed the support and encouragement
Introduction 3
of his father as well as of his extended family and stepfamily. Although

some of his early homosexual activities created problems for him in
his adopted town, with time, Leonardo seems to have developed close,
enduring relationships that sustained him.
Even in the most civilized of Renaissance cities, daily life was
brutal and precarious. Violence and disease were ubiquitous. Power
and allegiances continually shifted. The rurally raised Leonardo must
have learned a few lessons of diplomacy and politics during his first
period in Florence, but not enough to sustain a career or, more to
the point, to ingratiate himself sufficiently with the Medici clan. His
intellect, sharp wit, and charm only carried him so far. For him, those
years were marked by valuable experience and training, small personal
triumphs, and continual frustrations. Yet for his contemporaries, those
years provided, in Leonardo’s paintings and drawings, the germs of the
exalted High Renaissance style and tenors of expression completely
new to art. For us, his early years produced myriad beautiful artworks,
which offer insight into a singularly fertile mind and the culture it
would forever transform.
Figure 1.
View of the town of Vinci. Scala/Art Resource, NY.
1. Childhood
F ew knew and fewer cared to know about the boy’s birth

in a farmhouse in the tiny hamlet of Anchiano. The mother,
an unwed rural girl, bore the oddly sentient child on a quiet Tuscan
night in the spring of 1452 and then vanished into obscurity. Little
more than her name, Caterina, has survived the centuries, part of the
curious and marvelous legacy of her gifted son, Leonardo. Unlettered
daughter of a nameless tenant farmer, vestige of medieval feudalism,
she gave life to the most salient intellect of the Renaissance. What
instincts or grace she imparted to him one cannot say. It is reasonable
to believe, however, that she, as much as his notary father, Ser Piero di
Antonio, was responsible for his naturally buoyant and restless spirit.
Because of the circumstances, the boy was not given a patronymic or
traditional family name. Instead, Ser Piero seems to have named him
in honor of Saint Leo, a fifth-century pope venerated for his repulse
of Attila the Hun and for his potent sermons. Leo’s feast day happened
to be celebrated during the week of Leonardo’s birth.
Caterina probably nursed the infant for many months, because her
social stature – and Leonardo’s – would not have merited a wet nurse.
Any joy shared between mother and child was short-lived, however.
She soon relinquished him to Ser Piero, who, in the next year, married
Albiera di Giovanni Amadori, a young lady of adequate public stand-
ing, and established a proper family. To mitigate the scandal of the
illegitimate baby, Ser Piero’s parents seem to have arranged, within
a year of the birth, for Caterina to wed another peasant, a farm-
hand and kiln worker of good repute. Issues of love and compatibility
never entered into such affairs. However, in accord with contempo-
rary mores, Leonardo’s honorable family would have provided her
with a sufficient dowry.
5
As was customary, the newlyweds, Ser Piero and Albiera, moved

into the household of Ser Piero’s elderly father and mother, Antonio
di Ser Piero and Monna Lucia, in their native town of Vinci; five years
later, Antonio, who had organized a baptism for Leonardo, would still
claim his grandson as a dependent – a bocca or mouth to feed – on his
taxes. Thus, Leonardo’s earliest years were spent under the comfortable
protection of the typical extended, rural family, with at least three
generations of relatives, including an octogenarian grandfather and
a teenaged uncle, Francesco, ensconced in the various pleasures of
country life.
Somewhat isolated among the hills and not especially wealthy, the
family could not offer the child a fine tutor or other advantages of
civic life, but it could provide him with nearly constant attention and a
warm appreciation for the rich botanical life of Tuscany’s gently rolling
landscape. He may have been given some responsibilities in the family’s
modest fields of wheat, buckwheat, and grapes. He also could have
played, explored, and fished with local children and, occasionally, his
maternal half-sisters, who were not much younger than he and lived
with his mother in a nearby village. Leonardo appears never to have
forgotten these early experiences, and even as he moved from one
grand court to a loftier one, he seemed to have carried with him –
and expressed in his art – a nostalgia for those intimate, mysterious
aspects of nature that intrigued him as a child.
Despite its rural setting and mainly agricultural activities, Vinci had
political, mercantile, and cultural connections to nearby cosmopolitan
Florence. Dominating the town was the early-eleventh-century castle
of the feudal Counts Guidi, which had fallen under the control of the
Florentines in the mid-thirteenth century. From a distance, the long,
horizontal building, with its stark, massive tower at one end, looked
like a flexing, muscular arm. At closer range, the structure, one of
many erected by the Guidi throughout Tuscany, appeared somewhat
nautical, with the tower resembling the mast of a sailing vessel. This
aspect inspired the name Castello della nave or “Ship’s Castle.” Crowd-
ing around the castello was a flotilla of much smaller buildings, including
the church of Santa Croce, built of similar stone but in various shapes
and orientations, the entire constellation remote and adrift in the end-
less terrain of hills, olive groves, and plowed and terraced fields. Once
catering to the needs of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa through the
Guidi family, in Leonardo’s time, the castle served primarily as the
1. Childhood 7
office of the town’s chief magistrate (podestà) and a government center

to coordinate and benefit Vinci’s and Florentine commercial interests.
Leonardo seems to have profited as well from this exchange and
proximity to Florence. Reportedly, when still a boy, Leonardo painted
on a shield an elaborate image of a monster, a composite of many crea-
tures, for a local peasant. Ready-mixed paint is a modern invention,
and there were probably no artist workshops or well-stocked apothe-
caries (which, in the Renaissance, sold pigments) in Vinci from which
Leonardo could have obtained his colors. If the shield story is true, we
must probably assume that a supportive grandfather, father, or uncle
purchased the relatively expensive materials in Florence while there
on business and that one of them, or someone else in Leonardo’s fam-
ily, showed the youngster how to make tempera paint from eggs. The
picture that emerges is of a privileged – even pampered – only child,
whose talents had already become obvious. Nevertheless, the young
Leonardo perhaps always felt an emotional sting from his illegitimacy,
not simply because of societal disapproval, but because of his early
separation from his mother.
Paternal affection for Leonardo, however great, could not nullify
the social barriers imposed by illegitimacy, which probably prevented
him from pursuing the family’s traditional, notarial career. The stigma
of Leonardo’s birth may have caused Ser Piero to leave the boy behind
in Vinci when he and Albiera moved to Florence at an unspecified
date. The father evidently decided to wait (apparently for a number of
years) until he attained sufficient status and employment in his adopted
city before owning up to his bastard son. It also may have been that
Albiera, unsuccessful in bearing children herself, did not wish to have
Leonardo, her husband’s transgression, live with them.
Social customs were such that had Leonardo been born a girl,
the child, if not immediately put to death, would have been forever
left in Vinci, in the family of her mother or placed in a nearby
convent. Even a boy, under most circumstances, was relegated to
second-class citizenry, without opportunity to hold public office, and
was socially and professionally disadvantaged. Similarly, an illegitimate
child’s parents found their lives dishonored and disrupted. For this
reason and perhaps because Leonardo may have helped to care for
his elderly grandparents, the young man remained in Vinci until he
had almost reached his teens. It is possible that Antonio and Monna
Lucia insisted on keeping Leonardo with them, not only for practical
reasons but also because of the remarkable, rejuvenating effect a baby

or young child can have on an older couple.
Only around the age of twelve, following the death in 1464 of his
grandfather and of his stepmother, Albiera, in childbirth, did Leonardo
finally leave his pastoral existence for Florence, where his father had
successfully established himself as a notary. In the Renaissance, this
profession required expertise in contracts. A notary was roughly equiv-
alent to a modern corporate and estate attorney. Ser Piero had, in fact,
landed himself a rather prestigious and lucrative position; his employer,
the respected Cosimo de’ Medici, called Il Vecchio (“the Elder”), was
the patriarch of what eventually would become the most powerful
family in all of Tuscany.
Arguably the most astute member of the entire Medici clan,
Cosimo had extended the international banking empire that his father,
Giovanni de’ Bicci, had built through loan-sharking. With the per-
nicious stealth of a modern financial institution, Cosimo’s enterprise
amassed profits more from transaction and exchange fees than from
interest. His banking and commercial conglomerate stretched across
the continent to England and was forever in need of competent
notaries, like Ser Piero, to secure monetary transactions and busi-
ness deals. Cosimo managed to accrue political power as well through
a brilliant strategy that involved elaborate cronyism and subtle manip-
ulation of the Florentine voting system. Such power was necessary for
self-preservation; a wealthy man who did not take a role in govern-
ment could soon find himself and his family taxed into oblivion.
A low-key and unpretentious man of the people, Cosimo had rela-
tively few rivals and many friends; his open, genial attitude would likely
have brought him into frequent contact with Ser Piero and, occasion-
ally, with his family. Unfortunately, unlike the young Michelangelo,
who was virtually adopted by the Medici and shared their tutors,
Leonardo never gained such special favor. He seems to have been
largely an autodidact, with minimal formal schooling. His education
probably commenced around the age of seven, when he entered the
stage of life called pueritia. His father and grandparents would have
inculcated basic literacy through the repeated reading of scripture
and other religious books in the vernacular. Home-schooling man-
uals, with a broader curriculum, began to appear in Florence and
its environs only in the sixteenth century – fifty years too late for
Leonardo.
1. Childhood 9
He would struggle with rudimentary Latin throughout his life and,

so far as we know, had no facility in Greek. This despite the fact that,
under the Medici, the University of Florence became widely regarded
as the best institution in Europe to learn the Hellenic language and
writings of the ancient philosophers Aristotle and Plato. His poor
Latin indicates that after his arrival in Florence, the twelve-year-old
Leonardo received only a truncated, vernacular education. Usually,
the sons of notaries and other professionals, such as lawyers and physi-
cians, attended a Latin school. Given Leonardo’s relatively advanced
age, however, Ser Piero evidently opted for what had become a com-
mon alternative for young Florentine men aged eleven to fourteen,
especially those destined for an apprenticeship with an artist or artisan:
two years of vernacular reading and writing and, concurrently, two
years of abbaco, that is, commercial mathematics. This was in keeping
with the influential I libri della famiglia (Books on the Family), written
in Florence in the 1430s by the art theorist and practical philosopher
Leon Battista Alberti. Illegitimate himself, Alberti strongly advocated
that fathers ensure their sons learned mathematics and geometry. Once
in Florence, Leonardo had only a brief time to prepare for his chosen
vocation in art, because young men normally began their apprentice-
ship at age twelve or thirteen. He may have had less than the requisite
two years of formal education.
Supplementing Leonardo’s home-schooling in Vinci, the Floren-
tine vernacular curriculum would have acquainted him primarily with
standard religious texts, including the Fior di virtù (Flowers of Virtue).
This medieval book illustrated virtues and vices through engaging
stories about biblical and classical heroes and various legends of ani-
mals. He would also have read the Epistole e Evangeli (extracts from
the Epistles and Gospels read daily at mass) and the thirteenth-century
Legenda aurea (Golden Legend) of Jacobus da Voragine, a popular com-
pendium of saints’ lives. He would have encountered nothing very
scholarly or esoteric. However, he would have found in the Golden
Legend’s biography of the sixth-century Saint Leonardo a fanciful ety-
mology of his name, which was bound to have struck a chord. It also
proved prophetic; Jacobus claimed that a source for “Leonardo” was
the Latin legens ardus, or “he who chooses that which is difficult.” As
we shall see, the artist did precisely this, taking a painstaking approach
to any project before him, reveling in intricacies and intellectual prob-
lems. Where written expression was concerned, however, Leonardo
cleverly chose what was easier. In some classes, he would have been
offered opportunity and guidance to refine his writing skills. But his
reversed, mirror-image penmanship was his own invention, a way for
a left-handed person to write – and draw – quickly, hand preceding
quill, without smearing the ink.
His abbaco classes would have entailed training not only in account-
ing and bookkeeping but also in advanced algebra and geometry,
which would have been of practical necessity for a young man entering
a late-fifteenth-century Florentine artist’s workshop, where knowl-
edge of perspective and some engineering skills had become de
rigueur. It is also possible that Ser Piero determined this course of
study for his son for reasons of prudence; should a career in the arts
not pan out, Leonardo would possess sufficient mathematical skills to
find other employment in the robust economy of Medicean Florence.
As it turned out, the rigorous mathematical education came in handy
for Leonardo’s various endeavors, particularly as a designer of mili-
tary and other machinery; these sometimes required long columns of
calculations. A reference in one of his manuscripts to a Benedetto de
l’abbaco suggests that he may have consulted with his former instructors
when he needed assistance with his math.
Throughout his life, Leonardo was rather defensive about his lim-
ited schooling. He confessed in one notebook:
I am fully aware that the fact of my not being a man of let-

ters may cause certain arrogant persons to think that they
may with reason censure me, alleging that I am a man igno-
rant of book learning. Foolish folk! Do they not know that
I may retort by saying, as did [the ancient Roman general]
Marius to the Roman patricians: “They who themselves
go about adorned in the labor of others will not permit me
my own?” They will say that because of my lack of book
learning I cannot properly express what I desire to expound
upon. Do they not know that my subjects require for their
exposition experience rather than the words of others?
In another place, he reiterates, somewhat angrily:
if indeed I have no power to quote from authors as they

have, it is a far bigger and more worthy thing to read by
the light of experience, which is the instructress of their
1. Childhood 11
masters. They strut about puffed up and pompous, decked

out and adorned not with their own labors but with those
of others, and they will not even allow me my own. And
if they despise me who am an inventor how much more
should blame be given to themselves, who are not inventors
but trumpeters and reciters of the works of others?
We do not know how Leonardo may also have suffered because of

the presumed moral inferiority of left-handed people in Renaissance
Italy.
2. Florence and Cosimo the Elder
I n the mid-fifteenth century, the medici were not members

of the highest social class. Shrewd Cosimo’s success would have
inspired myriad ambitious bumpkins like Ser Piero from little Vinci.
Indeed, Ser Piero lived in the first period of history in which there was
some secular class mobility – so long as one could find a place in the
familial, political patronage system that Cosimo had founded and his
progeny perfected. In Della famiglia, Alberti confidently declared that
“men are themselves the source of their own fortune and misfortune.”
In those heady, optimistic days, self-proclaimed poets recited in the
street verses that celebrated the self-made man who ascends from the
lower ranks to aristocracy, loudly voicing the prevalent humanist view
that knowledge and virtue conferred nobility beyond that of inherited
wealth. Cosimo cleverly exploited this aspirant, bourgeois notion. He
frequently hired humble individuals from rural villages such as Vinci,
knowing that he would receive fierce loyalty and gratitude in return.
Moreover, such dislocated people were less likely to have connections
with his rivals in the city, the Pazzi family and other, old-money gentry.
His namesake, the equally tough-minded and calculating Cosimo I,
continued this effective strategy in the next century and became the
first Grand Duke of Tuscany.
Conscientiously following in the profession of his father and
his ancestors, Ser Piero would have regarded old Cosimo as a fine
model for his personal virtues, traditional values, and comportment.
Cosimo eschewed ostentation; generously supported civic organiza-
tions, avant-garde philosophers, and artists, like the skillful, if lasciv-
ious, painter and Carmelite friar Filippo Lippi; and was, above all,
deeply devoted to his family. He went so far as to commission a
translation of (Pseudo-) Aristotle’s Oeconomica (fourth century b.c.), a
13
treatise that praised family life and dispensed tips on effective house-
hold management. More tellingly, on the death of his second son in
1463, Cosimo wrote poignantly, paraphrasing Euripides, “This, which
we call life, is death, and that is the true life which is everlasting –.
For what is my power now worth? What worth has it ever had?”
On a happier occasion, he interrupted a serious meeting with visiting
ambassadors to make a whistle for one of his grandsons. When after-
ward his guests voiced their irritation, he responded “lucky for you
he didn’t ask me to play it, since I’d have done that, too.” Although
this sort of behavior would have endeared him to Ser Piero and to
many Florentines, more important for Leonardo was Cosimo’s almost
paternalistic support of gifted individuals and his tolerance for wide-
ranging intellectual discourse and for the eccentric, irreverent, and
sometimes immoral behavior of extremely talented people. This atti-
tude, perpetuated by his descendants, fostered a culture of creativity
in Florence for more than two centuries – and offered Leonardo nec-
essary encouragement and wide latitude.
Beyond that, Florence was a city of endless possibilities. The money
from the Medici’s banks permitted them to become major purvey-
ors of commodities, everything from alum (used in glassmaking and
leather tanning), wool, and olive oil to gold, silver, and jewels. They
could obtain for those favored customers with extravagant tastes almost
anything they desired, including exotic spices, giraffes, and slaves – for
50 florins each, approximately three times the price of an average horse
or ox. Despite this last abomination, Cosimo was a sincere populist,
who believed in Dante’s notion of il bene del popolo, the public good.
He underwrote much of the entertainment for the countless pageants
staged in Florence throughout the year and supported many of the lay
confraternities that participated in them. This fare was often far more
sophisticated than the festivals and processions Ser Piero and his family
had witnessed in Vinci. A higher class of diversion was required for
the discriminating Florentine populace, who distinguished themselves
from the masses of other European cities and towns. Florentines were
extraordinarily literate, even in the lower echelons of stonemasons,
wool dyers, and street vendors. Consequently, they were avid and, as
today, very critical consumers of culture – quick to praise, quicker to
condemn.
Renaissance Florentines elaborately amplified the traditional hol-
iday celebrations, including the ancient religious festival of the Magi,
2. Florence and Cosimo the Elder 15
for which the whole city was transformed into a New Jerusalem.
Various districts were decorated to recollect, and sometimes creatively
to reenact, biblical events. For wedding festivals and jousts, triumphal,
allegorical cars or floats were constructed, their passengers in spec-
tacular costumes or holding standards and parade shields that made
classical and chivalric allusions. Eventually, explanatory programs or
published descriptions were required to sort out all the learned ref-
erences and characters from ancient Greek and Roman history and
mythology, such as the emperors Julius Caesar and Titus; the hor-
rific, serpent-haired Medusa; and the stately Pallas Athena, goddess of
wisdom.
Few citizens were better read or more cultivated than Cosimo him-
self. His modest, everyman demeanor belied a voracious curiosity and
fierce intellect. He amassed a substantial library for his time, contain-
ing not only the writings of the best contemporary poets and philoso-
phers but also works from antiquity, many acquired on expeditions he
sponsored to Constantinople, Egypt, and Syria. The majority of his
holdings, which he bequeathed to San Marco, were religious books
and manuscripts. In addition to these, he owned the modern contribu-
tions of Dante, the lyrical poet Petrarch, ribald storyteller Boccaccio,
and esoteric philosopher Marsilio Ficino. These complemented the
classical texts of Plato, Livy, and Cicero in the elder Medici’s study.
To Ficino, for whom his patron had provided education and houses,
Cosimo assigned the arduous task of translating ancient volumes of
Plato from Greek. As was then the custom, Cosimo often asked the
intense, melancholic poet to read aloud to him from these books.
One imagines that, intermittently, the two men would break into dis-
cussion, debating the practical application of the great philosopher’s
pronouncements. Cosimo was interested, most of all, in moral philos-
ophy, instruction on how to live in the quotidian world. He owned
more than one translated copy of Aristotle’s Ethics and Cicero’s Letters
to His Friends (Epistolae ad familiares), full of humane wisdom.
The Medici padrone was especially venerated for his blunt pragma-
tism and dry sense of humor, a gift that, skipping a generation, was
passed on to his grandchildren, particularly to Lorenzo. Florentines
delighted in recounting Cosimo’s jokes, especially his one-liners, like
his pithy “you can’t govern a state with paternosters” (prayers beginning
“Our Father”), a rebuke to wishful thinkers and clerics. An enthu-
siastic supporter of humanist writers and a closet scholar himself,
Cosimo did not suffer fools, especially those of ostensibly grander lin-
eage who tried to feign intellectual sophistication by associating with
the learned. He once commented that Franco Sacchetti, a member
of the old Florentine elite and host of literary gatherings, was “like
the kidney, surrounded with fat and always lean,” implying that the
patrician never seemed to absorb much knowledge from those around
him. For years afterward, Cosimo continued to refer to this better-
born poseur as “the Kidney.” With time, Leonardo would assimilate
this puncturing wit, so typical of the worldly Florentines.
3. The Cultural Climate of Florence
C osimo’s patronage of the visual arts was no less impressive

than his support of humanist scholars and literature. Under his
bullish, benevolent reign, Filippo Brunelleschi created the vast dome of
the cathedral, an architectural miracle, and the sculptor Lorenzo Ghib-
erti realized the sumptuous gilt bronze Gates of Paradise for the Baptis-
tery portal nearby. While Brunelleschi built for Cosimo what would
become the principal Medici church, San Lorenzo, the dependable
architect Michelozzo di Bartolomeo, at Cosimo’s request, renovated
the church and convent of San Marco (where Cosimo maintained a
penitential cell), constructed a grand new palace for the Medici on the
via Larga, and renovated villas for them in the sylvan backwaters of
Cafaggiolo, Careggi, and Trebbio. From his favorite artist, the sculptor
Donatello, Cosimo commissioned several important works, including
the controversial, sensuous bronze David, a rakish interpretation of the
biblical hero, with more sashay than swagger.
Cosimo kept busy the rambunctious Fra Filippo Lippi, seducer
of ladies and nuns alike, and all of the other major painters as well;
Lippi supplied a number of pictures for the new Palazzo Medici,
and Fra Angelico and Paolo Uccello painted altarpieces and frescoes
for the churches of San Marco and Santa Maria Novella. Some of
Lippi’s pictures, such as his Annunciation (c. 1439) in San Lorenzo,
followed what were the latest, progressive, “scientific” trends in art. He
defined the space of the painting through a strict, if vertiginous, one-
point perspective system – a striking application of mathematics and
geometry – and he rendered the foreground glass vase with impressive,
optical precision.
Other of Lippi’s works, among them the Adoration of the Christ
Child that he created for Cosimo’s personal chapel in the Medici palace
17
(and a very similar picture for the private retreat of his profoundly
religious and cultured daughter-in-law, Lucrezia Tornabuoni), per-
petuated a mystical strain in Florentine painting (fig. 2). That darkly
suggestive work presents a visionary experience. The holy personages
are lost in contemplation; individual blossoms and natural elements
have an acutely alive and symbolic presence; the feral, rocky land-
scape and heavens less a setting than an enveloping cloak, hermetically
sealing off the back of the work. Lippi has re-created a mystical reve-
lation of the twelfth-century saint Bernard of Clairvaux, shown in the
background of the palace painting (now in Berlin), who, according
to legend, had a vision of the Nativity when he was a child. Signifi-
cantly, Leonardo seems to have found this introspective, artistic trend,
with its strange remoteness, as compelling as the new “rational” and
mathematic mode of Florentine painting.
Although much of this creative activity had been completed by
the time Leonardo and his father had reached Florence, the young
boy would have seen ongoing projects instigated by Cosimo’s son,
Piero the Gouty, and, later, his grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent
(Il Magnifico). Upon his arrival, Leonardo would have been dazzled
by the opulent marble and porphyry tomb for Cosimo that his future
master Andrea del Verrocchio created and later erected in 1465 in San
Lorenzo and by Benozzo Gozzoli’s majestic fresco of the Procession of
the Magi, full of wondrous natural detail, in the Palazzo Medici – both
projects commissioned by the sickly and short-lived Piero. During
adolescence, Leonardo witnessed the execution and public installation
of several of the sculptures that Verrocchio fashioned for Lorenzo,
including the tombs for Piero and his brother Giovanni de’ Medici.
Years later, Leonardo would still recall with awe Verrocchio’s engi-
neering feat in fabricating and mounting the famous copper orb on
the lantern of the dome of Florence Cathedral in 1471. The entire
city marveled, the merchant Benedetto Dei thereafter calling the artist
“Verrocchio of the Ball” (della Palla). The versatile master’s accom-
plishment may have stimulated Leonardo’s own engineering interests;
several of the young man’s drawings from that period either record or
were inspired by the hoist and crane used to install the Duomo sphere.
Not only would Leonardo have admired the technological equipment;
but also, as one who dreamed of human flight, he must have enviously
imagined the view from atop that soaring perch, by far the highest
point in the city.
3. The Cultural Climate of Florence 19
Figure 2.
Filippo Lippi, Adoration
of the Christ Child,
c. 1459, oil on panel,
formerly at the chapel
in the Medici Palace,
now in Berlin, Staatliche
Museen Preussischer
Kulturbesitz,
Gemäldegalerie.
Erich Lessing/Art
Resource, NY.
Leonardo also saw the ascent, under Piero and Lorenzo, of the
major painters Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Antonio
and Piero Pollaiuolo, and Luca Signorelli. Piero ordered or purchased
important works by several of these innovative artists, among them
three large paintings by Antonio Pollaiuolo of the mythological Labors
of Hercules for the Medici palace on the via Larga (lost but known
through small, autograph replicas). Whereas the perpetually ill and
eczema-ridden Piero felt the need to display these unsubtle symbols
of power and military prowess, his sagacious wife, Lucrezia, adher-
ing to Cosimo’s strategy of humility, kept a relatively low profile,
retaining the unpretentious “Tornabuoni” as her family name rather
than reverting to her family’s original, noble appellation, Tornaquinci.
She understood the danger of appearing too aristocratic in republican
Florence.
Their son, Lorenzo, preferred writing poetry and collecting gems

and other small objets d’art to the acquisition of paintings. Nonethe-
less, he did commission portraits and an altarpiece from Botticelli, fres-
coes from Ghirlandaio, and obtained some pictures in oil by esteemed
Flemish masters. In his relatively accessible, ground-floor bedroom in
the palace hung Uccello’s paintings of the mythological Judgment of
Paris and a scene of lions fighting dragons (these were joined, in 1484,
by Uccello’s famous tri-paneled Battle of San Romano). The precocious
Leonardo would have especially enjoyed the lion-and-dragon combat
when he was permitted to examine these paintings from time to time.
During his early apprenticeship with Verrocchio, Leonardo drew the
snarling heads of a lion and a dragon in confrontation – beasts for
which he seems to have had an enduring fondness (fig. 3). (Report-
edly, much later, for French king Francis I, he made a grand image of
a dragon fighting a lion, distorted in extreme perspective, or anamor-
phosis.) By the later 1470s, the young artist managed to gain entrance
into Lorenzo’s famed garden beside San Marco, where Lorenzo kept
part of his sculpture collection and allowed a lucky few to study and
work.
Despite this privilege, there is no evidence to suggest that Leonardo
was admitted into the meetings of the “Platonic Academy,” the name
an informal group of intellectuals at the Medici court invented for
themselves in the 1460s. The “academicians,” who often gathered at
Lorenzo’s refurbished villa at Carreggi, included Ficino, the famous
Greek scholar Johannes Argyropouos, whom Cosimo had brought to
Florence, the erudite young poets Angelo Poliziano and Cristoforo
Landino (a commentator on the works of Virgil, Horace, and Dante),
and the architect, art theorist, and writer Leon Battista Alberti, who
gloried in the role of venerable counselor and was, until his death in
1472, probably Leonardo’s most direct connection to the group. The
Neoplatonists, as they came to be called, discussed not only arcane
subjects, such as Plato’s views on the immortality of the soul and the
nature of God, but also the relative merits of the active life versus
the contemplative life and what personal qualities or accomplishments
determined “nobility.”
Although these issues were not central or pressing for Leonardo,
whose investigations were more pragmatic and Aristotelian, concern-
ing the observable, natural world, his exclusion from the academy’s
conversations may account for the anger he occasionally expressed.
Figure 3.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Study of the Virgin
Nursing with St. John the
Baptist, Figure and Head
Studies, Heads of a Lion
and Dragon, c. 1480,
pen and ink, Windsor
Castle, Royal Library
(12276r). The Royal
Collection C 2010
Her Majesty Queen

Elizabeth II.
(Ficino sometimes referred to intellectuals who, like Leonardo,

were not proficient in the classical languages, as levissimi, Latin for
“lightweights.”) Notwithstanding his lack of scholarly credentials,
Leonardo was probably permitted, once in a while, to attend lec-
tures given by Alberti, Argyropoulos (an authority on Aristotle’s
writings), and other members. Lorenzo seems occasionally to have
made the Medici library available to the artist. This contained at least
six works of Aristotle and some scientific and medical tracts, such
as Cornelius Celsus’ first-century On Medicine (De medicina), Pliny
the Elder’s first-century Natural History, Theophrastus’ On Botany
(third century b.c.) and Flavius Vegetius Renatus’ fourth-century vet-

erinary manual De mulomedicina, along with many volumes of poetry
and historical and religious texts.
Meanwhile, Leonardo’s father performed well enough as a notary
to attain, by 1469, a job at the Palazzo del Podestà (the present-day
Bargello), the seat of the highest law officer and main criminal court
in Florence. In the next year, he moved to the via delle Prestanze
(later called the via dei Gondi), in the neighborhood of the Palazzo
della Signoria, the city hall, into what would have been an upscale
house with airy rooms appointed, in the Florentine manner, with
small assemblies of painted furniture, set against mainly bare walls.
The relative austerity of the interior décor reflected the frugal way in
which the typical Florentine household was run.
The forty-three-year-old Ser Piero brought to the new casa a sec-
ond wife, Francesca di Ser Giuliano Lanfredi, and hopes for many chil-
dren. Unfortunately, his wishes were delayed. His first legitimate heir,
Antonio, arrived seven years later, born to his third wife, Margherita,
in 1476. He quickly went on to have another son with Margherita,
however, and seven more sons and two daughters with a fourth spouse,
Lucrezia. Because of the Renaissance’s high mortality rate of women
in childbirth, it was not unusual for a man to marry a few times
and to change residences, as his family evolved and grew. Leonardo,
by far the oldest of Ser Piero’s brood (by almost twenty-four years),
would have lived, as was customary for workshop assistants, mainly at
Verrocchio’s house and shop in the via dell’Agnolo, near the church of
S. Ambrogio. We know nothing of Leonardo’s relationships with his
stepmothers in Florence, but one of Leonardo’s biological analogies
may offer a clue. Observing how trees give abundant sap to grafted
limbs, the artist asserted that fathers and mothers “bestow much more
attention upon their stepchildren than upon their own children.”
Ser Piero’s elevated status and the many important connections
he made in his new position – with Verrocchio, the sculptor Andrea
della Robbia, and other artists and potential patrons – may have helped
solidify Leonardo’s place in Verrocchio’s workshop and sometime later,
by 1472, secure his membership in the painters’ confraternity or pro-
fessional club, the Compagnia di S. Luca (Company of Saint Luke).
Through his contacts and clients, Ser Piero seems to have worked
continuously to advance Leonardo’s career. No record has been
found, however, to indicate that the artist’s father ever took steps to
“legitimate” him, a legal process involving the approval of Florence’s

governing councils. This would have made Leonardo eligible to
inherit property and, more important, would have removed some
of the stain of dishonor. This is a curious fact, given Ser Piero’s pro-
fession and status and – what must have been a great and growing
concern – his failure, during twenty-three years of marriage, to pro-
duce a legitimate heir.
4. First Years in Florence and
the Verrocchio Workshop
D espite a certain confidence born of his many gifts,

the newly arrived, adolescent Leonardo must have found
the urban congestion of Florence and the desperate squalor of so
many who lived there a bit intimidating. From the airy public squares
spanned countless, winding streets and blind passages, many made
almost impassible by vendors’ stalls and filthy shacks. As in most
European cities, the poor, rural émigrés, and itinerant workers – alto-
gether, roughly half of Florence’s population – mainly hunkered down
in makeshift housing, crude wooden structures and lean-tos, braced
against churches and other masonry buildings.
Agricultural life was then much more intrusive and obtrusive than
it is today. Horses, donkeys, cattle, and other livestock were every-
where led through the narrow streets. Piles of hay and manure were
ubiquitous. Carts and mule trains, loaded with wool, raw silk, leather,
and produce, angled their way past these obstacles and large open-pit
quarries of pietra forte, the stone from which most of the palaces and
houses were built. Animal parts that could not be used by butchers or
leather makers were freely discarded in the streets, usually at the spots
where the livestock had been slaughtered. Carcasses floated in the
Arno as well, along with massive debris and chemical residues gener-
ated by the wool workers and dyers, who labored under lofty wooden
sheds (tiratoi) and pavilions along the river. A perpetual source of flood
and the city’s main sewer, the Arno was considered by most to be,
in Dante’s words, a “cursed and unlucky ditch” (Purgatory, XIV, 51).
In January 1465, probably just a year or so after Leonardo’s arrival in
Florence, the river flooded all the way to the Canto a Monteloro (now
the corner of via degli Alfani and Borgo Pinti), causing lay benches
to float there from the church of Santa Croce, and filling the ground
25
floors of the Podestà (later, Ser Piero’s workplace) and nearby apothe-
caries with water and waste. Needless to say, rodents were always a
problem, as was disease, which the populace attributed to the putrid
smells of the city rather than to the true source, rat-borne fleas. After
the Black Death had wiped out half of the Florentine citizenry in
the mid-fourteenth century, plagues came cyclically, nearly every few
years, throughout the fifteenth.
Fortunately, nature also intruded into the city in more benevolent
ways. Many people owned fine horses and kept hounds, songbirds, and
other pets. Some of the more affluent had gardens, with flowers both
native and imported from afar, such as exotic varieties of jasmine. Most
convents and monasteries maintained their own private gardens and
small orchards. At that time, there were also many small, unpaved, and
untended open spaces, where grasses and shrubs grew wildly and trees
provided shelter and shade. These were not parks in the modern sense,
but neglected places that offered respite or, in the case of one lightly
wooded, if ragged, tract of land near the church of SS. Annunziata,
opportunity for sketching. Not far from the city’s center, on the part
of the Arno far to the east of the Ponte Vecchio (upstream from
the wool industry), waterbirds thrived and fisherman armed with
poles and huge nets hauled in bounties of carp, cod, and trout. On
the outskirts of Florence, there were pastures and the lush, flowery
meadows from which the city had derived its name. Thus, Leonardo
found in and around the city at least some semblance of his former
life and surroundings.
When, perhaps in 1465 or 1466, he entered Verrocchio’s large
bottega or shop, which produced marble and bronze sculptures as well
as paintings and frames, it had an extensive crew and well-established,
if alternating, divisions of labor. Of an inherently sensitive nature,
Leonardo was probably initially overwhelmed by the din of stone-
chipping and metal-clanging and by the visible air, choked with marble
dust, sulphur, and the pungent odor of spilt wine. At that time, he
may have seen some craftsmen on their knees polishing the large
bell, years later affectionately called La Piagnona, the “great weeping
lady.” The bell was so-named because it summoned to the church of
San Marco the piagnoni, the “weeping” followers of the controversial
Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola, burned at the stake for heresy
in 1498. Leonardo possibly observed in another part of the studio
4. First Years in Florence and the Verrocchio Workshop 27
Verrocchio himself, adding the finishing touches to his marble bust of

the Florentine patrician Francesco Sassetti (c. 1464–65). The master,
undoubtedly, would have taken him across town to see the holy-water
basin (lavamano) that he, when an assistant, had years earlier created
with the sculptor Antonio Rossellino for the Old Sacristy of San
Lorenzo.
Unusually versatile, Verrocchio was one of the few sculptors of
his time to work in both bronze and marble and one of the rare
sculptors who also painted. The contemporary Florentine writer and
civic booster Ugolino Verino praised Verrocchio as comparable to the
ancient sculptor Phidias, noting that he even “surpasses the Greek in
one respect, for he both casts and paints.” In fifteenth-century Flo-
rence, only Verrocchio, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Antonio Pollaiuolo
combined those skills. Verrocchio was reportedly a competent musi-
cian as well.
Although born (between 1434 and 1437) to an artisan family that
was not especially wealthy, Verrocchio was very literate and cultured,
with a small library of classical and humanist texts, including the
first-century Heroides of Ovid and the fourteenth-century Triumphs of
Petrarch. He devoted himself to the study of antique art. He probably
knew more about ancient Greek and Roman sculpture than anyone
of his generation. Although such pieces informed his works, he rarely
chose – or was given the opportunity – to tackle classical subject
matter in his art. Nonetheless, his knowledge and talents profoundly
impressed the Medici, who gave him as many commissions as he could
handle; his earliest surviving sculptures, the lavamano and La Piagnona,
were created for Medici churches, and Sassetti, of whom he carved an
arresting bust, was the Medici’s banker.
After Verrocchio completed those works, the family assigned him
a range of projects in various media – a bronze sculpture of David
(c. 1465), the marble and porphyry tombs for Cosimo, Piero, and
Giovanni de’ Medici (c. 1465–67 and c. 1469–73), a polychromed
terracotta relief of the Resurrection (c. 1470) and a bronze Putto with
Dolphin (c. 1470–early 1480s) for the Medici villa at Careggi, and
an altarpiece, depicting the Virgin and Child with saints, for the
cathedral in Pistoia (c. 1475). Always accommodating, Verrocchio and
his assistants also produced painted-canvas standards for Medici jousts
(1469 and 1475) and elaborate festival decorations for the state visit of
the Duke of Milan in 1471. Through him, Leonardo gained a useful

understanding of the Medici’s tastes and interests.
Apparently, however, Verrocchio never mastered the fresco tech-
nique and so was not able to teach it to Leonardo and other shop
assistants. This partly explains why Leonardo chose unconventional
means when he was later assigned to create large murals, such as his
Last Supper for the Milanese church of S. Maria delle Grazie and Battle
of Anghiari for the Florentine Palazzo della Signoria. In both cases,
he employed highly experimental media and consequently watched
his works begin to decay almost as soon as he laid them on the wall.
As we shall see, Leonardo probably lacked the desire and patience to
learn the laborious fresco technique from skilled practitioners in other
ateliers.
He seems also to have inherited certain unfortunate work habits
from Verrocchio’s shop, specifically the tendency, shared by modern
building contractors, to move on to a new project before completing
the one at hand. Two major paintings produced by the shop (on which
Leonardo collaborated), the Pistoia Madonna della Piazza (fig. 21) and
the Baptism of Christ (fig. 22), were both completed years after they
were begun, with long periods during which the works were left to
gather dust. Later, the famous sixteenth-century biographer of artists,
Giorgio Vasari, lamented Verrocchio’s inability to finish pictures, a
failing that he would retain until the end of his life, as evidenced by
the incomplete quadro grande (large picture) and other works listed in
his estate.
Normally, a young man apprenticed to an artist spent his days
grinding colors, preparing gesso, and fulfilling numerous other duties
until the master deemed him worthy to participate in the actual exe-
cution of works. Given the varied activities of Verrocchio’s enterprise
and Leonardo’s great capacity to learn, his novitiate would have
involved an increasingly – and unusually – wide range of experiences,
perhaps as much in the applied and technical arts of casting bronze
and hoisting blocks of stone as in the fine art of draftsmanship. Highly
stimulated by the bustle and exchange of professional secrets, Leonardo
nevertheless would have spent many tedious hours employed in the
lowly tasks of the creato (literally, “creature,” as such assistants were
called) before his master, Verrocchio, assured of his abilities with pen
and brush, allowed him to assist on paintings.
Leonardo would have received a bare subsistence wage, probably

supplemented with funds from Ser Piero, who initially paid for his
son’s internship with the master. The young man’s starting annual
salary might have been as low as 6 or 8 florins and would have risen,
by the time he was seventeen (the earliest age at which assistants
became independent masters), to perhaps 18 or 20 florins. We know
that a shop assistant to the contemporary Florentine painter Neri di
Bicci received the annual sum of 15 florins, along with “a pair of
hose.” The pay of the creato was even less than it seems on face, for
an illiterate, low-level servant would have been paid perhaps 8 florins
per year, an unskilled laborer could have expected to receive 30 to 40
florins, a druggist 50, a civil servant 70, and a senior municipal official
as much as 300 florins annually. Moreover, a workshop member was,
like a servant, at the master’s constant beck and call, obliged to be
available for work at all hours of the day and night and even on
holidays if necessary. To cast the situation in a somewhat happier light,
one might say that Leonardo had joined a professional “family,” in
which his life was entwined with the master’s and in which notions
of individual privacy (then as now in Italy) hardly existed.
After Leonardo had demonstrated his considerable painterly tal-
ents, he still would have been rather restricted in how he could apply
them. Understandably, products from Verrocchio’s shop were required
to follow the master’s design and style closely, despite the many con-
tributing hands. For this reason, the principal figures in paintings, even
those touched by Leonardo, adhered to strict prototypes, often gen-
erated from cartoons (full-sized preparatory drawings) that the master
produced. Assistants normally could assert their individuality in a shop
piece only in less prominent details, such as a distant landscape or other
minor, natural elements.
Tales of Leonardo’s juvenile inclinations and adventures suggest
that he was always drawn to the natural world and was, no doubt,
happy to be anointed as the one primarily responsible for the natural
elements in Verrocchio workshop pictures. In light of its specificity
of detail, there may well be some truth to the aforementioned story,
related by Giorgio Vasari, that the inventive, young Leonardo painted
on a buckler, or shield, a “monster of poisonous breath, belching – fire
from its eyes and smoke from its nostrils,” a pastiche of various parts of
lizards, insects, and other, repulsive creatures he had collected. Later,
according to Vasari, Leonardo prepared for the Medici a tapestry car-

toon representing Adam and Eve in a verdant landscape with animals
and much vegetation, including accomplished depictions of a palm,
a fig tree, and “a meadow with an infinite variety of herbs.” That
composition is lost, along with a painting of the Head of Medusa,
undoubtedly a tour de force demonstration of Leonardo’s snake-
rendering skills, once kept in the Medici storage vault, the guardaroba.
Leonardo’s ingenuity and zoological knowledge would not have
escaped the attention of Verrocchio, who, as a former goldsmith,
had himself created a “cup full of [that is, decorated with] animals”
and other “bizarre fancies.”
Some reports of Leonardo’s concern for animals sometimes sound
almost like passages from a hagiography of Francis of Assisi, such as
the claim that the artist sometimes bought songbirds from their sellers
only to release them to freedom. Yet, seemingly corroborating this
story, Leonardo once wrote that “the goldfinch will carry spurge [a
deadly poison] to its little ones imprisoned in a cage – death rather
than loss of liberty.” It is known that, later in life, Leonardo kept
many horses. (This was an unusual luxury in that most artists could
only afford to rent horses or to own mules.) He apparently also loved
dogs. Every now and then, he would pause from his work to sketch a
canine companion in the margin of the page before him. On a sheet
of Leonardo’s optical illustrations in the manuscript known as the
“Codice Atlantico” (in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan), there is
one such study of a dog, evidently content simply to sit quietly beside
its inattentive master, the animal well accustomed to his interminable
periods of drawing and writing (fig. 4). The hound may have been
the lone, welcome guest in his studio; he advised artists to work in
solitude, allowing the presence of colleagues only if absolutely neces-
sary. Throughout his life, Leonardo conducted research in comparative
anatomy and drew a wide range of animals, both real and imaginary;
the only, unfortunate, omission from his pictorial bestiary, because of
his absence from Florence, was the beloved, doomed giraffe, given to
Lorenzo de’ Medici as a gift by the sultan of Egypt in 1487, which
died after striking its head on a beam in the Medici palace.
In fact, the artist’s fascination with nature intersected with that of
Lorenzo, one of several interests that the two young men shared,
which may have formed the basis for a respectful and cordial
Figure 4.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Optical Studies and
Resting Dog, c. 1492–
95?, pen and ink, Milan,
Biblioteca Ambrosiana,
Codice Atlantico (599r).
Finsiel/Alinari/Art
Resource, NY.
relationship. Lorenzo, who assembled a famed menagerie, enthusi-

astically bred fine horses (for which Leonardo designed stables), cattle,
pigs, hounds, and rabbits. His poetry, mainly pastoral, teemed with
animal and landscape imagery: cranes and falcons, deer and oxen, ilex
trees and olive groves, and rushing streams. Just three years Leonardo’s
senior, the high-spirited Lorenzo also would have appreciated the
artist’s musical abilities and irreverent sense of humor, about which I
will later comment at length. Il Magnifico composed and sang hunt-
ing and love songs and was notorious for telling funny, often ribald,
stories. His carpe diem attitude is revealed in the jaunty, carnival song
he wrote in 1470:
How lovely is youth –

Yet it slips away;
If you can be happy, be so.
For there is no certainty about tomorrow.
Some allowances should be made for the clichés, refrained in subse-

quent verses; the lyricist was barely out of his teens.
5.First Works in Florence
and the Artistic Milieu
T he earliest surviving traces of Leonardo’s hand – and

affection for animals – would seem to be found in the Tobias
and the Angel (c. 1472–73), now in the National Gallery, London
(fig. 5), a collaborative picture from the Verrocchio shop. The partic-
ipation of two hands in the work’s execution has long been apparent,
in light of the stylistic contrast between the sculptural rigidity of the
anatomy and costumes of the figures and the more freely rendered
dog and fish. The wavelike patterns of the dog’s unruly fur compare
closely to the many sketches of the movement of water and hair that
soon after streamed from Leonardo’s pen. The dead-eyed helplessness
and glistening scales of the carp (or tinca), gasping for breath, sug-
gest the touch of someone who studied aquatic life closely. Famously
able to survive for long periods out of water, the common river fish
would have provided a live (and fresh-smelling) model for hours before
becoming a meal.
An appreciative Verrocchio may have permitted Leonardo’s brush
to delineate as well the lively, luminescent curls of Tobias’s hair and
the intricate, knotted and fluttering belts and hems of the figures’
garments. Leonardo no doubt distinguished himself in the studio in
such subtle application of highlights and in the other remarkable effects
of illumination he could attain in the mixed media of tempera and oil
paint, then relatively new to Florence. Consequently, he became the
person called on to add those last, gilt-edged details, the final polish,
before the works left the shop.
The novel medium of oil paint, which Botticelli and others were
also beginning to employ, would have much intrigued Leonardo. With
it he knew that he could achieve qualities of translucency and trans-
parency that far surpassed the capabilities of tempera and fresco as well
33
as tenors of expression that the literal-minded Flemish, originators of

the technique, had just barely explored. He had found a vehicle not
only for success but also for investigation; his experimentation with
media would continue for more than thirty years, with either sublime
or disastrous results.
A respectful homage to a painting of the same theme by the broth-
ers Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo, the Verrocchio-workshop Tobias
and the Angel was meant, nevertheless, to eclipse it. From the time
of the major competition for the Baptistery doors project at the
dawn of the fifteenth century, artistic rivalries were enthusiastically
encouraged and pursued in Florence. Confident in the skills of his
gifted student, Verrocchio must have felt he could compete well with
the Pollaiuolo brothers and would have welcomed the opportunity
to make a reduced variant of their painting, then on display in the
church of Orsanmichele. The commission probably came to Verroc-
chio from someone with cataracts or other eye troubles (or who had
a family member with poor vision), because the subject of the pic-
ture, from the apocryphal Book of Tobit, recalls how the young Tobit,
guided by an angel, cured his father’s blindness with the entrails of a
fish. This charming, popular story of filial piety was appended to the
Old Testament in many, early vernacular Bibles. As we shall see, the
vision-related theme would have much appealed to Leonardo, and
the implicit, painterly competition would have begun to prepare him
for a far more public and overt guerra (or war), as such artistic contests
were called, some three decades later, when he would compete with
Michelangelo in the grand salon of the city hall.
For a young artist in the Verrocchio crew, who may have felt that
he was devoting an inordinate amount of time to making studies for
pictorial gowns and dresses (a particular strength and specialty of the
shop), the works of the Pollaiuolo brothers, masters of the nude figure
in action, must have seemed exciting. Celebrated for their deliberately
ungraceful, painted and bronze figures of Hercules and other sinewy
nudes in violent engagement, the Pollaiuolo boys offered a macho,
avant-garde alternative to the conservative, luxury-goods industry of
Verrocchio. They had a well-earned reputation for artistic boldness.
Not since antiquity had classical subjects, the Labors of Hercules, been
treated on such a colossal scale – one much grander than most religious
pictures of the period. The Pollaiuoli’s large trio of canvasses in the
Medici Palace, with their stunning male nudes, must have had a public
5. First Works in Florence and the Artistic Milieu 35
Figure 5.
Workshop of Andrea del
Verrocchio (including
Leonardo da Vinci),
Tobias and the Angel,
c. 1472–73, oil on panel,
London, National
Gallery.
C National
Gallery, London/Art
Resource, NY.
impact akin to that of the 1819 Paris unveiling of Theodore Gericault’s

painting the Raft of the Medusa, in which a sensational, contemporary
event was rendered on a monumental scale previously reserved for
high-minded, history paintings.
Leonardo furtively cast an eye on the Pollaiuoli’s heroic productions
throughout his first period in Florence and, on occasion, discreetly
borrowed from “the competition” for some of his major compositions.
The workshop of the brothers Pollaiuolo (so nicknamed because their
father was a poultry seller) was centrally located on via Vacchereccia,
opposite the Palazzo della Signoria, and therefore a convenient stop
for Leonardo, whose father lived nearby, and for other curious artists
from Verrocchio’s shop. Probably in direct response to the famous
Figure 6. engraving of a Battle of Nudes (c. 1471–73) by his rivals, Verrocchio

Leonardo da Vinci,
View of the Arno created his own ostentatious, “display” drawing of the subject, long
Valley, 1473, pen and lost. However, he never managed, in most minds, to pose a serious
ink, Florence, Uffizi,
Gabinetto Disegni e challenge to Pollaiuolo preeminence in the mastery of the unclothed
Stampe. Scala/Ministero male figure.
per i Beni e le Attività
culturali/Art Resource, Possibly in the same year that he assisted with the Tobias, Leonardo
NY. rendered his earliest known, dated drawing – not surprisingly, a land-
scape – presumably made on the spot (fig. 6). The vibrant sketch
captures, with familiarity, a view of the Arno River valley with the
town of Montalbano, northwest of Florence near Vinci, in the left
distance. The sheet is inscribed in his usual left-handed, backward
manner, “[feast] of Holy Mary of the Snow, day of August the 5th,
1473,” in reference to the anniversary of a miraculous snowfall, and
to a shrine in the area that commemorated it. His pen enlivens as it
records, evoking not only a spectacular, somewhat exaggerated topog-
raphy of breathtaking chasms and infinite plains but also the natural
forces of wind, heat, and geological erosion. It is clear that Leonardo,
still in his early twenties, had already spent considerable time contem-
plating the processes of geological formation and the cycling of water.
5. First Works in Florence and the Artistic Milieu 37
He meticulously differentiates the layers of stratified rock that com-

prise the cliff’s face and traces or implies the flow of water from hilltop,
down waterfall, to valley stream, to town and verdant, saturated fields.
Whether the artist was able to translate his dramatic landscape into
paint and insert it into the background of one of the Verrocchio shop
pictures, the likely purpose of the study, cannot be determined; the
view does not reappear in any of Verrocchio’s or Leonardo’s extant
paintings. He may well have been following the lead of Piero Pol-
laiuolo, perhaps the first Florentine painter to include in his pictures
recognizable views of the Arno valley below the city, as in his Annunci-
ation of c. 1470, now in Berlin. Whatever its intended use, Leonardo’s
drawing is especially interesting in that it reveals how, even in his
youth and when making a dated “record,” he tended to idealize,
almost automatically, the subject before him.
6.Early Pursuits in Engineering –
Hydraulics and the Movement of Water
P erhaps in the early 1470s, and certainly by the end of

the decade, Leonardo became very interested in the move-
ment of water through man-made, technical means. Vasari states that
Leonardo, when “still a youth,” was the first to suggest reducing the
unpredictable river Arno to a navigable canal from Pisa to Florence.
The earliest pages (c. 1478–80) of Leonardo’s Codice Atlantico are
covered with devices for raising large quantities of water or directing
its flow. Some sheets credibly illustrate systems of weirs and locks on
canals; others have studies of contraptions with gears, weights, and
hydraulic cylinders, such as the so-called Archimedes’ screw, based on
the ancient Greek mathematician’s famous invention, which suppos-
edly employed a large revolving spiral to pull water upward (fig. 7).
Although Leonardo’s writings indicate that he sometimes consulted
treatises on water in Lorenzo the Magnificent’s possession, the latter
seems not to have kept in his library any books by Archimedes or
Heron of Alexandria, the two standard, classical sources on hydrostat-
ics and pneumatics. However, Leonardo probably saw a copy of the
Italian humanist Roberto Valturio’s De re militari (1472), an anthol-
ogy of ancient military science, which illustrated the hydroscrew and
other devices for the conveyance of water. The artist would eventually
obtain his own version of this text.
Leonardo may have received important early encouragement in
his engineering interests from the multitalented Francesco di Giorgio
Martini, a Sienese painter, manuscript illuminator, sculptor, architect,
and military engineer. In 1472, Martini’s appointment as Siena’s operaio
dei bottini, that is, civil engineer for (water) conduits, was terminated,
and he was freer to travel and to pursue his career as a painter. Circum-
stantial evidence indicates that he probably spent extended periods in
39
Florence between 1472 and 1474. Rather tentative in style and exe-
cution, his pictures from around (and after) that time show the strong
influence of the progressive, Florentine artists Alesso Baldovinetti,
Botticelli, Lippi, and, especially, Verrocchio – Martini’s attempts to
give his provincial works a veneer of modernity. His Coronation of the
Virgin, painted around 1472–74 (now at the Pinacoteca Nazionale,
Siena), owes much to Verrocchio, and some of his sculptures from
that time have been mistakenly attributed to either Verrocchio or
the young Leonardo. More highly regarded for his designs for mar-
itime projects and for military machines and fortifications, Martini
would have been able to offer to the twenty- or twenty-one-year-
old Leonardo instruction in large-scale engineering projects – and a
professional role model – that Verrocchio could not. His machine
drawings of the 1470s represent many of the same sorts of devices that
the young Leonardo would try to design: hoists, pumps, hydraulic
lifts, and mechanical maritime structures.
After his time in Florence, the Sienese inventor may have inter-
mittently kept in touch with Leonardo for a number of years, because
his many projects kept him traveling constantly, occasionally through
Tuscany. One should also bear in mind that, during those periods that
he was based in his native Siena, he could journey to Florence in a
day (or Leonardo to Siena), from dawn to dusk, on a good horse.
Eventually, he and the young man from Vinci would have recon-
nected in Milan, after Leonardo moved there; and we know that,
in 1490, the two men were together in the nearby town of Pavia,
advising on structural matters concerning the cathedral. They agreed
on many architectural principles, advocating that the ideal church
design should have a central plan (that is, entirely symmetrical with
longitudinal [nave and choir] and latitudinal [transept] structures of
equal length), and they shared a strong Aristotelian bias for “organic”
proportions, derived from natural forms.
At some point, Leonardo came to possess some of Martini’s impor-
tant manuscripts on architecture and engineering. These manuals were
of immense value to him, because, over the course of his career,
he would support himself more through defense and public-works
projects than through his artwork. Leonardo’s own, eloquent mechan-
ical illustrations were indebted to Martini’s, which offered examples
of exploded or cutaway views and depicted how machinery moved
and operated in three-dimensional space. These were immediately
6. Early Pursuits in Engineering – Hydraulics and the Movement of Water 41
comprehensible and credible images for which written commentary Figure 7.

Leonardo da Vinci,
was almost unnecessary. Devices for Raising Water
The young Leonardo concerned himself not only with macro- (including the Archimedes’
Screw) and Other Studies,
engineering schemes, with how the flow of water could be diverted, c. 1480, pen and ink,
controlled, and its power harnessed, but also with how people could Milan, Biblioteca
Ambrosiana, Codice
travel over and under it. He was probably familiar with Lorenzo de’ Atlantico (1069r).
Medici’s copy of Flavius Vegetius Renatus’ De re militari (On Mat- Art Resource, NY.
ters Military), a fourth-century treatise that emphasized the need for

Roman soldiers to know how to swim. On one sheet (fig. 8), the
artist drew, in succession at upper left, prototypes for a snorkel with a
long breathing hose (perhaps for clandestine military activities), swim-
ming goggles (which Leonardo says were used, along with breathing
tubes, by pearl fishers in the Indian Ocean), and water “shoes” –
small, rounded boards attached to the feet – and water-shoe poles.
The obvious impracticality of this last invention leads one to suspect
that it was based solely on imagination and not experimentation.
Like so many of Leonardo’s inventions, the water-walkers and poles
could function only on paper; he seems often to have appreciated an
idea or theory for its beauty, its delightfulness, without concern for
its efficacy or validity. However, another aquatic design he produced

at that time, for a lightweight, portable bridge for military excursions,
would appear to operate in the real world. Later, he would develop and
advocate the breathing tube as a built-in component of a plausible,
flotation outfit, a lifesaving device for soldiers and other shipwreck
victims:
it is necessary to have a coat made of leather with a double

hem over the breast which is the width of a finger, and
double also from the girdle to the knee, and let the leather
of which it is made be quite air-tight. And when you are
obliged to jump into the sea, blow out the lappets of the
coat through the hems of the breast, and then jump into
the sea. And let yourself be carried by the waves, if there is
no shore near at hand and you do not know the sea. And
always keep in your mouth the end of the tube through
which the air passes into the garment; and if once or twice
it should become necessary for you to take a breath when
the foam prevents you, draw it through the mouth of the
tube from the air within the coat.
When Leonardo investigated a natural phenomenon, such as a

violent, tossing wave or an optical illusion, he did so with relentless
diligence. Often, his inquiry was prompted by an observation that
he found particularly intriguing or inexplicable. He wondered, as we
might today when looking into the rearview mirror of an automobile,
“why something seen in a mirror appears smaller than it [really] is?”
Then, he would ask, “what sort of a mirror would show the thing
exactly the right size?” On another day, he might ponder why “a dead
woman floats face downward in the water, and a man the opposite
way [?]” When faced with such conundrums, his immediate response
was to try to make comparisons with other natural phenomena he had
observed and to draw analogies, be it the reflection of the moon in a
pond or the drifting orientations of inanimate objects on a river.
Given time and opportunity, he would consult “authorities” –
Aristotle, Euclid, or Pliny – to see whether they provided answers, in
the scant books and manuscripts available to him through the Medici,
friends, or even the kindness of bibliophile strangers, such as those sec-
ondhand acquaintances he describes as “the nephew of Gian Angelo
the painter [who has] a book about water that belonged to his father”
and “the brother of Sant’ Agosta in Rome – who lives in Sardinia.”
In the end, even if he could not completely comprehend or explain Figure 8.

Leonardo da Vinci,
what he saw, he at least attempted to address it in practical terms; he Devices for a Diver,
would try to invent a nondistorting mirror or create an apparatus to for Walking on Water,
and Various Studies
prevent drowning. This is not to say that Leonardo would not permit for Machines, c. 1480,
himself, on occasion, to indulge in some “useless” abstract thought or pen and ink, Milan,
theory, as in his brain-twisting and nihilistic little romp: Codice Atlantico (26r).
Veneranda Biblioteca
Among the greatest things that are found among us, the Ambrosiana.
existence of Nothing is the greatest of all. This dwells in

time, and stretches its limbs into the past and the future,
and with these takes to itself all works that are past and
those that are to come, both of nature and of the animals,
and possesses nothing of the individual present. It does,
however, extend to the essence of anything.
Leonardo’s tendency, seen already in his View of the Arno, to

idealize or to “correct,” to bring what he observed into accord
with preconceived notions or theory, profoundly affected almost
every project and investigation he undertook throughout his life.
Figure 9.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Cross-Section of a Man’s
Head, Showing Three
Chambers for Reception,
Processing, and Storage
(Memory) of Sensory
Impressions, c. 1493–95,
(12603r). The Royal
Collection C 2010
Her Majesty Queen

Elizabeth II.
Hyperinquisitive as he was, he was never a scientist in the mod-

ern sense – methodically setting up controlled trials and accurately
measuring and recording the results, a modus operandi developed in
the late seventeenth century. His fascination with water had much to
do with the fact that he held the ancient (and contemporary) view
that it was one of the four basic elements, along with air, earth, and
fire and constituted the most vital fluid of what he described, in his
famous personification, as the “Body of the Earth.”
Like all of us, when confronted with evidence that contradicted
theory, he tended to cling to the latter, going so far as to disbelieve –
and reconfigure in his drawings – what was placed directly before his
eyes. For example, he had the opportunity to examine closely a human
brain (and those of many animals), and yet, when he drew the organ
in cross-section, he delineated an imaginative, three-chambered cog-
nitive system (fig. 9), based on the capricious speculations of medieval
scholars interpreting the ancient writings of Aristotle, particularly his

treatise On the Soul (De anima). To put it another way, Leonardo acted
as if what he observed in many instances – if it departed from accepted
notions – constituted an anomaly. In his startling, cross-section view of
a couple copulating (Windsor Castle, Royal Library), Leonardo traced
the origin of the sperm, back through a quirky, reproductive plumb-
ing system, not to the testicles, but, again following Aristotle (and
Hippocrates), to the spinal column and ultimately to the base of the
brain. The artist inventively drew a long duct that directly connected
penis to spine. Leonardo would have known not only Aristotle’s faulty
biological scheme but also Diogenes Laertius’ memorable aphorism,
“semen is a drop of the brain.” Lorenzo de’ Medici had a copy of
the Greek biographer’s third-century Lives of the Philosophers translated
into the vernacular. Similarly, because of his generally mechanistic
approach, when Leonardo later made a detailed study of the human
heart, during a dissection, he could not resist adjusting his illustration
slightly, regularizing the geometry, to bring it into conformity with
ideal, mathematical, and engineering principles.
7.The Bust of a Warrior and
Leonardo’s Creative Method
T he young painter’s consuming interest in nature and

zoomorphic forms manifested itself in another drawing from
the same period as the View of the Arno, one dependent on Verroc-
chio workshop productions – his fearsome Bust of a Warrior in Profile
(fig. 10), incongruously scratched in the delicate medium of met-
alpoint. This study, preserved in the British Museum, is based on
Verrocchio’s lost, fanciful profile relief of the ancient Persian king,
Darius, crudely reproduced in surviving glazed terracotta facsimiles.
Lorenzo de’ Medici sent the original metal sculpture, along with a
similar portrait of Alexander the Great, to King Matthias Corvinus
of Hungary as a gift – from whose possession it disappeared with-
out a trace (likely destroyed in the second or third decade of the
sixteenth century, during the Turkish invasion and occupation). Ver-
rocchio probably loosely modeled his reliefs on antique cameos in
Lorenzo’s collection, such as the lost profile Bust of Athena (known
from documents and a reproductive illustration of 1483), in which the
Greek goddess wore comparable, fantastic armor. Lorenzo might have
pointed out this pedigree-by-association in an accompanying letter to
Corvinus.
If those contemporary clay copies that have come down to us retain
the basic features of Verrocchio’s lost Darius (fig. 11), then we may
surmise that Leonardo, again, invigorated and elaborated on what
he saw. On the chest of Leonardo’s warrior, a growling lion’s head
has been altered to look up, deferentially, to the fiercer visage of the
soldier. Very different from the aquiline profile of a classical hero (as
seen in the terracottas), the brutish face of the sketch, one suspects,
either pays homage to a tough, local bravo, a soldier of fortune, or
represents some other, thuggish-looking acquaintance of Leonardo.
47
Figure 10.
Leonardo da Vinci, Bust
of a Warrior in Profile,
c. 1473–74, metal-
point, London, British
Museum, Department
of Prints and Drawings.
C The Trustees of the
British Museum/Art
Resource, NY.
Figure 11.
After Andrea del
Verrocchio, Darius,
mid-1470s?, glazed
terracotta, Lisbon,
Museu Nacional de Arte
Antiga. Courtesy of the
Museu Nacional de Arte
Antiga.
7. The Bust of a Warrior and Leonardo’s Creative Method 49
Figure 12.
of a Man, c. 1480–82,
red chalk, Windsor
(12502). The Royal
Collection C 2010
Her Majesty Queen

Elizabeth II.
Sometimes called a “nutcracker man,” in reference to the powerful jaw

and prominent nose and chin that almost meet (strongly caricatured
in certain drawings), the head clearly belonged to a real person.
Indeed, the man appears to me to be the same intimidating model,
subsequently drawn full-face with comparable horizontal furrows
above the bridge of his nose and a similar lion decoration on his shoul-
der, that Leonardo employed frequently in the early 1480s and after he
returned to Florence from Milan in 1500 (fig. 12). The artist seems to
have taken perverse pleasure in recording, in a series of strictly frontal
and profile “mug shots,” the effects of aging, particularly the man’s
increasingly sagging features and thinning hair (fig. 13). A drawing in
the Louvre (fig. 14) appears to show him at an advanced age, at least
in his seventies; although his cheeks have sunken and his neck thinned
and fallen in folds, he can still be recognized by his distinctive, cleft
and bulbous nose, downturned mouth, and piercing eyes. Leonardo
Figure 13.
of a Man, c. 1502, red
chalk, Windsor Castle,
Royal Library (12503).
The Royal Collection
C 2010 Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth II.
perhaps made this last, parting study of the man in 1515, when the
artist, then based in Rome, accompanied his employer Giuliano de’
Medici (son of Lorenzo the Magnificent and brother of Pope Leo X)
to Florence as part of a papal entourage.
On one early, informal, portrait drawing of the same man (fig. 15)
by a Verrocchio assistant (mixed in with Leonardo head studies at
Windsor Castle), there is an inscription identifying him as an oth-
erwise obscure Spaniard – Tomás Valdéz or Valdés from Salamanca
(scrawled, Tomaso valdéz/ s.[ign]or salaman[ca]). He may have been
chosen as a military model not only for his fierce looks, but also
because, in late-fifteenth-century Europe, the prowess of the unde-
feated Spanish infantry and artillery was legendary, partly because of
their sheer numbers. By 1475, the kingdom of Castile-Aragon had
an army twice as large as that of any other region or country. Given
the close correspondence of his features to those of Verrocchio’s sit-
ter for his equestrian monument to the deceased, mercenary general
Figure 14.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Head of an Old Man,
c. 1515?, red chalk,
Paris, Louvre (2249).
Réunion des Musées
Nationaux/Art
Resource, NY.
Bartolomeo Colleoni (designed c. 1480–88), whose own face was not

used for that idealized sculpture, one wonders if the older master hired
the same rugged model.
In addition to reworking (or replacing) the face of Verrocchio’s
Darius, Leonardo has transformed the bird’s wing on the original hel-
met into that of a dragon – the dragon’s wing, like the lion’s head,
deriving from similar features on the Rossellino/Verrocchio lavamano.
He has also given the ornate acanthus and tendrils a quality of writhing,
tenacious growth. Leonardo would come to make a habit of rethink-
ing traditional types and symbols – looking at the people who sur-
rounded him, finding those who best represented a particular charac-
teristic, and then, in his art, reinforcing that telling physiognomy or
Figure 15.
Workshop of Verroc-
chio, Portrait of Tomás
Valdéz, c. 1473–75,
(12484). The Royal
Collection C 2010
Her Majesty Queen

Elizabeth II.
personality with inventive attributes or props. Vasari tells of how the

artist would sometimes stalk a person with an interesting face for an
entire day, just to make good sketches of their features from differ-
ent angles. Florence, in the fifteenth century, was not the international
commercial center that Venice was, and so Leonardo had to hunt assid-
uously among the homogeneity of facial types he found there. Given
his own origins, the coarse visages of country folk in town, captured
in the paintings of Andrea Castagno, would not have intrigued him.
However, he must have regarded as interesting models those from
foreign lands – not just Spain, but North Africa, the Middle East,
and Eastern Europe, from which many of the local slaves came. He
could quickly study the exotic faces of those non-Christian Algerians,
Circassians, Russians, Tartars, and Turks when they emerged occa-
sionally and briefly from patrician households.
Leonardo suggested an aide-mémoire for times when unwitting
models had escaped: “when you [have to] draw a face from memory
take with you a little book wherein you have [already] noted down
similar features, and when you have glanced at the face of a person
you wish to portray, look then at the [facial] parts [in the book], which
nose or mouth is like his, and make a little mark to recognize it, and
then later, at home, put it together.” Despite this typological approach,
Leonardo seems not to have adhered to the strict orthodoxy of the
Renaissance physiognomists, who believed that each individual has
facial traits associated with one of the four temperaments or personality

types – sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic – supposedly
determined by the relative proportions of the four humors or fluids
(blood, phlegm, white bile, and black bile) in the body. According
to that classification system, a choleric person, for example, would
normally have a round face, prominent forehead and eyebrows, and
deep-set eyes, among other attributes. Eschewing such generalities,
Leonardo preferred to examine a face more carefully, watching the
changing features and expressions for the individual temperament and
for a hint of the discreet soul. In this approach, he aligned himself
with Alberti, who, in Della famiglia, had expressed doubts about the
four-humor theory, suggesting that a person’s disposition is largely a
product of environment – highly responsive to parental teaching and
conditioned by experience and habit.
8. Early Participation in
the Medici Court
I n the winter of 1474–75, probably between december and

January, Leonardo assisted Verrocchio with the design of a
standard for a magnificent joust sponsored by Giuliano de’ Medici,
Lorenzo’s tall and athletic younger brother (fig. 16). Ostensibly, the
event celebrated a defensive treaty negotiated between Florence,
Venice, and Milan – reconfirming their nonaggression pact of 1454–
55. However, such jousts (mock duels on horseback), not to be con-
fused with tournaments (mock wars on horseback), took place annu-
ally in Florence, as a regular part of carnival and as a rite of passage
for aristocratic and prominent young men, whose participation sig-
naled that they had reached the qualifying age for public office. Held
on 29 January 1475, Giuliano’s joust, meant to rival one alla franciosa
organized by Lorenzo in 1469, had all the pageantry and chivalric
splendor of a medieval French romance – part of a long, anachronistic
tradition of “knight errantry” in Florence. Having designed a standard
for Lorenzo’s contest, Verrocchio knew exactly what was required for
Giulio’s.
Now preserved in the Uffizi, the standard drawing was apparently
begun by Verrocchio, who established the positions of the figures in
black chalk, and finished by Leonardo, who reinforced the master’s
lines with pen and ink and then added plants at left, shading them
with his distinctive left-handed, backward-slanting, hatching. Fitted
into the long, triangular format of a standard, the two figures represent
the winged, love god Cupid (or Amor), and a young woman, either
a terrestrial Venus or a maiden nymph, in an untenable, recumbent
posture; when Leonardo took over the execution of the drawing, he
seems to have misinterpreted the placement of the large rock, which
55
likely was intended to support her (proper) right arm. Verrocchio

appears to have reused the pose he had invented for a terracotta Sleeping
Youth (now in Berlin).
The mythological subject was almost certainly prescribed by one
of the Florentine Neoplatonists, possibly Marsilio Ficino, the self-
appointed leader of the group, who advanced the notion of an Earthly
Venus or Aphrodite (as she was called by the Greeks) – a mundane
goddess of love. In his arcane Commentary on Plato’s Symposium of
1469, the celibate Ficino expanded on the ancient Greek philosopher’s
distinctions between divine love and earthly love, for which he had
posited two Venuses, a nude goddess, who rules over matters pertaining
to the divine and heaven, and a clothed, earthly or “natural” deity,
who represents both the beauty found in the material world and the
procreative principle. Human love and desire, subthemes of Giuliano’s
joust, fall within the realm of visible, terrestrial beauty and, therefore,
the domain of the Natural Venus (amor vulgaris).
On the other hand, the glamorous lady in the standard drawing
could be a Sleeping Nymph, a leitmotif for many contemporary writ-
ers, such as the Medici courtier Luca Pulci. His epic, pastoral poem,
Il driadeo d’amore (The Wood Nymph of Love), written between 1464
and 1465, is laden with both dozing and frolicking ninfe. Among those
verses (XXXVIII–L), Pulci describes at length a romantic encounter
between Cupid and a sleeping nymph named Pietra, or “Rock,” who
“loved with a perfect [that is, chaste Platonic] love.” Thus, the stone
in the Verrocchio drawing, more prominent before Leonardo’s alter-
ations, may have been intended as an identifying attribute. Leonardo,
at some point, came to own a copy of Pulci’s poem.
Whoever she is, the comely woman in the drawing appears to
be lightly daydreaming, after having gathered a bouquet of flowers,
which she cradles with left hand in the folds of her dress – significantly,
close to her abdomen. Cupid does not prepare to pierce her with one
of his arrows, as is his habit, but gently tries to wake her from her
reverie, touching her heart, so that he may lead her, with a prominent
spear (cum jousting lance, an uncharacteristic weapon for him), into
romantic adventure, suggested by the lush and fertile vegetation at left.
The artists have thus combined and cast themes of medieval chivalry –
knightly and amorous quest – in ancient Greek terms: the armed,
antique god of love stirs the desires of an unsuspecting maiden nymph
or Earthly Venus, dressed in a classically inspired gown.
8. Early Participation in the Medici Court 57
The particular shape of the standard was derived, ultimately, from Figure 16.
Andrea del Verrocchio
the labarum or flag of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, whose and Leonardo da Vinci,
pennant was well known from the carved medallions on his triumphal Study for a Joust Standard
for Giuliano de’ Medici,
arch in Rome. Botticelli provided Giuliano with a similar banner (also 1474–75, pen and
lost), featuring the goddess Pallas Athena. Grasping a lance and the ink over black chalk,
Florence, Uffizi,
shield of Medusa, she stood in a white gown before a flowery meadow, Gabinetto Disegni e
with a restrained Cupid nearby, bound by golden cords. All of this we Stampe. Art Resource.
learn from a poem by Poliziano, which also notes that Pallas Athena
was shown trampling the flames of love before they could kindle the
olive branches at her feet, presumably a reference to her unassailable
purity. Known only to the poet and the patron, the full meaning of
Botticelli’s standard, like Verrocchio’s, was intentionally made elusive,
poetic secrets for Giuliano to savor.
Handsome as they were, the standards must have been almost
lost among the fancy costumes, some encrusted with twenty pounds
of pearls and fitted with billowing capes, damascened armor, and
caparisoned horses in the Piazza Santa Croce, and in the hoopla of
the twenty-two-year-old Giuliano’s predetermined victory, for which
he was awarded an ornate helmet designed by Verrocchio. He rode
triumphantly at the end of a long procession of gallant cavalrymen
and footmen, as a sharp fanfare of horns embroidered the air. The
more important prize eluded him, however; he could only watch
from a distance as the woman he desired, Simonetta Cattaneo, the

consumptive, dying young wife of Marco Vespucci, was honored in
the festivities as the “Queen of Beauty.” Hopelessly unattainable, she
was the perfect, chivalric object of unrequited love. Verrocchio and
Leonardo, of insufficient social stature to partake in the ceremonies,
could only have observed the ritualized, poignant drama from the
sidelines. Despite its contrivance, this play of manners, performed long
before opera, would have just as effectively brought the spectators to
tears.
Thus, like Lorenzo’s joust of 1469, held in honor of his bride-to-
be Clarice Orsini, Giuliano’s event was mainly a pretext for courtship
and magnificent self-indulgence. So that there would be no con-
fusion about the former motive, Botticelli’s standard was inscribed
in gold Gothic letters with the French motto la sans par, “the lady
without peer,” in reference to Simonetta, and the figure of Pallas
Athena markedly resembled her. A couple of years before, in 1473,
with similarly amorous intentions, a certain young Florentine named
Bartolomeo Benci, accompanied by a retinue of eight colleagues and
thirty attendants, had serenaded his lady, Marietta, and then had orga-
nized a joust beneath her balcony (as she pretended to be besieged in a
castle). His associates later provided the same entertainments for their
girlfriends, who were probably impressed as well by the car their min-
ions led. This represented the Triumph of Love, a theme borrowed
from Petrarch, and featured mechanical, flying cupids and a bleed-
ing heart surrounded by flames. Although Giuliano’s own extravagant
production did not – could not – win him the spectrally beautiful
Simonetta, he lived long enough to see his mistress, Fioretta Gorini,
bear him a healthy son, Giulio, the future Pope Clement VII.
9. Leonardo’s Personality and Place
in Florentine Society
L eonardo’s musings about romance, and about human

qualities, behavior, and failings, appear to have led to his un-
usual drawing of Phyllis Astride Aristotle (c. 1475–78), a scene of such
awkward folly that it anticipates the antiheroics of Shakespeare and
Rembrandt (fig. 17). The specific impetus for the study was probably
either a contemporary Florentine engraving or one of many circulat-
ing Northern European prints of the subject. According to legend,
the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, of steely mind but evidently
weak knees, allowed his beautiful young mistress, Phyllis, to ride on
his back in exchange for her favors.
In a cramped sketch of ungainly postures and forced perspective
(the furniture recedes too rapidly in space), Leonardo gently pokes
fun at his supreme intellectual mentor, who, on all fours, looks back
imploringly and shamefully at his dominatrix, in the general direction
of the bed that awaits them. For the good-humored Leonardo the
contrast between the realms of the intellect and the flesh made for fine
parody – a telling counterpoint to Michelangelo’s self-flaying paintings
and poems devoted to related themes of base carnality. Leonardo’s
bemused attitude toward heterosexual conduct is apparent in a remark
he later jotted in one of his notebooks: “the act of procreation and
everything that has any relation to it is so disgusting that human
beings would soon die out if there were no pretty faces and sensuous
dispositions.”
Coincidentally, some of Leonardo’s own sexual peccadilloes were
revealed in the same period in which he sketched the compromised
Aristotle. In 1476, while still employed in Verrocchio’s shop, Leonardo
and three of his colleagues were accused, anonymously, of commit-
ting sodomy with a certain seventeen-year-old youth named Jacopo
59
Saltarelli, an obliging apprentice in a goldsmith’s shop. If the alleged

acts had not been consensual, the Verrocchio gang would have been
indicted for a corporal or capital offense. Such charges are credible,
given the generally boisterous and promiscuous atmosphere of large
ateliers at that time and what we know of Leonardo’s later erotic
proclivities.
Homosexuality was regarded as an activity rather than an identity in
the Renaissance and for centuries thereafter, and the sexual preference
of many was, to say the least, fluid. Leonardo, however, appears to
have been fairly fixed in his desires; the relationship he later formed
with a young protégé, Gian Giacomo Caprotti, called Salai, endured
for decades. In any event, he and his coworkers seem not to have
suffered dire consequences for their behavior. Apparently, there was
no legal follow-up to the denunciations of the Verrocchio shop hands,
and, at that time, much greater dishonor fell on the person – probably
Saltarelli – who assumed the more passive role in such sexual escapades.
Leonardo remained in Verrocchio’s équipe and continued his role of
favored collaborator for at least another two years.
One suspects that Leonardo’s disarming charm, as much as his
artistic talents, preserved his job and earned him the position of infor-
mal ringleader of the shop. Contemporary biographers say that he was
charismatic, with the graceful, unassuming manner of one to whom
all things come naturally and easily. His colleagues idolized him for
his leonine beauty, athletic physique and prowess, musical talents (he
sang and played the lira da braccio or “arm lyre”), and wit; and he seems
to have had no trouble in attracting younger, male companions. We
know that during his first period in Florence, he had a close rela-
tionship with a gentleman named Fioravante di Domenico, whom
Leonardo described in 1478 as his “most cherished” friend.
Word of his beauty and romantic preferences has caused a few
scholars to speculate that Leonardo may have had an intimate attach-
ment to Verrocchio, a lifelong bachelor. Some have further theorized
that the master modeled the lovely face of his bronze adolescent David
(created in the mid-1460s and now in the Bargello Museum, Florence)
on that of his attractive assistant. The exact nature of the two men’s
relationship will likely remain forever unknown. One should not draw
any conclusions from the fact that Leonardo resided for a period in
Verrocchio’s house because, as noted earlier, such master–assistant liv-
ing arrangements were not only common but typical. There is not,
9. Leonardo’s Personality and Place in Florentine Society 61
to my mind, an especially close correspondence between the David’s Figure 17.

Leonardo da Vinci,
profile and Leonardo’s, recorded in a red-chalk drawing at a more Aristotle and Phyllis,
advanced stage of life (fig. 18). Verrocchio had many suitable young c. 1475–78, pen and
ink on blue paper,
models from which to choose. Hamburg, Kunsthalle.
That profile study of Leonardo (now in the Royal Library, Windsor Bildarchiv Preussis-
cher Kulturbesitz/Art
Castle), probably created by his Milanese follower Francesco Melzi, Resource, NY.
reveals how distinguished the master appeared in full maturity, with
refined, almost delicate, features and well-groomed beard. Leonardo
was no less fastidious in dress and was, perhaps, a little vain. We
learn that he frequently wore a dashing, rose-colored tunic, cut to
the knee, although longer garments were then in vogue. Although
immodestly revealing his strong, well-turned limbs, the shorter dress,
more significantly, was associated with princely courts. Leonardo was
almost certainly familiar with Diogenes Laertius’ then well-known
description of Aristotle, in the Lives of the Philosophers, as someone
who “indulged in very conspicuous dress” and who “used to groom
his hair carefully.” From the artist’s “shopping lists,” we know that he
kept his companion Salai nattily dressed as well – in silver cloth with
green velvet trim.
Figure 18.
Francesco Melzi (?),
Profile Portrait of Leonardo
da Vinci, c. 1510–12?,
red chalk, Windsor
(12726). The Royal
Collection C 2010
Her Majesty Queen

Elizabeth II.
Leonardo envisioned the genteel “ideal life” of a painter thus: “the

painter sits in front of his work at perfect ease. He is well dressed and
wields a very light brush dipped in delicate color. He adorns himself
with the clothes that he fancies; his home is clean and filled with
delightful pictures.” Socially disadvantaged by the illegitimacy and
geography of his birth, Leonardo would have dressed impeccably and
“fashion-forward” not only to fit into court life but also to compensate
for his plebeian background. In a general way, the stressed tidiness –
one could almost say “daintiness” – of his archetypal painter was meant
to play down the messy, physical aspects of his vocation, to present the
artist less as a craftsman in the mechanical arts (ars mechanica), a laborer
who works with his hands, and more as a thinker-designer, engaged in
the liberal arts (ars liberalis). The disheveled fellow with unruly hair and
Figure 19.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Portrait of an Old Man, c.
1495–1505?, red chalk,
Turin, Biblioteca Reale
(15571). Alinari/Art
Resource, NY.
large, coarse features portrayed in the famous, presumed Self-Portrait

in Turin (fig. 19) and in other Leonardo drawings is obviously another
man.
Leonardo’s jocular, often self-deprecating attitude made it virtually
impossible for those he surpassed, which was practically everyone, to
envy or begrudge him. He seems to have heeded Aristotle’s advice
that “ironic persons who depreciate their own merits give an impres-
sion of superior refinement.” No doubt, such charm also allowed the
artist to dodge deadlines and responsibilities and, time and time again,
escape stern reproach. A tireless conjurer of riddles and, as we shall see,
chronic punster, Leonardo could have diffused almost any difficult sit-
uation with a clever remark or joke. Examples of his jests, concerning
painting and reincarnation, can be found in his manuscripts:
A painter was asked why he had made his children so

ugly, when his painted figures, which were dead things
[inanimate], he had made so beautiful. His reply was that
he made his pictures by day and his children at night.
A man wishing to prove on the authority of [the ancient

Greek philosopher] Pythagoras that he had been in the
world on a former occasion, and another not allowing him
to conclude his argument, the first man said to the second:
“And as proof that I was here on a former occasion, I
remember that you were a miller.” The other, who felt
provoked by his words, agreed that it was true, for he
said he remembered the speaker had been the ass that had
carried flour for him.
On other pages, Leonardo offers tongue-in-cheek, apocalyptic

“prophecies” (profetie) of what were, actually, ordinary situations:
O cities of the sea, I behold in your citizens, women as well

as men, tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms
and legs by folk who will have no understanding of our
speech; and you will only be able to give vent to your grief
and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints,
and sighs, and lamentation one to another; for those who
bind you will not have understanding of your speech nor
will you understand them.
Leonardo refers, in this riddle, to infants wrapped in swaddling bands.
The high walls of mighty cities shall be seen inverted, in

their trenches
that is, the city walls are reflected in surrounding moats.

He seems to have possessed, in his small library, a copy of the Liber
Facetiarum, or Book of Jests (1451), by the Tuscan humanist Poggio
Bracciolini, which contained hundreds of funny anecdotes, puns, and
jokes, many of them off-color, and some that we, today, would term
“bathroom humor” – episodes of gentlefolk and clerics engaging in
various sexual acts or irreverently passing wind. Like those of Poggio

(and Lorenzo the Magnificent), Leonardo’s jokes could occasionally
be lewd:
a woman crossing a treacherous and muddy place lifts up

her dress both in front and in back. Therefore, as she
touches both anus and vagina, she tells the truth three
times when she says “This is a difficult passage.”
Overinterpreted and overblown by Sigmund Freud, Leonardo’s

famous, reputed, youthful dream, in which a kite, a kind of hawk
(Freud called it a “vulture”), repeatedly thrust its tail into his mouth,
also may have been no more than a crude, private joke on the artist’s
part. Psychoanalysts now realize that a memory recounted from child-
hood is likely to be a legend. A claim to remember a childhood dream,
made by a very complex adult, would probably be a manipulation, or
even a perverse jest, rather than a straight story. Memories are altered
ineluctably each time they are recalled. The remnants of an early
dream (if it actually occurred) would have been wholly transformed
over the years.
Written on a sheet devoted to the aerodynamics of birds (specifi-
cally, their descent), the strange remark, alternatively, may have been
a not-so-veiled, hostile reference to his father, because, according to
the Fior di virtù and Leonardo’s own rough draft for a bestiary, the
kite brutally attacks its own children out of envy and “keeps them
without food.” It would be easy, but irresponsible, for us to speculate
further on Leonardo’s relationship with his father; given the circum-
stances of the artist’s birth, his sexual activities, and, as we shall see,
his erratic work habits, there was certainly potential for familial con-
flict – potential, yet no clear evidence of it. That said, readings of the
purported dream as “homosexual fantasy” (Freud) or, more recently,
“homosexual anxiety” should also be considered with skepticism.
10.Important Productions and
Collaborations in the Verrocchio Shop
P robably in those free-spirited days as a member of the

Verrocchio crew, Leonardo drew in metalpoint on blue paper
the elegant, if disturbingly fetching, nude figure of John the Baptist
pointing – the first of his many enigmatic and increasingly androg-
ynous or homoerotic portrayals of the saint (fig. 20). Beyond any
imposition of personal tastes onto his subject, Leonardo, in feminizing
John – and other male saints and angels – probably intended to sug-
gest that in divine beings, genders are combined and transcended. The
refined study may have been Leonardo’s contribution to the design of
an altarpiece called the “Madonna di Piazza,” representing the Virgin
and Child with Saints John and Donato, commissioned by the Medici
around 1475 from Verrocchio’s shop for an oratory chapel in Pistoia
Cathedral (fig. 21). Eventually, another assistant, Lorenzo di Credi, was
entrusted, it seems, with the entire execution of the altarpiece, but he
probably availed himself of Leonardo’s gracile drawing in conceiving
the figure of the Baptist.
By the mid-fifteenth century, the pointing pose of the saint had
become canonical in art; he was also frequently depicted holding or
wearing a banner with the words, Ecce Agnus Dei (Behold the Lamb
of God), his proclamation of Christ’s divinity and sacrificial nature,
reported in the Gospel of John (1:36). However, the Baptist, a patron
saint of Florence, usually appears in art either as a very young boy or
as an unattractively weathered ascetic, grasping a slender reed cross.
Here, Leonardo seems to delight in conveying the sensuous anatomy
of his adolescent model, whose holiness appears questionable and
whose pointing gesture lacks conviction. The painter may have found
justification – and even the idea – for his depiction in Donatello’s
67
Figure 20.
Leonardo da Vinci,
St. John the Baptist, c.
1475–76, silverpoint on
blue prepared paper,
Windsor Castle, Royal
Library (12572). The
Royal Collection C
2010 Her Majesty

Queen Elizabeth II.
marble, pubescent Saint John of the 1440s or, more likely, Benedetto
da Maiano’s sculpture of a lanky, teenaged Baptist (c. 1476–78), either
in progress or recently completed, for the niche over the door of the
Sala dei Gigli in the Palazzo della Signoria. Yet Leonardo’s saint lacks
the youthful awkwardness and innocent piety of those Saint Johns.
Not one to conspire in trend setting, Credi prudently aged the figure
when he translated it into paint.
Although the touch of Leonardo’s brush cannot be discerned in
the Pistoia altarpiece, his participation, perhaps at the same moment,
in the execution of Verrocchio’s beautiful Baptism of Christ (begun
c. 1468–69, resumed and finished c. 1475–76) for the monastic
church of S. Salvi has been well observed and for centuries extolled
(fig. 22). Prone to embellish and mythologize, Vasari related that
Leonardo was responsible for painting the angel in profile at left – a
10. Important Productions and Collaborations in the Verrocchio Shop 69
Figure 21.
Lorenzo di Credi,
Virgin and Child
with Saints John and
Donato, c. 1475–76
oil on panel, Pistoia
Cathedral. Niccolò
Orsi Battaglini/Alinari
Archives, Florence.
figure, the writer gushed, so gloriously rendered and superior that an

embarrassed Verrocchio, who executed the lion’s share of the picture,
decided thereafter to turn his attention exclusively to sculpture. It
is difficult to determine the exact division of labor in the painting,
but Leonardo’s intervention would seem to extend well beyond the
crouching angel to many of the landscape details and to the figure
of Christ. Evidently, the young artist had by this time risen to the
position of full-fledged collaborator. It should be recalled that he had
enjoyed the official status of an established painter since 1472, when
he was admitted to the painter’s professional confraternity.
Leonardo’s involvement is unmistakable in the handling of the
baptismal river’s banks and flowing water, which finds its source in his
familiar, distant mountains and meanders gradually through the entire
landscape, carving its way toward the viewer. This depth-defining
motif may have been inspired by similar features in the backgrounds of
a few paintings by the Pollaiuoli, such as Antonio’s bold Hercules and the
Hydra for the Medici palace and the Shooting of Saint Sebastian (c. 1475;
Figure 22.
Andrea del Verrocchio
and Leonardo da Vinci,
Baptism of Christ, c.
1468–69 and c. 1475–76,
oil on panel, for S.
Salvi, now Florence,
Uffizi. Scala/Ministero
per i Beni e le Attività
culturali/Art Resource,
NY.
fig. 23) by both Antonio and Piero, a picture that Leonardo would have
admired in the Pucci family oratory beside the Florentine church of SS.
Annunziata. Leonardo carried the river idea much further, however,
needing to unify spatially a work created sporadically by two hands
over a period of six years or more. He rendered his more pervasive
body of water with a geological awareness, exaggerating the erosive
effect of the river on the surrounding topography.
With utmost confidence, Leonardo apparently took it upon him-
self as well to create or revise the central figure of the Savior. To
unify the luminosity of the picture, Leonardo painted or repainted,
in oil, Christ’s flesh with soft, gray tonalities that are in keeping with
the shadowy background. In later pictures, Leonardo would much
exaggerate this sooty, gray quality, which tends to blur the edges of
figures and objects, to obtain an atmospheric effect that would come
10. Important Productions and Collaborations in the Verrocchio Shop 71
Figure 23.
Antonio and Piero del
Pollaiuolo, Shooting of
Saint Sebastian, c. 1475,
oil on panel, London,
National Gallery.

C National Gallery,
London/Art Resource,
NY.
to be called sfumato (“in smoke”), one of his most admired inno-

vations. Yet even here, the vibrancy of this surface treatment works
successfully to meld Christ’s head and torso with the misty back-
ground and surrounding air. Consequently, the figure, which recalls
in its lean muscularity Leonardo’s metalpoint Saint John the Baptist,
contrasts sharply with Verrocchio’s more dryly delineated and rough-
hewn saint. Above them, still more incongruous, an old-fashioned
feature has been added for the conservative, pious monks of S. Salvi:
the disembodied hands of God the Father release the dove of the Holy
Spirit, a detail probably quoted from the mystical Adoration of the Christ
Child that Filippo Lippi painted for Piero de’ Medici’s wife, Lucrezia,
more than a decade earlier.
Since its day, Leonardo’s angel has been admired for the vitality
and complexity of its pose and lustrous “waterfall” of hair. These fea-
tures suggest or heighten the momentary quality of the stance of the
divine figure, waiting like a dutiful altar boy to offer Christ a robe
following baptism. With Saint John’s cross and the rocky outcropping
nearby, the cloth is also intended to invoke Christ’s burial shroud –
perhaps accounting for the particularly solemn and apprehensive
expression of the companion angel. In keeping with Vasari’s story,
that disturbed face has occasionally been read autobiographically as
conveying Verrocchio’s dismay with the comparative excellence of
Leonardo’s shimmering angel. Such an interpretation is highly doubt-
ful, but nevertheless appealing when one examines closely the fresh,
evanescent head of Leonardo’s celestial valet. The painter has indicated
not only the transient sheen of the angel’s hair, but also the watery glint
and transparency of the orbs of its eyes, to which he has deliberately
juxtaposed the spherical crystals on its collar. Leonardo’s proclamation
on talent and maturation, reportedly first said to his math tutor, seems
apt here: “Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.”
11. Leonardo’s Colleagues in
the Workshop
I nitially trained as a goldsmith, the stocky, durable

Verrocchio considered himself a sculptor first and then a painter.
His decisive, midcareer transition from painting to sculpture was prob-
ably a preference and not, as Vasari suggested, a retreat. Certainly, his
contemporaries admired him foremost as a sculptor, an unrivalled
metal caster and engineer. Only in his late twenties, but industrious
and diligent, when he opened his independent business, he proved to
be an excellent foreman, coordinating the activities of a self-contained
shop in accord with time-tested, old-fashioned modes of operation.
For sculpture (even relatively small works), he employed the centuries-
old assemblage technique, in which many separate pieces were cast and
then welded together – every major project involving the contribu-
tions of numerous hands.
The collaborative atmosphere and multitasking demands of his
shop benefited scores of artists who passed through it, including Perug-
ino and the sculptor Francesco di Simone Ferrucci. Leonardo and
Lorenzo di Credi may have been the only assistants who remained for
a decade or more; many other workers probably came and left on an
“as needed” basis. Leonardo, no doubt, thrived in this environment
and would have been galvanized by the challenge of learning so many
diverse skills. However, the detailed, sometimes factory-like approach
could be a bit stultifying for some, such as Lorenzo di Credi, who,
like many Florentine artists, had first apprenticed with a goldsmith.
As a painter, he excelled in the small parts but could never quite grasp
the whole. Even the generally respectful Vasari had to admit that the
well-intentioned Credi was punctilious to a fault.
A great admirer of Leonardo and probably five years his junior, the
tractable Credi imitated his drawings as much as he did those of the
73
master and managed to achieve a competent and ingratiating artistic

manner. In a large, busy shop, there was always room for the effective
and dependable plodder. Verrocchio, trusting Credi for his conserva-
tive bent and fastidious ways, would put him in charge of the shop
when he was elsewhere on business. He also knew that he could count
on Credi, his favorite pupil, to execute meticulously straightforward,
conventional pictures, such as the Pistoia altarpiece, with its simple
grouping of fairly static figures. Although, as previously noted, there
has been speculation that Leonardo may have been Verrocchio’s lover,
the master had a much closer personal relationship with Credi, who
was eventually named executor of his will and inherited all of Verroc-
chio’s furniture and clothing, as well as the bronze, tin, and porphyry
left in the workshop at his death.
Of a temperament similar to Credi’s, Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci,
better known as Perugino, gained much in the Verrocchio work-
shop as well. Nearly an exact contemporary of Leonardo, Perugino
probably came to Florence a half-dozen years after him, around 1470,
from desperate conditions in his native town of Perugia. Accustomed
to dire poverty, Perugino reportedly slept in a “miserable chest” for
the first several months after he arrived in the city. Vasari postu-
lated that it was Perugino’s experience of extreme economic dis-
tress and hunger that drove him to study and work incessantly, in
the Verrocchio shop and throughout his life. Such motivation also
spurred him to fast-track his independent career, and by 1475, when
Leonardo was still a rowdy workshop member, Perugino was already
fulfilling important commissions in Perugia and surrounding Umbria,
notably the Adoration of the Magi for the church of the Servites in Colle
Landone.
Whether for reasons of jealousy, personality clashes, or differing
views, the two artists, Vasari reports, became rivals. One can imagine
that Leonardo disdained Perugino’s unadventurous approach to paint-
ing, his inclination constantly to repeat figure types and stock poses
that had proven popular and lucrative. According to Vasari, Perugino’s
contemporaries often taunted him for reusing figures “either through
avarice or to save time.” Perhaps with Perugino in mind, Leonardo
wrote that the “greatest fault of painters” was “to repeat the same
movements, the same faces, and the same style of drapery in one
and the same narrative painting.” And, as someone who declared that
“poor is the man who desires many things,” Leonardo would have
11. Leonardo’s Colleagues in the Workshop 75
abhorred the unbridled venality of Perugino, about whom Vasari said, Figure 24.
Leonardo da Vinci,
“he would have sold his soul for money.” Annunciation, c. 1473–
While in the Verrocchio workshop, Leonardo produced some 76, oil on panel, for
San Bartolomeo di
paintings completely of his own design and execution, including an Monteoliveto (outside
Annunciation (c. 1473–76) for the monks of San Bartolomeo di Mon- of Florence), now
Florence, Uffizi.
teoliveto (outside Florence), now in the Uffizi (fig. 24). The com- Scala/Ministero per
mission, acknowledging Leonardo’s full professional status, was either i Beni e le Attività
culturali/Art Resource,
passed to him by Verrocchio or steered to him by his notary father, NY.
who counted that religious institution among his monastic clients.
Created by a still-immature youngster, scarcely past twenty, the stiff
picture was accepted, despite its flaws, by the provincial monastic
clergy, who would have delighted in the brilliant passages of nat-
ural detail and landscape. He spread before them a rich, millefleur
tapestry of flowers within a walled garden, a reference to the hortus
conclusus (enclosed garden) of the biblical Song of Songs (4:12), a pop-
ular source for Marian imagery – and metaphors for her virginity – in
the Renaissance.
His angel, although splendidly garbed, assumes an unnaturally
rigid, hieroglyphic posture. Likewise, the Virgin appears rather
wooden, a fantoccio, an artist’s lay figure or mannequin, whose arms and
hands have been adjusted into position. Such inadequacies may have
resulted from Leonardo’s dependence on clay models when working
out the figures’ poses; he perhaps had neither Verrocchio’s permission
nor the funds to employ living, studio models for an extended period
of time. Compensating for some of these shortcomings, Leonardo used
Figure 25.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Drapery Study,
c. 1473–76, pen,
brush and gray tempera
with white heighten-
ing on gray prepared
linen, Paris, Louvre
(2255). Réunion des
Musées Nationaux/Art
Resource, NY.
the opportunity to demonstrate everything he had seen and learned

in the Verrocchio shop, from the master’s one-point perspective sys-
tem, to the Virgin’s obtrusive lectern, based on the master’s tomb for
Piero and Giovanni de’ Medici, to her abundant drapery, conceived
through the Verrocchio studio practice of drawing after pieces of
linen that had been dipped in wet plaster and then carefully arranged.
Fortunately, several of these beautiful drawings of drapery, landscapes
in themselves, survive, including the brush-and-wash studies, now in
the Louvre and Uffizi, that served as the models for the dresses of the
annunciate Virgin and angel (fig. 25).
These sheets, together with a detailed study of the angel’s sprig
of lilies, foster the impression of an artist who worked assiduously,
but piecemeal – assembling his composition from well-considered yet
disparate parts (the way in which Verrocchio created his sculptures).
The overall effect of the picture would seem to confirm this; the
11. Leonardo’s Colleagues in the Workshop 77
Figure 26.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Study of a Female Head,
c. 1474–76, pen and ink
with washes, Florence,
Uffizi (428E). Scala/Art
Resource, NY.
isolated figures, decorative rather than interactive, seem as immobile

as the stone lectern and background trees. Only the distant mountains,
gloriously evocative in their atmospheric shroud, hint at Leonardo’s
inventiveness and ambitions, scientific as well as artistic.
Although still finding his own way artistically, Leonardo was appar-
ently more than happy to nurture his friend Lorenzo di Credi’s creativ-
ity and career – behavior auspicious of the generous and sure guidance
he would one day provide to the young artists who worked for him. In
addition to offering a drawing to Credi for the Baptist of the Pistoia
Madonna di Piazza, he allowed his colleague to peruse his portfo-
lio of studies when Credi needed to design the predella, the lower
register of scenes, for that altarpiece. With good reason, Credi must
have become particularly enamored with Leonardo’s exotically elegant
Study of a Female Head (now Uffizi – fig. 26). The jeweled brooch and
wing motif of the headband indicate that Leonardo conceived her
either as an angel or as some sort of allegorical or mythological being.

Credi, however, decided that the bowed head and demurely downcast
eyes would very well suit the Annunciate Virgin in his predella panel,
now in the Louvre. The transformation was made with only minor
adjustments to the headgear and coiffure. Unashamedly, Credi also
appropriated the profile pose of the angel and organization of his pic-
ture from Leonardo’s recently finished Annunciation. Later, according
to Vasari, Credi replicated a Leonardo Madonna and sent his copy to
the king of Spain.
12. Leonardo’s Madonna of the
Carnation and the Exploration
of Optics
P ossibly executed not long after his ANNUNCIATION, and

featuring some of the same faux-alpine topography,
Leonardo’s delightfully curious Virgin and Child with a Carnation of
c. 1476–78 (fig. 27), now in Munich, reveals his inclination to move
beyond studio conventions and to probe with a keener eye the work-
ings of human anatomy and the properties of light. In the panoramic
landscape, glimpsed through windows, Leonardo shows that he could
achieve the atmospheric-perspective effects of the finest Flemish paint-
ings, for which Lorenzo the Magnificent had a special enthusiasm;
precious masterpieces by Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus, and other
Northern masters graced his palace. With a general concern for Medici
approval, Leonardo no doubt derived some of his imaginative land-
scape elements, as well as the background window motif, from such
pictures. His rugged landscape would have had an inviting familiarity
for a northern European viewer. To Leonardo’s audience, however,
the mountain ranges must have seemed a forbidding wilderness and, in
the context of his painting, suggestive of a primordial, ancient world
now in recession, with the advent of Christ. Also much intrigued by
Flemish art around that time, but less interested in natural topography,
Sandro Botticelli chose to introduce a more sanguine, northern Euro-
pean townscape into the background of his Shooting of Saint Sebastian
of 1474, painted for the Florentine church of S. Maria Maggiore.
The generally presumed date of the Munich picture coin-
cides with the infancy of Leonardo’s half-brother, the long-awaited
Antonio (born 1476), who may have served as a model. For the unusu-
ally young Christ, Leonardo obviously had studied a baby firsthand,
recording but not fully understanding the visual problems experienced
in the first months of life. In the Munich picture, the Christ Child, eyes
79
straying and unfocused, reaches almost blindly for the Virgin’s carna-
tion. Ungraceful though this gesture may be, Leonardo renders it with
a fascinated precision, as he does the baby’s doughy flesh. Although
hindered by his ungainly body and underdeveloped vision, the holy
child instinctively wishes to seize the flower, a traditional symbol of
the Passion, specifically the Crucifixion, because of its nail-like buds.
In portraying the truth of what he observed, Leonardo characteristi-
cally reveled in its complexity. A simple exchange between a mother
and child has become, in his hands, a subtle matrix of physiological
mechanics and religious meaning.
Vision and optical effects can almost be considered subtexts of the
Munich picture. In it, Leonardo demonstrates not only his ability to
reproduce bright, outdoor light and soft, ambient interior illumination
but also shows, in the Flemish-inspired, crystalline vase, the small, glass
balls attached to the cushion, and the Virgin’s conspicuous, emerald
brooch that he can imitate the appearance of rays of light which are
refracted, filtered, and reflected. Since the Middle Ages, the emerald
had been viewed as a badge of purity, as the stone was said to splinter
when a virgin was violated. But placed so near to the baby’s eyes,
in the center of Leonardo’s composition, the prominent green stone
probably had additional significance.
From ancient times through the Renaissance, emeralds were
believed to aid eyesight. Aristotle’s successor, the fourth-century b.c.
philosopher Theophrastus, confidently asserted that emeralds were
good for the eyes, pointing out that some people carried emerald
seals with them for intermittent, salutary viewing. Pliny’s first-century
Natural History, the basic encyclopedia of animals, vegetables, and min-
erals in the Renaissance, reported that strained eyes could be restored
to their “normal state by looking at a ‘smaragdus’ (emerald).” Ficino,
at the Medici court, declared that not just emeralds but all smooth,
green materials held therapeutic value for the eyes. This belief persisted
well into the seventeenth century. In his poem “A Lover’s Complaint”
(1609), Shakespeare noted: “the deepe greene Emrald in whose fresh
regard, weak sights their sickly radiance do amend.” Precious and
semiprecious stones and jewels were a frequent topic of conversa-
tion in Lorenzo the Magnificent’s circle, for he owned a significant
number of gems, cameos, and various objects, such as vases and tazze
(cups), carved from carnelians, chalcedony, jasper, and sardonyx-agate.
Leonardo’s later manuscripts indicate that, like Lorenzo, he came to
12. Leonardo’s Madonna of the Carnation and the Exploration of Optics 81
Figure 27.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Virgin and Child with a
Carnation, c. 1476–78,
oil on panel, Munich,
Alte Pinakothek.
Bildarchiv Preussis-
cher Kulturbesitz/Art
Resource, NY.
possess Pliny’s opus and specialized books or treatises on precious

stones (lapidari), perhaps by Theophrastus and the German theologian
Albertus Magnus.
In Leonardo’s time, interest in precious and semiprecious stones was
far more pervasive and topical than it is today. This had partly to do
with the fact that, as with the emerald, many precious stones and metals
were valued almost as much for their supposed medicinal (or magically
curative) properties as for their aesthetic qualities. The diamond was
thought to be an antidote for poison and to protect against plague,
the ruby a remedy for flatulence, and the sapphire effective against eye
disease. The sparkling, violet amethyst was considered to be a cure for

drunkenness and purportedly made the wearer more nimble-minded
and shrewd in business matters. Ficino and members of the Medici
court and family, notably Francesco I in the later sixteenth century,
consumed significant amounts of powdered lapis lazuli, an expensive
stone used as an artist’s pigment, as well as the “elixir of life,” a form
of potable gold. Properly and regularly ingested, these materials were
believed to counteract excess black bile in the body and consequently
alleviate melancholy.
Despite the original observations and considerable thought that
Leonardo invested in the Virgin and Child with a Carnation, he made
certain that it would still be recognized as a Verrocchio workshop
product. The Virgin’s features conform closely to the master’s facial
types, widely admired, then as now, for the gentle affection they
exude. Very similar faces and capricious hairstyles are found in several
Verrocchio and Verrocchio-shop drawings, notably two well-known
studies of female heads (one possibly for the lady in the joust-standard
design) in the collections of the British Museum and Louvre. The need
for “branding” aside, Leonardo also emulated his mentor’s idealized
countenances and intricate coiffures because, as Vasari noted, he clearly
much appreciated their inventiveness. It is interesting to note, however,
that when the impressionable and loyal Credi painted his tiny Madonna
of the Pomegranate in these years (c. 1476–78), his primary model was
Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with the Carnation, and only secondarily
did he look to Verrocchio’s works.
13.The Benois Madonna and
Continued Meditations on the
Theme of Sight
M any of the same themes and inquiries concerning

vision continued to preoccupy Leonardo when he exe-
cuted another, better-known painting of the Virgin and Child not
long afterward, the so-called Benois Madonna (c. 1478–80), named for
its last private owner (Leon Benois), and now in the State Hermitage
Museum in St. Petersburg (fig. 28). In what can be regarded almost as
a further elaboration on the actions of the Munich infant, Leonardo
portrayed the older, and rather immense, child in the Benois Madonna
as gamely trying to focus his eyes on a sprig of cruciform-shaped
flowers. The painter would have had a largely erroneous idea about
the nature of the child’s struggle, because he did not know of the
existence of lenses in the eyes.
Instead, following the eminent Florentine theorist Leon Battista
Alberti, Leonardo, at least into the 1490s, ascribed to the fallacious,
Platonic “theory of emission” in the operations of sight – that is,
the belief that the eyes emit rays that extend to the object seen. In
his widely read treatise On Painting of 1435, Alberti had applied the
geometric elaboration of Euclid’s Optics (c. 300 b.c.) to the visual
rays (opseis) that Plato described in his fourth-century dialogue, the
Timaeus. There, Plato spoke of such fictive rays as an ocular “fire”
mixing in sympathy with external light. With great authority, Alberti
explained how an infinite number of these rays issued from the eyes,
the most powerful being the central one or “centric ray,” which, he
believed, played “the largest part in the determination of sight.”
Exactly contrary to the true nature of vision, which involves intro-
mission, the reception of light from an object into the eyes, Leonardo
nevertheless wrote about and drew diagrams of this imaginary phe-
nomenon. In fact, along the margins of one of his preliminary studies
83
Figure 28.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Virgin and Child
with Flowers (Benois
Madonna), c. 1478–80,
oil on wood panel,
transferred to canvas,
St. Petersburg, State
Hermitage Museum.
Scala/Art Resource,
NY.
for the Benois Madonna, he made three tiny “technical” sketches that
show, from right to left, parallel centric rays emitted from a pair of eyes
looking forward, intersecting rays from eyes turned slightly inward,
and, last, rays intersecting from eyes turned markedly inward (figs. 29
and 30). The final diagram is in keeping with the eyes of the Christ
Child in the Benois Madonna, who assertively guides the hand of his
mother, so that the flowers will be brought into the crossing of his
ocular rays.
Leonardo would go on to devote much of his life to investigations
of optics, binocular vision, and perception and eventually would come
to an uneasy reconciliation of the theories of emission and intromis-
sion. Thus, although he made some subtle and astute observations,
13. The Benois Madonna and Continued Meditations on the Theme of Sight 85
Figure 29.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Virgin and Child, Profile
Studies, Technical Sketches,
and Schematic Studies
of Eyes with Visual
Rays, c. 1478–80,
silverpoint, leadpoint,
pen and ink, London,
British Museum (1860-
6-16-100r). C The
Trustees of the British

Museum/Art Resource,
NY.
he did not get very far. A full knowledge of the function of the eyes’
lenses would only be attained in the mid-nineteenth century, and only
in the late twentieth would a fundamental understanding be realized
of the neurology of visual perception, which, in the case of an infant,
depends not only on the operation of the lenses but on the progressive
chemical sheathing (called “myelination”) of nerve tracks between the
retina and vision-related areas of the cerebral cortex.
As in the Munich Virgin and Child with the Carnation, Leonardo’s
attention to the mechanics of vision in the Hermitage picture has
interesting implications. Leonardo’s artistic contemporaries, such as
Botticelli and Raphael, often treated the theme of divine foreknowl-
edge of the Passion in their Madonnas. The Christ Child is typically
Figure 30.
shown recoiling from, or willingly embracing, a goldfinch or some
Detail of Schematic
Studies of Eyes with other traditional symbol of Christ’s Passion (according to medieval
Visual Rays in fig. 29.
lore, a goldfinch plucked a thorn from Christ’s crown when he was on
Art Resource, NY.
the way to Calvary and was splashed with a drop of his blood – hence,
the characteristic red mark on the bird’s neck). In his two Madonnas,
Leonardo, the empiricist, sought to break down and analyze the phys-
iology of vision and perception, the mysterious connections between
sight and insight. The Munich child is virtually blind, yet seems aware
of the symbolic carnation. The child of the Benois Madonna has still
not responded to the distinctly cruciform shape of the flower (proba-
bly an artistically modified jasmine or wallflower), because he cannot
see it clearly. Once that happens, the child’s hazy curiosity could, pre-
sumably, lead to foresight of his sacrifice. By adding explicit reference
to the act of seeing, Leonardo has protracted and compounded the
tension inherent in portrayals of the Christ Child apprehending his
death. Attuned to Leonardo’s works and interests, Lorenzo di Credi,
in imitation, similarly portrayed babies with underdeveloped vision in
several of his own paintings and drawings.
In contrast to its serious subtext, the Hermitage picture presents
what may be the most joyous and youthful depiction of Mary in
13. The Benois Madonna and Continued Meditations on the Theme of Sight 87
Renaissance art. Unconventionally, she seems to be speaking or laugh- Figure 31.

Leonardo da Vinci,
ing, playfully engaged with her child, her radiant vitality accentuated Studies of Machines (verso
through Leonardo’s deliberate complications of posture and drap- of fig. 32), 1478, pen
and ink, Florence, Uffizi
ery. Able to observe on a regular basis the interactions between his (446E). Polo Museale.
half-siblings Antonio and Giuliomo (born in 1479) and stepmother,
Leonardo made a number of sketches that capture the awkward and
unpredictable actions of an infant: wrestling with a cat, snatching a
piece of fruit from a bowl, poking his fingers into his mother’s face.
Drawings executed for the Benois Madonna and for a related work,
depicting the Virgin and Child with a Cat (figs. 38 and 39), indicate
the artist’s desire to make the compositions as dynamic and intri-
cate as possible – a major advance from the more staid, frontal stance
of the Munich Madonna, which, as we have seen, was based on a
Verrocchio prototype. Leonardo had attempted, tactfully and mini-
mally, to distinguish his Virgin and Child with the Carnation from the
standard Verrocchio shop piece by including beautiful, if improbable,
flourishes – the impossibly complex silhouette of the Virgin’s veil, the
watery and convoluted cascades of her dress and shawl. In the Benois
Figure 32. Madonna, this sort of virtuoso demonstration of twisting form in space
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies of Heads and is more credibly and profoundly integrated, with a helix serving as the
Machines, 1478, pen and core and organizing armature of the entire composition.
ink, Florence, Uffizi
(446E). Polo Museale. One may fairly associate this interest in structures unfolding in
space with Leonardo’s concurrent fascination with gyrating machin-
ery and the use of sprockets, gears, and conveyor belts to transfer
motion from one plane to another. On both sides of a fragmentary
sheet of sketches, dated to 1478 and now in the Uffizi, are various
mechanisms in which Leonardo explored how forces and tensions
could be conducted and controlled in three dimensions (figs. 31 and
32). He conceived the Benois Madonna, with its curving, stepped pro-
jections of arms and legs, its stacked arrangement of revolving forces
and counterforces, as a similarly contained system – a small engine or
clockwork universe of energies in equilibrium.
14. The Madonna of the Cat
S ketched beside some of the machines on the ragged but

important Uffizi sheet of 1478 is another kind of counterbal-
ance, a contrast between two typologies that would become a fixation
for Leonardo: the wizened, contemplative face of an old man and
the fresh, inquisitive visage of a youth – an embodiment of Aristotle’s
decree that “each thing may be better known through its opposite”
(fig. 32). Eventually, as we shall see, this juxtaposition would carry
religious and spiritual connotations in certain of Leonardo’s works,
notably his representations of the Adoration of the Magi and Last
Supper. However, we might rather assume that, at this relatively early
stage of his career, his musings had something to do with his fam-
ily situation. The grandfather, Antonio, would have been a constant,
possibly doting, presence in the young Leonardo’s life until the old
man passed away in 1464 at age 92. With a father who was mainly
absent, engaged in business in Florence, an estranged mother (who
had moved with her husband to another village), and a stepmother
who died prematurely, Leonardo likely felt a special closeness to his
grandparents, with whom he lived for nearly a dozen years. In the
countless drawings of the aged that he made over the course of his
career, one often senses a certain reverence and intimacy.
Aside from any personal meaning they may have had, Leonardo’s
ubiquitous pairs of contrasting heads, as noted earlier, also reflect his
belief, based on Aristotelian principle, of the elucidating power of
opposition – through which, in some cases, a better understanding of
each of the antipodes may be gained and, in others, a “just mean”
or balance achieved. The skeptical artist continually sought to present
or expose contradictions, and he loved irony. Ultimately, though, as
a Christian philosopher who believed in the profound interrelation
89
Figure 33.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Sketches of a Child
Holding and Playing
with a Cat, c. 1478–
80, pen and ink,
London, British
Museum (1857-1-10-1).

British Museum/Art
Resource, NY.
of phenomena in a divinely designed world, he desired a Renaissance

version of the modern, unified-field concept, a reconciliation of all
contrasting ideas and forces.
Near the pair of heads on the Uffizi sheet, Leonardo left the enig-
matic inscription: “ – 1478, I began the two Virgin Marys.” One of
these was presumably the Benois Madonna, the other, perhaps, a Virgin
and Child with Cat, for which, as previously mentioned, numerous
preparatory studies survive, some closely related in composition to the
former work (figs. 33, 35–40). This series of stream of consciousness
drawings is instructive for what it reveals of Leonardo’s rather manic
14. The Madonna of the Cat 91
Figure 34.
Andrea del Verrocchio,
Boy with Dolphin, late
1470s, bronze, for the
Medici villa at Carreggi,
now Florence, Palazzo
Vecchio. Scala/Art
Resource, NY.
and circuitous, creative process. He took full advantage of the quick,

weightless movement of the quill pen, which, as many a draftsman
has noted, can seem almost to move of its own accord. Among the
first of these studies may have been the frantic, exuberant sketches
on both sides of a sheet preserved in the British Museum (fig. 33),
where Leonardo captures, in blurred, stop-action frames, a young
child’s good-natured abuse of a cat. He had an uncanny ability to
illustrate swift and minute movements, such as nuances of feline reflex
and exceedingly intricate and fleeting currents in water (the latter
confirmed by modern high-speed photography). Either his eyesight
was extraordinarily quick – and quasi-microscopic in power – or, after
countless hours spent studying animals and bodies of water, he was
just extremely good at speculating about those rapid movements and
patterns in nature that are difficult to observe. Whichever the case, his
loose, fluid penmanship owed much to the example of Verrocchio,
Figure 35.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Study for a Virgin and
Child with a Cat, c.
1478–80, pen and ink
with wash, Florence,
Uffizi (421E). Art
Resource, NY.
whose manner of sketching was unprecedented in its spontaneity and

vitality.
In these vigorous child-and-cat drawings, the artist was also likely
responding to Verrocchio’s recently completed bronze, Boy with a
Dolphin (late 1470s; fig. 34), which Il Magnifico had just obtained
for his villa at Carreggi, the seat of the Platonic academy of philoso-
phers and so a prestigious and prominent venue. Verrocchio’s giddy,
wriggling statue, with its ambitious spiraling effect, would have posed
something of a challenge to Leonardo. The sketch at bottom left of
the British Museum sheet (fig. 33) appears to be a first, direct reaction
Figure 36.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies for a Virgin
and Child with a Cat,
c. 1478–80, pen and
ink, London, British
Museum (1860-6-16-
98). Polo Museale.
to the sculpture; Leonardo has the child grasp the animal in much
the same manner, and some rough lines suggest that he even consid-
ered extending the boy’s proper right leg, like that of the Verrocchio
bambino. Often regarded as a solitary genius who received ideas from
on high, Leonardo, in reality and in almost every instance, responded
in his art to the recent work of others, particularly to those objects
that were novel in some way. In large part, his brilliance consisted in
his ability to make instant and optimal use of the contributions of oth-
ers – the isolated individual, who feels compelled to invent everything
completely de novo, cannot himself become an innovator.
So goaded, Leonardo continued to explore the subject of a boy
with a cat, usually lashed together in a hopeless tangle and including
a woman (the Virgin) as well, in at least five other sheets. At an early
point in the design process, he considered placing the child, clutching
the cat, on a cushion or platform beside the Virgin (figs. 35 and 36).
Figure 37.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies for a Virgin
and Child with a Cat,
c. 1478–80, pen
and ink, Bayonne,
Musée Bonnat (152).
Later, the composition evolved, momentarily, to one very similar to

that of the Benois Madonna, with the three figures in a taut knot
(figs. 37 and 38). He subsequently changed his mind again, tracing the
design right through the sheet with a sharp stylus, reversing and then
altering the poses in pen and wash (figs. 38 and 39). The study closest
to the (planned) painting may be the smallest surviving sketch – the
tender, tiny design now in a private collection, in which the heads of
the three figures seem gently to touch (fig. 40).
Although Leonardo would have found a squirming cat a more
challenging prop than a dolphin, it is difficult to say exactly why he
chose to place that particular animal in the baby’s arms. Of course, as
Figure 38.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Child with a Cat, c.
1478–80, pen and
ink, London, British
Museum (1856-6-21-1).
British Museum/Art
Resource, NY.
a common household member (perhaps in Ser Piero’s abode), the cat

conveyed domesticity, as did, despite its foreboding symbolism, the
goldfinch, a favorite pet of children in the Renaissance. One should
recall that these small and intimate Madonnas were intended for the
home, usually a bedroom.
It is also possible that Leonardo’s choice of animal-actor was
intended to perpetuate a charming, popular legend that a cat gave birth
to a litter of kittens at the moment of Christ’s Nativity. Other than
that, the cat has no Judeo-Christian significance (curiously, although
worshipped in Egypt for millennia, cats are never mentioned in the
canonical books of the Bible). In ancient Greek mythological texts,
Figure 39.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Child with a Cat (verso
of fig.38), c. 1478–80,
6-21-1). Alinari/Art
Resource, NY.
however, the feline is said to be a proxy of Hecate, goddess of the

dead and the underworld. Perhaps because of this tradition and, cer-
tainly, due to medieval stories of necromancy, the cat was some-
times regarded, like the goldfinch, as an omen of death. In Leonardo’s
Tuscany, there was an old, folk superstition that the sudden appearance
of a cat could portend someone’s passing. A black cat has ominous
associations even today.
Leonardo’s painting of the Virgin and Child with the Cat was either
somehow lost or, in light of the fact that no replicas or variants survive,
was, more likely, never fully realized, the fate of so many of his projects.
Figure 40.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Virgin and Child with a
Cat, c. 1478–80, pen
and ink with wash,
New York, Private
Collection.
It was also around this time, in January of 1478, that he received

what is believed to have been his first independent commission, for
an altarpiece (probably depicting the usual Virgin and Child with
Saints) for the Chapel of San Bernardo in the Palazzo della Signoria,
an important civic project that he failed to complete after having
accepted an initial payment in good faith (ultimately returned). We
can assume that the contract for the prestigious altarpiece had Ser
Piero’s fingerprints all over it.
15.Leonardo, the Medici,
and Public Executions
U nquestionably, leonardo, always seeking new chal-

lenges, had trouble sustaining interest in many of the Floren-
tine art industry’s stock-in-trade products – traditional church altar-
pieces and small Madonnas for domestic display. By the later 1470s,
the Verrocchio shop was fast becoming a mere (sculptural) niche
player in the “Madonna market.” Remembered today foremost for
his mythologies, the Birth of Venus and Primavera (Spring), Botticelli
was, by the early 1480s, the dominant madonnero, maker of painted
Madonnas, in Florence, employing a large corps of assistants to repli-
cate his designs. Leonardo may have felt some professional jealousy
toward Botticelli, whose prosperity stemmed not only from his talents
but also from the favor of Piero de’ Medici, who, years earlier, had
invited the painter to live with him and his family in the Medici Palace.
Rarely does Leonardo mention his very successful contemporary in
his writings or reflect Botticelli’s works in his own. In fact, Botticelli’s
Annunciation fresco of 1481, then in the loggia of the church of San
Martino alla Scala (now in the Uffizi), is most likely the target of some
of Leonardo’s harshest criticism:
I recently saw an Annunciation in which the angel looked

as if she wished to chase Our Lady out of the room, with
movement of such violence that she might have been a
hated enemy; and Our Lady seemed in such despair that
she was about to throw herself out of the window.
He took another, unambiguous, swipe at Botticelli in his unpub-

lished Treatise on Painting (Trattato della Pittura) when advocating that
artists should throw sponges loaded with paint at walls and study the
99
resulting abstract stains, which might suggest landscapes, battles, and

other images that could stimulate the imagination:
– Botticelli said that such study [of wall stains] was in vain.
[But] it is really true that various invenzioni [inventions or
ideas] are seen in such a stain. I say that a man should
look into it and find heads of men, diverse animals, battles,
rocks, seas, clouds, woods, and similar things, and note
how like it is to the sound of bells, in which you can hear
whatever you like. But although those stains will give you
invenzioni they will not teach you to finish any detail. This
painter of whom I have spoken makes very dull landscapes.
One also finds in Leonardo’s manuscripts the occasional, grumbling

remark that seems to be part of a reticent, one-sided dialogue between
him and Botticelli, comments that were probably rhetorical and never
actually communicated but suggest that he had Botticelli on his mind.
Apparently, for Leonardo, there was an emotional dynamic, or irritant,
where his colleague was concerned.
Even if a “healthy” rivalry with Botticelli did exist, Leonardo
would have feared boredom much more than the competition. His
greatest professional shortcoming was that once he had solved an
artistic problem, in his drawings or in his mind, he wished to move
on, lacking the patience to commit to it to paint or, in some cases,
paralyzed by his own perfectionism. What had been a bad habit of
leaving pictures unfinished in the Verrocchio’s shop seems to have
become almost a pathology for Leonardo. He famously wrote with
exasperation, probably self-inflicted, on more than one manuscript
page, “Tell me if anything was ever done.”
Although his brush sometimes faltered, his pen never ceased to
convey the entire range of human experience and expression. In the
same period that he celebrated those intimate, affectionate moments of
familial life in his Madonna studies, he objectively recorded mankind’s
public brutalities on other sheets. With dispassionate precision, he
drew the hanged corpse of the savage Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli,
one of the Pazzi family conspirators, who had murdered the young
Giuliano de’ Medici at high mass in Florence cathedral in late April
1478 (fig. 41). The Pazzi – banking, business, and political archrivals
of the Medici – had been incensed by Lorenzo’s efforts to curtail their
power. Reportedly, Baroncelli delivered the first, probably fatal, blow
15. Leonardo, the Medici, and Public Executions 101
Figure 41.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies of the Hanged
Bernardo di Bandino
Baroncelli, 1479, pen and
ink, Bayonne, Musée
Bonnat. Réunion des
Resource, NY.
to Giuliano’s chest, and then buried a long knife in the stomach of the
Medici bank manager Francesco Nori, killing him, when he moved
to defend his boss, Lorenzo de’ Medici. Others tore at Giuliano with
daggers. Lorenzo, the primary target of the plot, miraculously escaped
with just a minor neck wound, after being attacked by two priests who
were in on the scheme. The clerics were quickly caught, castrated,
and hanged.
The assassination attempt came after Lorenzo, more concerned
with cultural matters than military affairs, had squandered much of
the Medici reputation for toughness – and appeared to many to be
weak himself. His habit of quickly surrendering “protection” money
to any who threatened him or the city was seen as indicative of his
vulnerability and general fearfulness. His constant struggle with gout,
the “Medici disease,” as well as his high-pitched, nasal voice, often
caused him to seem less than virile and commanding.
To reassure the Florentine public of his survival, Lorenzo appeared
several times after the assault in the windows of the Palazzo Medici.
Wishing to reinforce that message, some of his relatives and supporters
commissioned three wax effigies of him, two of which were placed
in prominent places in the city (the third was sent to Assisi). Perhaps
accompanied by Leonardo, Verrocchio oversaw the fabrication, by
his friend, the wax-worker Orsino Benintendi, of these sculptures,
painted with natural colors to appear as lifelike as possible. They
portrayed Lorenzo bandaged and wounded, as he appeared hours after
the attack, or wearing the apparel of the average Florentine citizen.
We can assume that the effigies were rather convincing. Florence,
and Orsino especially, were renowned for such figures and other wax
simulacra.
The assassin Baroncelli, a well-connected member of another old
Florentine banking family, managed to escape to Constantinople, from
where the Turkish Sultan finally agreed to extradite him in late 1479.
Leonardo made his quick sketch at the end of December, when the
murderer was hanged, together with his wife, from windows of the
Palazzo del Capitano, on the same busy street as Ser Piero’s house.
Although public executions were common in late-fifteenth-century
Florence, occurring at a rate of more than one a week, they were
usually performed in a designated field on the outskirts of the city,
rather than in a central square, a venue reserved for high-profile
criminals. Most of the offenders, as many as fifteen at a time, were
15. Leonardo, the Medici, and Public Executions 103
led out through the eastern part of the city, past the church of Santa
Croce, to the gallows by way of the via de’ Malcontenti (Street of the
Malcontents) – so-named because many individuals were sentenced
to death for allegedly conspiring against aristocratic families. This fre-
quent recourse to capital punishment necessitated special, communal
heralds on horseback, who regularly announced captures, death sen-
tences, and dates of execution. Such brutal and public spectacles hardly
deterred the roiling lawlessness of the city. But they did afford drawing
practice to Leonardo, who, according to the Milanese art theorist and
painter Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, closely studied the gestures of the
condemned, so that he could “delineate the tension in their brows,
and the expressions of their eyes and whole appearance.”
Leonardo’s sketch of the deceased Baroncelli includes a second,
detailed rendering of the face and, alongside the body, a careful
description of the colors of his clothes: “small tan-colored cap, black
satin doublet, black-lined jerkin, blue coat lined with black and white
velvet stripes – black hose.” The artist probably made these inscrip-
tions to aid his memory if he were later assigned to create a painting
of Baroncelli on the wall of the Podestà (or Bargello), the city court
and jail, on which effigies of the other principal conspirators had
been rendered a year earlier. It was a Florentine tradition to paint
such murals as posthumous defamations of offenders and as warnings
to enemies, after the actual corpses had deteriorated or been hacked
apart.
In 1478, Botticelli had been hired by the Ottimati (the Florentine
government’s council of eight “best men”) to paint several of the Pazzi
conspirators as they dangled, upside-down, from the windows of the
Podestà, and Lorenzo himself had written verses to go underneath
their heads. These images flanked others that Andrea del Castagno
had created decades earlier, in 1440, when he was assigned to portray,
also inverted, eight traitorous members of the old Florentine Albizzi
family, who had been executed for joining forces with the Milanese at
the Battle of Anghiari. Leonardo saw the faded remnants of all these
effigies (erased only in 1494) every time he visited his father in his
Podestà office. It may have occurred to him that he could perhaps
gain favor with the Medici by following in the footsteps of Castagno
(known as Andreino degli Impicchati – Little Andy of the Hanged Men),
who, as a farmer’s son from the Mugello region of Tuscany, rose from
a similar, rural background to attain high status and fame.
It appears, however, that, despite his preparations, Leonardo was

never asked to add a nature morte of Baroncelli to the wall of shame.
The de facto leader of the Florentine Republic and victim of the
conspiracy, Lorenzo was not present to sanction it. As it happens, he
was just then arriving in Naples, on a critical diplomatic mission that
would last many months. Further, the Ottimati and Medici loyalists
may have decided that they had in their hands a more effective tool
for defamation; with the printing press, newly arrived and established
by Bernardo Cennini in Florence in 1477, the writer Poliziano and
others were able widely to disseminate accounts of the Pazzi plot and
of the conspirators’ treachery. Although his act of artistic vengeance
was never realized, Leonardo must have still taken some consolation
in knowing that Giuliano had found pleasure in the joust standard he
had helped create, which now rested unobserved, beside Botticelli’s
mounted pennant, Verrocchio’s prize helmet, crested shields, and
other souvenirs in the young man’s abandoned trophy room.
16. Leonardo and Ginevra de’ Benci
L eonardo finally had the opportunity in this period to

test his hand at portraiture – of a more benevolent kind –
when he was engaged to paint a likeness of the lovely Ginevra de’
Benci, the sophisticated daughter of the wealthy banker, Amerigo
de’ Benci, and an object of admiration for numerous poets (fig. 42).
Leonardo’s father may have facilitated the commission; a longtime
friend of the Benci family, he drafted many legal documents for them
over the years. Although married in 1474 to Luigi di Bernardo Nicco-
lini, the precocious, sharp-witted Ginevra attracted the fervid atten-
tion of the Venetian ambassador Bernardo Bembo, when he visited
Florence later in the decade. The intellectual Bembo’s devotion to her
reportedly took the form of a chaste “Platonic love,” a term coined at
that time by Ficino. Openly and widely acknowledged, their relation-
ship (and her beauty) became the subject of Petrarchan sonnets writ-
ten by several poets at the Medici court, notably Cristoforo Landino,
Alessandro Braccesi, and Il Magnifico himself.
The device or impresa on the reverse of her portrait, Bembo’s
heraldic laurel and palm, attests to the closeness of their bond – and
very probably indicates that he was the patron (fig. 43). If Bembo
commissioned the picture (with Benci approval) – as a gift to Ginevra
or remembrance of her – he likely would have done so during his
extended second sojourn in Florence, from July 1478 to May 1480,
after he had known her for some time, rather than during his first
mission there from January 1475 to April 1476; some stylistic aspects
of the picture would seem to suggest this as well. If, as some have
maintained, the portrait had been ordered by her husband, Luigi, she
almost certainly would have been depicted wearing the ritual jewelry
that he had bestowed on her, symbols of their union and of his wealth.
105
Figure 42.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Portrait of Ginevra de’
Benci, c. 1478–80, oil
on panel, Washington,
National Gallery of
Art. Image courtesy of
the Board of Trustees,
National Gallery of Art,
Washington.
This display of the groom’s “dowry” was of no small significance,

for its magnitude determined the very plausibility and viability of a
marriage in mercantile Florence. In the fifteenth century, one kept
a large portion of one’s savings in jewelry and clothes (as well as in
communal/municipal bonds) rather than in cash. Instead, her costume
features no jewelry but a black scarf, which may have been a sign
of affiliation with the Platonic academicians; Landino is represented
wearing a similar, academic stole in a Ghirlandaio fresco.
In its otherwise showy artifice, Leonardo’s portrayal of Ginevra,
at the age of twenty or twenty-one, was probably intended to be
the visual equivalent of metaphors employed by Medici poets. In
one sonnet, Landino effusively describes her “hair of gold,” “ivory
teeth, white as snow,” “swan’s neck,” and “golden nipples” on “snowy
bosom.” Leonardo’s picture generally conforms to Landino’s meta-
phorical excesses, showing necessary decorum, however, as regards
16. Leonardo and Ginevra de’ Benci 107
Figure 43.
Reverse of Ginevra
de’ Benci, fig. 42.
Image courtesy of the
Board of Trustees,
National Gallery of Art,
Washington.
Ginevra’s mouth and chest, because a proper Florentine lady did not
expose her teeth or breasts. We tend to associate this extremely literal
use of visual metaphor with later Florentine art, such as portraits by
the sixteenth-century painter-poet Agnolo Bronzino, with their hard,
alabaster skin and gold-filament hair. However, through such aesthetic
posturing, a collusive nod to the literati of the court, Leonardo may
have sought admittance to the cultural and intellectual elite, despite
his lack of much formal education.
Moreover, the picture may have been Leonardo’s opening salvo in
the long debate over the paragone, the comparative merits of painting
and poetry, an issue popular in Italian Renaissance courts and a bone
of contention for Leonardo throughout much of his life; he would
participate in a discussion of the subject at Sforza Castle in Milan
in 1498. At about the time that Columbus landed in the Americas
(and in the year of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death), the artist was busy
drafting arguments in favor of painting over poetry, preserved in his

manuscripts:
And if you, poet, claim to portray a story as if painting

with your pen, the painter with his brush will more readily
satisfy and will be understood less tediously. If you assert
that painting is dumb poetry, then the painter may call
poetry blind painting.
– [the sense of] hearing [as concerns recited poetry or

music] is less noble than sight, in that as it is born so it
dies and its death is an swift as its birth. This does not
apply to the sense of sight, because if you represent to the
eye a beautiful human body composed of proportionally
beautiful parts, this beauty will not be so mortal or so
rapidly destroyed as music. Instead it has great permanence
and remains to be seen and considered by you.
Take the case of the poet describing the beauties of a lady

to her lover and that of a painter who makes a portrait
of her; you will see whither nature will more incline the
enamored judge. Surely the proof of the matter ought to
rest upon the verdict of experience!
The exercise of visual metaphor in the Ginevra was only one of

Leonardo’s pointed demonstrations of the “literary” capabilities of
painting. Almost certainly at the instigation of the patron, he employed
other literary conceits in this work as well – namely, the motto on
the reverse, Virtutem Forma Decorat (Form [or Beauty] Adorns Virtue),
devised by Bembo, and the placement of a juniper (ginepro) behind
the sitter, a play on her name. Among the great book collectors of the
century, the humanist Bembo was extremely knowledgeable about
ancient and modern encomium, and he fathered – and mentored –
the famous poet, later cardinal, Pietro Bembo. An aspiring poet her-
self, Ginevra would have appreciated the laconically gracious Latin
inscription and visual pun.
Just as the various sonnets lauded Ginevra’s virtues and appear-
ance in a lofty, grandiloquent manner, Leonardo has so idealized his
subject that his work just barely qualifies as a portrait. The promi-
nent, high forehead, extraordinarily wide-set, almond eyes, glowing
white skin, and perfectly cylindrical neck seem to be so extensively
Figure 44.
Lorenzo di Credi
(attributed to), Portrait
of a Lady (Ginevra de’
Benci?), c. 1473–74, oil
on panel, New York,
Metropolitan Museum
of Art. Image copyright
C Metropolitan
Museum of Art/Art
Resource, NY.
reformed that it is difficult to assign an age to the sitter and causes one
to wonder whether the image bears much likeness to the actual per-
son. That being the case, it is not completely reckless to speculate that
the very similar Portrait of a Lady (c. 1473–74), now in the Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art (fig. 44), where it is convincingly attributed to
Leonardo’s colleague, Lorenzo di Credi, could be an earlier depic-
tion of Ginevra, created in honor of her engagement (sposalizio) or
nuptials.
Although old attributions of artist and sitter are notoriously falli-
ble, it must be acknowledged that the New York painting is clearly
inscribed in a contemporary fifteenth-century hand on the reverse,
GINEVERA DE AM – BENCI. When executing this picture, its
author, too, emended the sitter’s physiognomy; one discovers in the
underlayers of paint, revealed by x-rays, that the shape of her face and
her features were originally extremely close to those of Leonardo’s
Ginevra. Moreover, Credi’s slimmer, younger woman – probably a

teenager – holds a wedding ring, and stands before a comparable
juniper and a flourishing, young tree. Her plain, dark dress does not
necessarily indicate that she is a widow, as has sometimes been said.
Rather, her austere costume is in keeping with recently reestablished
(in 1472) sumptuary laws: the only jewelry she wears is a simple neck-
lace, another ritual wedding present of the groom, and she has neither
the typical, extravagantly embroidered sleeves of the period nor the
pearl-adorned frenello, or hair bridle.
It has long been assumed that Leonardo’s portrait, which has been
severely cut down at bottom (Bembo’s device on the reverse is cropped
at its base), at one time included the sitter’s arms and hands – rest-
ing in the graceful manner of those in the New York picture. A
deservedly famous, beautiful drawing of hands, holding flower stems,
in the Windsor Royal Library perhaps offers a good idea of how
Leonardo placed Ginevra’s; in fact, it may have served, as some have
suggested, as a preliminary study for the picture. If this supposition
is correct, then Leonardo’s lady would have closely approximated in
gesture and bearing certain sculptural portraits of Florentine matrons
by Verrocchio, including a Lady with a Small Bouquet of Flowers in
the Bargello. Although somewhat flat and relieflike in her truncated
state, Leonardo’s Ginevra must have had considerably more volumet-
ric presence, akin to Verrocchio’s bust, when she possessed her lower
torso and arms.
Compromised, too, are other spatial effects in the picture, due to
the slight darkening, or “sinking,” with age of some of the pigments,
particularly the greens of the juniper. However, careful scrutiny of
the foliage reveals how complex and sophisticated Leonardo’s evoca-
tion of light and air still is. Here he has relied almost exclusively on
subtle optical effects to generate space, as opposed to the underly-
ing linear perspective of his Annunciation. Whereas Ginevra’s hair and
other details have the Flemish precision of the Munich and Benois
Madonnas, the deftly varied brushwork of the foliage and distant trees
has a summarizing efficiency that is more suggestive than descrip-
tive. Traces of his fingerprints reveal that Leonardo achieved some
of these nuances of light and texture by gently touching and mod-
eling the wet paint with his hands. Noteworthy, too, is the way in
which Leonardo has set the luminous figure against the background.
His light–dark juxtaposition is not merely a style, an aesthetic effect,
but signals an emerging working method of complete originality
Figure 45.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Study of a Lady with a
Unicorn, c. 1478–80?,
pen and ink, Oxford,
Ashmolean Museum
(1855 KPH 15). Cour-
tesy of the Ashmolean
Museum, University of
Oxford.
in which he will compose his pictures in a monochromatic, sepia

pattern of light and dark, and then apply color almost as a finishing
tint. This would become a standard procedure for him, as we shall see
in his later depictions of the Adoration of the Magi, Saint Jerome, and the
Virgin of the Rocks. All of these innovative and progressive techniques,
so characteristic of Leonardo, support a date for the picture in the
late 1470s, rather than to the period of the rigid Annunciation, as has
sometimes been argued.
The courtly ideal manifested in the portrait of Ginevra (the very
name conjuring up its Arthurian equivalent: Guinevere) is expressed
as well in a couple of Leonardo’s sketches for a Lady with a Unicorn,
which, some believe, may have been intended for the image on the
reverse of the painting, before the patron and artist decided to repro-
duce Bembo’s emblem (fig. 45). The broad head and neck of the lady
in these drawings, particularly the Oxford sheet, resemble those of

Ginevra, and the presence of the mythical unicorn, which was sup-
posedly attracted only to maidens, would have underscored Ginevra’s
purity. Other portrait paintings, and some portrait medals, of the
period include similarly lovesick unicorns on their versos.
Most closely associated today with French art, because of the cul-
minating depictions of the Lady-and-Unicorn theme in the tapestry
series at Cluny and in the Cloisters Museum of New York, the subject
can actually be traced back to early Christian times; it is found in the
second- to fourth-century Physiologus (The Naturalist or Scientist), an
anonymous Greek compilation of descriptions and legends of animals
that had been given Christian interpretation. The entertaining text and
subject became popular across all of Europe, but particularly in France,
from the Middle Ages through to the Renaissance. The widely read
medieval Fior di virtù also included a passage on the unicorn, reporting
that the male animal had “such a taste” for the company of young
maidens that “whenever he sees one he goes to her and falls asleep in
her arms.” The creature was further popularized in late-fourteenth-
century Italy in illustrated editions of the poet Petrarch’s epic Triumphs
(Trionfi), in which he described a series of imaginary processional cars,
including a Trionfo della Pudicizia (Triumph of Chastity), surmounted
by an allegorical, female figure of Chastity. Most of these manuscripts
depicted the car or float as drawn by a pair of ornamented unicorns.
By the fifteenth century, artists and artisans in Florence took up
the triumphal Lady-and-Unicorn theme in prints and in the deco-
ration of cassoni (wedding chests) and deschi da parto (trays painted to
celebrate the birth of a child), where the imagery was connected with
marriage and used to emphasize the bride’s unblemished devotion.
Pudicizia, in this context, did not mean celibacy, but purity, modesty,
and fidelity – that is, all of the wifely virtues. In presenting the uni-
corn with its muzzle in the lady’s lap, a drawing by Leonardo in the
British Museum is especially close to cassone and print depictions of
the theme. Leonardo’s Oxford study was thus likely a second take on
the subject, as he shows the unicorn, no less smitten with his lovely
captor but kept on a very short leash.
17.Leonardo as Portraitist
and Master of the Visual Pun
A lthough the GINEVRA DE’ BENCI commission probably

gave Leonardo only limited access to the Medici court
during his first period in Florence, the success of the work firmly
established his credentials as a portraitist and led to equally impor-
tant projects: the Mona Lisa or La Gioconda, a portrait of the wife
of the wealthy Florentine silk merchant and civic leader Francesco
del Giocondo, as well as an elegant portrait of the noble Milanese
lady, Cecilia Gallerani (fig. 46). From Vasari, we know that Leonardo
also drew (much later) a portrait of the famous merchant-explorer
Amerigo Vespucci, for whom America was named. The artist’s rela-
tionship with Vespucci, who was portrayed, according to Vasari, at
an advanced age, may have been long term. Both spent most of their
youth and early adulthood in Florence. Vespucci (a cousin by marriage
of the tragic beauty Simonetta) was only a year older than Leonardo,
and his father, from a family of wine and silk merchants, was also a
Medici notary. More significantly, the young men were kindred spir-
its – boldly inquisitive with strong interests in “natural philosophy”
(science), geography, and cartography. Over time, they formed enough
of a friendship that Vespucci gave Leonardo a book on geometry, a
most extravagant present.
The explorer would have imparted to the artist not only firsthand
observations about the fauna and flora of the Old and (later) New
World but also wonderful misinformation of the most sensational
kind. He told of cannibals in America who had consumed hundreds
of people, including women and children, and had salted human hams
(prosciutti umani). Open-minded and somewhat hedonistic, Vespucci
relished reporting the sexual customs of the native women, who, he
said, offered themselves to any man and injected their partners’ penises
113
Figure 46.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Portrait of Cecilia
Gallerani (Lady with
an Ermine), c. 1485,
oil on panel, Cracow,
Czartoryski Museum.
Nimatallah/Art
Resource, NY.
with toxins to make them swell to more satisfying proportions. With

barely concealed admiration he concluded that “[among the natives]
there is no private property; everything is owned in common. With
neither king nor governor each man is his own master. They have
as many sexual partners as they desire – . They have no temples, no
religion, worship no idols. What else can I say? They live according to
nature.” Leonardo would have listened to Vespucci’s words with rapt
attention and, perhaps, a sense of affirmation for his own unconven-
tional attitudes.
Unfortunately, attempts to identify Vespucci’s face among the
numerous heads Leonardo drew in his notebooks over the years have
proved futile. Extant portraits of the explorer vary greatly in appear-
ance, some showing a husky man, others a gaunt, elderly person in
profile, with eyes set especially high on his face. Although the sec-
ond type (seen in an oft-reproduced painting in the Uffizi and in
17. Leonardo as Portraitist and Master of the Visual Pun 115
Figure 47.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Rebuses, c. 1487–90,
Castle, Royal Library.

C 2010 Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth II.
engravings) might actually derive, ultimately, from Leonardo’s lost

portrait, none of his drawings corresponds to it closely.
So far as we know, the Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci was the first
example of what became one of Leonardo’s more unusual “literary”
pursuits. Some years later, in his Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (or Lady
with an Ermine) fashioned at the behest of the Milanese Duke Ludovico
Sforza, whose mistress she was, Leonardo again demonstrated his keen
wit; that work, like the Ginevra with its juniper, contains a prominent
visual pun. On one level, the tense ermine alludes to Cecilia’s politely
restrained, kinetic intellect as well as to her purity; both the Fior di
virtù and Leonardo’s own bestiary celebrate the animal for its “nobility”
and supposedly exceptional hygiene. However, Cecilia’s pet also makes
punning reference to her last name; the Greek word for the animal
is “galée.” Similarly, the reticent smile of the Mona Lisa, coaxed or
Figure 48.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Madonna of the Yarn-
winder, c. 1501, oil on
panel, Drumlanrig
Castle, Collection of
the Duke of Buccleuch.
Snark/Art Resource,
NY.
invented by the artist, may have been meant as a pun; her name, “La
Gioconda,” means the “jocund” or “cheerful” woman.
Visual puns and rebuses – amusing puzzles that depend on the
assonance of words that have different meanings (serial visual puns,
really) – would become a hobby of sorts for Leonardo. A double-
sided page (fig. 47), preserved at Windsor Castle, is completely covered
with more than 130 tiny rebuses that Leonardo contrived, probably
the lone surviving specimen of several such sheets; just a half-dozen
small scraps remain from some of those missing pages. These quasi-
cryptic pictographs were as close to a “code” as anything Leonardo
would ever devise, as he challenged the sonnet writers and courtiers Figure 49.
Detail of “Yarnwinder”
in their own arena of clever word games. rebus at upper left of
Many of Leonardo’s rebuses are short, comprising only two or fig. 47. (Reversed for
legibility) The Royal
three images. A doodle of a sage plant (in Italian, salvia) next to Collection C 2010
the word “me” forms the imploring “salvi a me” or “save me!”; the Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth II.
sketch of a lion (leone) guarding some flames (signifying “burning” or
“arde”) and two tables (deschi) creates the term “lionardeschi,” the name
Leonardo’s followers were called; and a drawing of a holy or pious cat
(pia gatta) with wings engenders the Italian sentence “pia gatta vola” –
“pious cat flies” – or, when said quickly, the phrase “piang’ a tavola,”
which can mean either “cry at the table” or “painted on panel.” Other
of Leonardo’s rebuses were a little more ambitious and clever, such as
the fishhook (amo, in Italian) he drew beside a musical score, with part
of the vocal musical scale “ut re mi fa so la.” In the Middle Ages and
Renaissance, this scale, or solmization, invented by a Tuscan, Guido da
Arezzo, in the eleventh century, comprised only these six notes, and
“ut” took the place of “do.” The artist’s word-image reads: l’amo re
mi fa sol la [za] re, or l’amore mi fa sollazzare – “love gives me pleasure”
or “love amuses me.” The second, more literal, translation would be
in keeping with Leonardo’s playfully cynical attitude, evident in his
aforementioned slur on romance and procreation.
It seems that Leonardo even managed to integrate a rebus into at
least one of his religious pictures. The eponymous prop of his Madonna
of the Yarnwinder (c. 1501; fig. 48) appears to derive from one of the
visual puns on the Windsor sheet. At the upper left of the page is a
series of thumbnail sketches (fig. 49), with accompanying inscriptions,
that represent from right to left: a pear tree (pero), a saddle (sella), a
woman with a sail (fortuna – a personification of fortune), two notes
on a musical stave (mi and fa), a fern (felce), the letters “tal,” a face (viso),
and a black yarnwinder (aspo nero). When recited together, Leonardo’s
word-pictures form the whimsical sentence, “Pero se la fortuna mi fa

felice tal viso asponerò!” – “However, if fortune makes me happy, I will
show such a face!” The words “aspo” and “nero” merge to make the
exclamatory word/phrase “asponerò” – “I will show.”
Placed prominently in Leonardo’s painting, the word-image
“asponerò” has a special resonance. In the picture, the Christ Child not
only eagerly seizes the instrument, but, with his left hand, emphatically
points heavenward – a gesture, often associated with John the Bap-
tist, that indicates “I will show” the way to redemption. Further, the
bold motion of the child’s arm, proximate and parallel to the crosslike
yarnwinder, suggests that this salvation will come through his sacri-
fice. The painting was intended for the esteemed French statesman
and diplomat Florimond Robertet, a polyglot who much appreciated
this sort of wordplay and owned other pictures with imbedded visual
puns. One of his personal heraldic devices featured pruned, flowering
branches or fleurs émondes, an allusion to his Christian name. It must
have occurred to Leonardo that such nominal word combinations
were not so different from the clever, bogus etymologies of saints’
names that he had read as a youth in the Golden Legend.
Although Leonardo’s rebus in the Madonna of the Yarnwinder was
perhaps unprecedented, it would not remain unique in sixteenth-
century European painting. The Lombard artist Lorenzo Lotto
inserted in his Portrait of Lucina Brembati (c. 1518–20) the well-known
rebus of a moon (luna) divided by the letters “ci”; and the German
painter Hans Holbein’s French Ambassadors (1533) includes the famous
anamorphically distorted skull, a momento mori, or reminder of death,
which is also probably a pun on the artist’s name: hohl Bein, or hol-
low bone. By the third quarter of the sixteenth century, rebuses were
common enough in Italian emblems (devices or coats-of-arms with
mottos) that the writer Giovanni Andrea Palazzi, regarding them as
low-minded and, possibly, as a French import, felt the need to dispar-
age them in his Discorsi sopra l’imprese (Discourses on Devices).
Any francophobia aside, Palazzi was probably right in assign-
ing a French origin to the heraldic phenomenon. Visual puns and
rebuses had been popular features in the imprese or devises of France
for centuries. Since at least the time of King Louis Le Jeune, who,
in the twelfth century, ordered for his son, Philip Augustus, a blue
dalmatic sewn with gold fleurs-de-lys, a flower whose name – as
Fleur de Loy – played on his own, visual puns were ubiquitous in
French heraldry. Throughout the Middle Ages and early Renaissance,

similar puns appeared on countless French chivalric shields, called
armes parlantes for their phonetic character, including those of Enguer-
rand de Candávène, a count of St. Pol in the late twelfth century,
whose escutcheon bore a sheaf of oats (canne d’avoine), and Gui de
Munois, a thirteenth-century monk of St. Germain d’Auxerre, whose
clever seal featured a cowled ape in the sky, rubbing its back with both
hands – a rebus that could be recited as “singe-air-main-dos-serre” (mon-
key [in the] air [with his] hand squeezes [his] back). Two centuries
later, the Renaissance chronicler Jean Juvenal des Ursins reported
that, in 1416, the dauphin Louis emblazoned his standard with a rebus
comprising a golden letter “K,” a swan (le cygne), and a golden “L”
to proclaim his romantic interest in a certain young woman of the
Casinelle family, one of his mother’s ladies in waiting.
Leonardo’s verbal punning and compilation of rebuses were thus
not merely idle amusement but had practical application – and, for
him, career-enhancing potential. He would find the French courtly
pretensions of the Medici chivalric jousts and Florentine literati in
the northern Italian city of Milan as well. There the tyrant Ludovico
Sforza, with a consummate narcissism worthy of royalty, commis-
sioned dizzyingly complex, literary conceits and pictorial allegories
that honored him and his rule. Called Il Moro, or “The Moor,” after
“Maurus,” his baptismal second name and dark complexion, Sforza
elicited from Leonardo the sycophantic, only semiclever sentence: “O
moro, io moro se con tua moralità non mi amori tanto il vivere m’é amoro” (“O
Moro, I shall die if with your goodness you will not love me, so bitter
will my existence be”) – a literary display that employs five punning
variations on “moro” in sixteen words. The artist also contrived visual
puns for Sforza, featuring a mulberry tree (morus in Latin). Of course,
such talents would have been no less appreciated when Leonardo, at
the end of his life, secured employment in Robertet’s milieu, at the
French court of King Francis I.
18. The Young Sculptor
I n the period just before or after leonardo finished his

portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, that is, the late 1470s or early
1480s, he may have turned his attention, for a brief time, to sculpture.
A growing consensus of scholars believes that he was probably respon-
sible for the pensive, terracotta Bust of the Young Christ in an Italian
private collection (fig. 50). Although the attribution to Leonardo must
remain tentative, because no other sculpture by him survives for com-
parison and the piece is completely undocumented, certain aspects of
the work point to his hand. The facial type and handling of the hair
suggest that the sculpture comes from someone trained in the Verroc-
chio shop; comparisons can be made to Verrocchio’s terracotta bust
of Christ in a private collection in London and to the physiognomies
of the master’s David (Bargello Museum), Christ and Saint Thomas,
and, especially, in the pronounced asymmetry of the eyes and queerly
bulging eyelids, his Christ of the Crucifixion (c. 1470–75; fig. 51), also
in the Bargello.
Yet, typical of Leonardo, the Young Christ has been invigorated
in a novel way – the head is turned, breaking the usual symmetry
of such busts (as Verrocchio would do in his terracotta portrait of
Giuliano de’ Medici of c. 1478), and Christ’s expression has been
“humanized,” made momentary and unquiet. With eyebrows raised
and eyes lowered, he seems to be intellectually assimilating something
he has just observed or mulling over a response to something that he
has just heard, as if caught up short in his discussion with the elders in
the temple, recounted in the Gospel of Luke (2:46–50). In his personal
reflection on Christ, Leonardo, as one might expect, imagines him
to be similarly thoughtful and questioning, as much the reasoning
philosopher, the Old Testament teacher as Savior or healer.
121
Figure 50.
Leonardo da Vinci
(attributed to), Bust
of the Young Christ, c.
1478–80?, terracotta,
Rome. Reproduced by
kind permission of the
Heirs of Luigi Gallandt
and Sotheby’s.
The passage in Luke is the only biblical account of Jesus’ matura-

tion, reporting that, in just three days, the twelve-year-old had remark-
ably increased in “wisdom and stature.” In this respect, Leonardo’s
bust would have served as an appropriate coming-of-age present for a
young man who had reached adulthood (like Renaissance paintings of
Hercules at the Crossroads and the Dream of Scipio, which were intended
to invoke an adolescent’s choice between a life of virtue versus vice,
or duty over pleasure). The work may have had a special meaning for
the artist. Around the time of its execution, he was probably about
to separate from the Verrocchio shop and launch his independent
career.
The portrayal of Christ as an adolescent in a freestanding, sculp-
tural bust is also unusual, but it would not be entirely unexpected for
Leonardo, who pondered over religious subjects incessantly, often rein-
terpreting them, and who earlier, unconventionally, portrayed Saint
John the Baptist at that stage of life. It has not been sufficiently noted
that, despite occasional fits of irreverence, Leonardo was extremely
devout – both God-fearing and God-admiring – as his writings,
throughout his life, make abundantly clear:
I obey thee, O Lord, first because of the love that I ought

reasonably to bear thee; secondly, because thou knowest
how to shorten or prolong the lives of men.
18. The Young Sculptor 123
Figure 51.
Andrea del Verrocchio,
Detail of Head of Christ
in Crucifixion, c. 1470–
75, bronze, Florence,
Museo Nazionale del
Bargello. Polo Museale.
Fortune is powerless to help one who does not exert him-

self. That man becomes happy who follows Christ.
Falsehood is so utterly vile that, though it might praise the

great works of God, it offends against his Trinity.
The Lord is the Light of all things –.
The Creator does not make anything superfluous or defec-

tive.
Rejoice that the Creator has ordained the intellect to such

excellence of perception.
These thoughts, most of which he wrote only for himself, are at

odds with Vasari’s assertion that Leonardo’s “heretical frame of mind –
caused him not to adhere to any kind of religion, considering that it
was perhaps better to be a philosopher than a Christian.” The only

“heresy” of which we know is the artist’s deep skepticism with regard
to the biblical Deluge, because of his knowledge of the behavior of
natural bodies of water; “how,” he asked, “did the waters of so great
a Flood depart if it is proved they had no power of motion?”
19. The Madonna Litta
F rom leonardo’s passing mention about beginning “the two

Virgin Marys” and his copious drawings that often include
sketches for several projects on one sheet, one can fairly presume that
he liked to work on several things at once. This may have been partly
owed to his obsessive nature and been partly a habit he picked up from
Verocchio, who, we know, enjoyed moving back and forth between
concurrent projects. Along with the Benois Madonna, Virgin and Child
with the Cat, Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, and, possibly, the Bust of
Christ, Leonardo probably devoted some time in the very late 1470s,
and more focused attention in the early 1480s, to the conception of a
nursing Madonna in profile, known from a quick sketch on a sheet at
Windsor (c. 1478–79), which shows Mary both full-face and in three-
quarter view (fig. 3); an exquisite, metalpoint study for the Virgin’s
head (c. 1481; fig. 52); and a workshop picture, often attributed to his
follower Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (fig. 53).
The painting, referred to as the Madonna Litta (after the Milanese
collector, Count Antonio Litta, from whom it passed to the State Her-
mitage Museum, St. Petersburg), may have been started by Leonardo
in 1481 and then put aside when he became too involved with the
important commission for anAdoration of the Magi from the monks of S.
Donato a Scopeto. Boltraffio or another shop assistant painted most of
the work, all that is now visible, probably soon after Leonardo arrived
in Milan in 1482. He mentions in the brief “inventory” he made in
that year a “Madonna finished” (probably the Benois Madonna) and
“another, almost finished (maybe an exaggeration or self-deception),
which is in profile,” likely the Madonna Litta. Leonardo habitually
carried paintings, often incomplete, on his travels. In some cases, he
probably hoped to find spare time to finish them. In other cases, such
125
Figure 52.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Study for the Head of
the Virgin, c. 1481,
metalpoint heightened
with white on pale blue
prepared paper, Paris,
Louvre (2376). Erich
Lessing/Art Resource,
NY.
Figure 53.
Giovanni Antonio
Boltraffio (with
Leonardo da Vinci),
Nursing Virgin with
Goldfinch (Madonna
Litta), c. 1481–84, oil
on panel, St. Peters-
burg, State Hermitage
Museum. Scala/Art
Resource, NY.
19. The Madonna Litta 127
as the Mona Lisa, which he lugged to France and, probably, to Rome,

he apparently used the works as “display samples,” to demonstrate his
abilities to prospective clients.
Over the years, Leonardo scholars have fiercely debated whether
the Madonna Litta should be assigned to the master or his pupil. How-
ever, the uninspired essays in landscape and costume, as well as the
evenly “licked” finish of the picture, surely betray an inferior hand.
Whereas Leonardo’s shadows always appear to be gently wafted over
the surfaces of flesh and fabric, here they are regularized and have the
aspect of a stain. Despite this extensive intervention of an assistant, the
general design of the picture and, especially, the complicated, twisting
pose of the Christ Child must be attributed to the master. Leonardo
also would have stipulated the inclusion of the symbolic goldfinch,
cozily and ominously tucked into the breach between mother and
child.
20.The Adoration of the Magi
and Invention of the
High Renaissance Style
P robably thanks to his father once again, leonardo

obtained a commission in 1481 to paint an Adoration of the
Magi for the monastic church of S. Donato a Scopeto, outside of
Florence (fig. 54). Certainly, the odd financial circumstances of the
project point to Ser Piero’s notarial involvement; a saddle manufac-
turer bequeathed to S. Donato an endowment for a painting for the
high altar and at the same time left a dowry for his granddaugh-
ter. The scrupulous Ser Piero would have foolishly staked his good
name and standing, as the official notary of the patrons, in rec-
ommending his brilliant but unreliable son for the job. Ser Piero’s
tax records may be relevant. These indicate that he had moved
with a new (fourth) wife to a house on the via Ghibellina and
had stopped supporting Leonardo financially by 1480 – a reason-
able decision in light of Leonardo’s age (twenty-seven or twenty-
eight) and the fact that Ser Piero had two other legitimate children
to look after. Almost predictably, Leonardo’s work on the monu-
mental panel was left incomplete; he never progressed beyond the
underpaint stage. Nevertheless, even in its unfinished state, the pic-
ture must be considered a conceptual masterpiece, and the many
extant studies for the work reveal the enormous amount of energy –
in concentrated and original thought – that Leonardo devoted to the
composition.
Representing both the beginning and epitome of the High Renais-
sance style in Florence, the picture is painstakingly composed so that
every element – every figure, every gesture, and every symbol – con-
tributes dynamically to the meaning of the work. Leonardo believed
that, as in nature, form must perfectly follow function: style should
be exactly appropriate to content, no actor and no action unnecessary
129
or redundant, each gesture the most compelling manifestation of an

emotion. He once wrote:
Every smallest detail has a function and must be rigor-

ously explained in functional terms that are in accord with
nature as opposed to the postulates of the ancients. Human
ingenuity – will never discover any inventions more
beautiful, more appropriate or more direct than nature,
because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is
superfluous.
Just as the Munich and Benois Madonnas concerned the themes

of sight and insight, his carefully conceived Adoration of the Magi is
spatially organized according to the perceptions of the actors and their
degree of enlightenment. The three Magi, who recognize the infant
as the Savior, form a compact triangle with the Virgin and Child
on the surface, or picture plane, of the painting. Meanwhile, those
actors that have an instinctive but unspecified awareness of the child’s
divinity create a semicircle, excavating a shallow space, around the
triangle. Some appear disoriented; others seem blindly to gaze, eyes
shielded, into a bright light. The heroic figures at each corner of the
composition search for answers to explain this mysterious spiritual
presence: the older man or seer at far left, in deep contemplation,
looks within – as those around him seek his wisdom; his counterpart,
the young man at right, possessing less knowledge of the world, looks
without – beyond even the universe of the picture.
To the right of center, a man recoils, hand raised, as a young
tree miraculously springs from age-old stone, a double allusion to the
wooden cross on Golgotha and the new spiritual life on earth under
Christ, rooted in the Old Testament bedrock of the Jews. Removed
from the sacred knowledge and geometry of the lower half of the
composition, the small, combative, background figures coexist within
a discrete and mathematically generated, perspective space, unobser-
vant and wholly ignorant of the historical event before them. The
themes to which Leonardo alluded in his early Madonnas now serve,
in a brilliant summation, to integrate the entire structure and narrative
of the work.
When such a lucid articulation and equilibrium are attained in a
pictorial scheme, a painting is sometimes said to be “classical.” That is,
the work recalls, in a general sense, the consummately calm sculptures
of fifth-century (b.c.) Athens, such as Myron’s Discus Thrower or the
20. The Adoration of the Magi and Invention of the High Renaissance Style 131
Figure 54.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Adoration of the Magi,
metope reliefs of the Parthenon, in which difficult poses effortlessly 1481, oil on panel, for
find balance and opposing forces are resolved or suavely contained S. Donato a Scopeto,
now Florence, Uffizi.
within a rational, geometric framework. However, Leonardo’s classi- Alinari/Art Resource,
cism is not a recollection but a parallel development – the result of NY.
similar intentions rather than imitation. For during his early years in
Florence, his access to the vocabulary of antique art, like his access
to Greek and Latin, was extremely limited. Whereas Lorenzo the
Magnificent possessed a respectable collection of ancient coins and
carved gems, he apparently had only about half a dozen significant
antique sculptures. These works – the mythological figures of Marsyas
and Priapus, a Boy with a Bird, marble busts of the Roman emper-
ors Agrippa and Augustus, and a bronze Head of a Horse – were far
different in spirit from “classical” fifth-century Greek sculpture and
Figure 55. provided, at any rate, only sparse and fragmentary examples for study.
Detail of Figures
to the Right of the
The serene poise and restrained energy of the ancient Greek master-
Virgin and Child in pieces of Myron, Phidias, or Polykleitos, which Leonardo’s art evokes,
fig. 54. Erich Lessing/
were completely unknown to him.
Art Resource, NY. Although not obvious on first inspection, Leonardo’s point of
departure for the Adoration was once again the Pollaiuoli Shooting of
Saint Sebastian (fig. 23). From that picture, he derived the notion of
dividing the painting into two realms of action: a triangle of figures in
the foreground bounded by a dark semicircle and a distant panorama
of horsemen linked, in their linear dispersal, to the horizon. Following
the Pollaiuoli, Leonardo placed a tree at center, surrounded by figures
that mirror one another’s poses (a much-renowned feature of the
brothers’ picture), with grand classical ruins in the left distance, and a
rocky outcropping in the background at right. However, as we have
seen, he elaborated extensively on this framework, infusing each figure
with an individual personality and motivation and creating an entirely
new, compositional and symbolic cohesiveness.
The profound thought that Leonardo devoted to each actor is evi- Figure 56.
Leonardo da Vinci,
dent not only in the two standing “prophets,” as they are sometimes Studies for the Adoration
called, on either side of the composition, but even in the more sum- of the Magi, 1481, pen
and ink, Paris, Bib-
marily realized figures of the inner circle. To the immediate right of liothèque de l’Ecole
the Christ Child, a trio of heads sensitively conveys a spectrum of emo- Nationale Supérieure
des Beaux-Arts (424).
tions: quizzical irritation, fearfulness, and hesitant curiosity (fig. 55). Photo: Jean-Michel
Opposite them, a befuddled Saint Joseph cautiously peers from behind Lapelezie.
a rock over Mary’s (proper) right shoulder. He holds the lid to the
jar given to Christ by the elder magus, Melchior, who kneels directly
below, touching his face to the ground, as if weighted down, humbled,
by his full knowledge of the child’s identity. Behind Joseph, two beau-
tiful, vacuous youths who have just ridden in from the background
(sitting, indecorously, in intimate tandem on their horse) inquire cav-
alierly about the foreground gathering; the man whom they consult
points to the miraculous, robust tree that grows from solid rock. The
three young men closest to the tree appear celebratory: the youth
on the right indicates, with finger raised heavenward, that the newly
sprouted tree is the work of God; beside him, another man places his
cupped hands before the tree in a gesture denoting worship as much
as surprise; the youth farthest to the left, stationed behind the Virgin
Figure 57.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Figure Studies for the
1481, pen and ink,
Cologne, Wallraf-
Richartz Museum,
Graphische Sammlung,
no. Z 2003. Collection
of Wallraf-Richartz
Museum, Rheinisches
Bildarchiv Köln.
and Child and directly in front of the distant palm, an ancient symbol
of victory over death or of resurrection, looks knowingly toward the
viewer.
Leonardo’s many preliminary studies in pen and ink reveal how
much he fretted over the expressions and gestures of all these figures.
In sheets preserved in Paris and London, one can see how carefully he
considered the attitude of the old “prophet” at left. On the Paris sheet
(fig. 56), he drew the brooding figure, first as a young man both with
and without a staff. He tried both possibilities again in his series of
studies in London, arriving at a figure that approximates the old seer
of the painting in gravity of stature and thought. Interspersed among
Figure 58.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies of Hands for the
1481, metalpoint,
Windsor Castle, Royal
Library (12616). The
Royal Collection

C 2010 Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth II.
these sketches are his ideas for numerous other witnesses, generally
more animated and upright than those he would choose to populate
the foreground of the Uffizi picture – presumably deciding in the end
that if the ancillary figures were too busy and prominent, they might
distract from the principal drama. For those figures in the painting
that bow and genuflect in wonder before the Holy Family, Leonardo
looked to the varied studies he had made on two sheets now preserved
in Cologne and the Louvre (fig. 57). The extensive repertoire of
poses on these pages affords us a tantalizing glimpse of the obsequious
choreography of Renaissance court manners. Leonardo also created
a number of studies of elegantly expressive hands for the Adoration
on a double-sided sheet at Windsor Castle (fig. 58). He would review
these and make many more “talking-hand” drawings when, more than
a dozen years later, he composed his Last Supper for Santa Maria delle
Grazie in Milan. His fluency in the language of hands was, perhaps,
Figure 59. due in part to his scrutiny of the gestures of the deaf, a practice he
Leonardo da Vinci,
Perspective Study for Back- recommended to other artists in his Treatise on Painting.
ground of the Adoration of As we have observed, Leonardo conceived the distant background
the Magi, 1481, metal-
point, pen and ink with figures of the Adoration of the Magi as inhabitants of an independent
wash, Florence, Uffizi realm, with its own internal perspective or spatial logic and velocity
(436E). Alinari/Art
Resource, NY. of activity. To this end, he actually created a large, independent, com-
positional study for the background scene, rendered with a fastidious
linear grid, which is still extant and in the Uffizi’s collection (fig. 59).
Untouched by Christ’s grace and subject to mundane, physical laws,
the figures of this separate, ancient world move about impulsively and
frantically, compelled by their bestial nature – running, clashing, nois-
ily blowing horns of alarm. As in the painting, they embody centuries
past of spasmodic, pointless conflict. The stairs of their temple lead
nowhere. Leonardo here seems to have improvised and expanded on
the traditional ruins motif in Italian paintings of the Adoration and
Nativity, in which the remnants of ancient buildings allude to the Old
Dispensation of the Jews, on which Christ will build his church. This
architectural symbolism was probably inspired by the biblical refer-
ence, in Isaiah (9:10), to the coming of the messiah: “the bricks have
fallen, but we will build with dressed stones.”
A few of the actors in Leonardo’s drawing try, unsuccessfully, to
control frightened horses, a Platonic metaphor for restraint of the
Figure 60.
Leonardo da Vinci,
1481, pen and ink
over leadpoint, Paris,
Louvre (RF 1978). Art
Resource, NY.
passions or amore bestiale; in his dialogue, Phaedrus, Plato likened the

soul to a spirited horse, reined in by horsemen or charioteers. These
figures would become, in the painting, the cavalrymen who seem to
be engaged in mock battle – perhaps Leonardo’s fond recollections of
Lorenzo’s and Giuliano’s lavish jousts of 1469 and 1475, full of pomp
and harmless fury. In portraying pagan antiquity, the artist appears
to have consulted as a model an ancient bronze Head of a Horse in
Lorenzo the Magnificent’s collection. Leonardo’s horses here, and in
subsequent works, have that antique sculpture’s exceptionally thick
neck, unnaturally rounded where it joins the crown of the head, and
sometimes the distinctive tuft of hair, tied with a cord, at the front of
the mane.
Interestingly, another preliminary compositional drawing for the
Adoration, now in the Louvre, reveals that, at one point in the design
process, Leonardo considered depicting an ancient, sacrificial proces-
sion in the background (fig. 60). Although difficult to decipher, the
parade of small figures moves toward an altar, where a (bovine?) car-
cass has been deposited and pierced with a lance – a scene possibly
inspired by an antique Roman relief. Correspondingly, the Virgin,
in the drawing as in the painting, serves as a central “altar” at which
Christ is worshipped. Thus, the drawing directly associates the blood
ritual of an ancient society with Christ’s sacrifice. On further consid-
eration, Leonardo elected to revise the background subject, perhaps
feeling that his unprecedented gloss made the theme of sacrifice too
explicit, undermining what should be the generally joyous mood of
an Adoration.
21.The Adoration and
Leonardo’s Military Interests
T he ultimate decision to represent sportive combat, rather

than ritual sacrifice, in the Adoration of the Magi (fig. 54) also
may have reflected the artist’s growing military interests. At virtually
the same moment that he conceived the painting, he was devot-
ing much time to the invention of machines of war and defense.
On one page of the Codice Atlantico, he designed a mechanism for
repelling ladders (of attacking soldiers) from a crenellated fortress wall,
not unlike those that surrounded Florence in the Renaissance. On
other sheets, Leonardo contrived huge catapults and colossal crossbows
(fig. 61) – the sprightly, scattered figures that operate those weapons are
similar to the cavalry of the Adoration. For these inventions, he prob-
ably would have studied any designs for war devices left to him by
Martini, reviewed Valturio’s military tracts, and consulted the archi-
tectural treatises of the ancient writer Vitruvius and contemporary
theorist Alberti, which included sections on fortifications and other
defense systems. There is no evidence that any of these ideas ever left
Leonardo’s drawing board. Further, in many instances, what appear to
be plausible machines, conscientiously planned down to the specifica-
tion of bolts and hinges, could not possibly have worked, due to the
intrinsic properties – such as tensile strength and flexibility – of wood
and the other materials involved.
No doubt, Leonardo’s military drawings and research responded to
the unease of Florence’s political situation at the end of the 1470s and
early 1480s. Following the Pazzi conspiracy, the city and surround-
ing areas of Tuscany came to be threatened by the Duke of Calabria,
who commanded the royal armies of Naples. Excommunicated by
Pope Sixtus IV, a Medici foe, Lorenzo the Magnificent found that
his allies, including the dukes of Ferrara and Milan, were reluctant to
139
come to his aid. The condemnation had followed an earlier punish-

ment: in 1476, when the Medici contract to control the papal alum
monopoly expired, management of the mines in the town of Tolfa
was turned over to a Roman company. Also in this period, England
had begun to produce its own cloth and was sending less wool to
Florence for processing. Consequently, the Florentine economy had
weakened considerably. Lorenzo may have doubted that he had suf-
ficient resources to field an effective army. An onslaught of plague
further undermined manpower and productivity. When, in the win-
ter of 1479–80, the Duke of Calabria’s soldiers advanced as far as Siena,
where they hunkered down because of inclement weather, Lorenzo
realized drastic action was required. He set off on a dangerous voyage
to negotiate directly with King Ferrante of Naples, arriving in the
southern Italian city around Christmas in 1479.
In Naples, Lorenzo reverted to his usual tactic of spreading
money around liberally – demonstrating his generosity by contributing
dowries for numerous poor girls and buying the freedom of a hun-
dred gallery slaves. He bought Florence’s continued liberty as well,
paying an “indemnity” to the Duke of Calabria and ceding to Naples
some valuable territories in southern Tuscany. During his two and a
half months at the Neapolitan court, the articulate and witty Lorenzo
seems thoroughly to have charmed the king. Although greeted as a
hero upon his return to Florence in 1480, the relief of the populace
was both premature and short-lived; before the year was over, a large
contingent of the Turkish army would threaten the Italian peninsula –
only the first of many threats that would come in waves. In the short
term, the attack of the infidels was a boon to Florence, drawing the
attention and armies of the Duke of Calabria and of the pope away
from Tuscany. However, as many Florentines feared, Lorenzo’s open-
purse diplomacy was not, in the long term, a sound policy, particularly
with respect to much wealthier foreign powers, such as France, which
was always able to enlist a formidable army. Within a dozen years, these
concerns proved to be well founded. Lorenzo’s successor, his politi-
cally inept son Piero, would relinquish the valuable port of Pisa and
other Florentine strongholds to the invading French forces of Charles
VIII in 1494, and an enraged local populace consequently expelled
the Medici.
Perhaps already contemplating his own departure from Florence, in
1481 Leonardo put aside any trepidation he had and focused intensely,
21. The Adoration and Leonardo’s Military Interests 141
Figure 61.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Design for a Colossal
Crossbow, c. 1481,
pen and ink, Milan,
Codice Atlantico (149r).
Art Resource, NY.
for a time, on the Adoration of the Magi. Ingeniously, he was able to

unify the epic range of activities – military as well as devotional –
through the geometries he imposed on the dense composition as
well as the comprehensive way in which he patterned it in light and
dark. This was a decisive break from the traditional Florentine method
of painting, which involved adding, coloring, and modeling in light
and shadow each figure or element, one at a time. Leonardo’s novel
approach here was to conceive the entire work as he would a large

study in pen, brush, and wash, broadly determining the placement of
the strongest lights and darks, and a few of the medium tones. By this
means, indicative of the comprehensive manner in which his mind
grasped the matter before it, he achieved an unprecedented coherence
in Renaissance painting, in terms of both design and idea, emphasizing
certain figures and symbols, suppressing others – an internal dialogue
in black and white. In this working method, color became almost an
afterthought, an embellishment on a rigorously intellectual scheme.
Only after countless revisions to his composition would Leonardo
introduce, as final touches, “superficially” attractive elements of color
and dashes of spontaneity – just as, only after careful preparations and
contributions by others, had he placed the finishing glint or sparkle
on a Verrocchio-shop picture. This form-over-color approach was
in accord with notions espoused by the Neoplatonists, particularly
Ficino, who wrote in his treatise, “On the Immortality of the Soul,”
that “sight cannot perceive colors unless it assumes [first] the forms
of these colors.” That is, color has no reality independent of a solid
object.
Powerful as the Adoration of the Magi was in its unfinished state,
Leonardo’s failure to consummate it must have displeased not only the
patrons but also his supportive father. Eventually, the S. Donato monks
were able to hire the painter Filippino Lippi, illegitimate son of Fra
Filippo by the nun, Lucrezia Buti, to take over the commission, and
he wisely availed himself of Leonardo’s drawings in creating his own
altarpiece, completed in 1496. No doubt glad to be relieved of the
long moribund project, Leonardo, then living in Milan, would have
gratefully instructed his father to donate his designs to Lippi, who had
earlier executed the altarpiece for the Palazzo della Signoria, when
Leonardo did not follow through on that work.
How Ser Piero, probably mortified, handled the S. Donato situa-
tion is not known. Leonardo, too, must have felt some embarrassment
along with regret, for by that time his rival and former colleague, an
artist of more limited talents, Perugino, had attained a sterling reputa-
tion and important patronage in Rome. He had executed a fresco for
Pope Sixtus IV in Old Saint Peter’s basilica around 1479, and he was at
work, at the pontiff ’s behest, on his monumental fresco, Christ Giving
the Keys to Saint Peter (c. 1480–82), in the Sistine Chapel. Impressive in
its spatial grandeur and narrative clarity, the work was, in truth, hardly
21. The Adoration and Leonardo’s Military Interests 143
more advanced than Leonardo’s juvenile Annunciation with respect to

the individual figures, the bland, facial expressions and stilted poses of
which were all too characteristic of Perugino’s conservative manner.
Nevertheless, although he was one of the younger artists participating
in the decoration, Perugino seems to have been authorized to devise,
with Botticelli, the overall scheme of the room, the most prestigious
project in Christendom at that time.
Meanwhile, Leonardo’s abandoned Adoration languished in the
house of his friend, Giovanni de’ Benci, the brother of Ginevra, and
later passed to Giovanni’s son, Amerigo. The contract for the altar-
piece had stated that the work was to be completed in twenty-four
months, thirty at most – a stipulation that, in hindsight, Leonardo
must have found infinitely amusing, both in light of his work habits
and the S. Donato monks’ resources. Very tight with funds, the monks
had asked Leonardo, contrary to custom, to spend his own money on
materials, rather than giving him an advance, and their last payments
to the artist had been in wine rather than cash.
22. Leonardo and Allegorical Conceits
for the Medici Court
O n the reverse of a sheet of “old seer” studies for the

Adoration, Leonardo furiously sketched an allegory that
deserves careful attention for what it may disclose about his rela-
tionship with Lorenzo de’ Medici in the early 1480s. The design
and theme, involving personifications of Fortune, Death, Envy, and
Ingratitude – all clearly labeled – would seem to be the artist’s own
inventions (fig. 62). As in most of Leonardo’s “left-handed” narra-
tives, the electric action flows from right to left. At far right, Fortune
(Fortuna), depicted as a woman with long, flowing hair, holds a child,
who blows a trumpet to extinguish the torch of Death (Morte), intent
on setting the branches of a tree on fire. Supporting Death on their
shoulders are the surprised figures of Envy (Invidia) and Ingratitude
(Ingratitudine). Roughly indicated at left, Ignorance (Ignoranza) and
Pride (Superbia), apparently complicit in the attempted arson, watch
in dismay as their plot is foiled.
A recent suggestion that the allegory alludes to the failed assas-
sination attempt on Lorenzo de’ Medici is intriguing. The drawing,
related in style to the highly charged background of the Adoration,
probably dates to the period of 1481–82, some time after Lorenzo
had returned to Florence from his successful diplomatic meeting in
Naples and after almost all of the prime conspirators in the Pazzi
scheme, including Baroncelli, had been caught and executed. The ink
sketch also may have followed the shocking revelation of yet another
plot to murder Lorenzo in 1481. The tree, according to this line of
speculation, would be a laurel, the hardy plant that Lorenzo took as his
personal emblem and that subsequently became a symbol of Medici
endurance and dynasty. When not writing about laurels and other
natural elements in his poetry, Lorenzo often featured Fortuna as a
145
Figure 62. principal theme. Therefore, Leonardo may have created the drawing
Leonardo da Vinci,
Allegory with Fortune and to demonstrate his loyalty and to curry favor with the beleaguered
Death, c. 1481, metal- Lorenzo, for whom he would have provided the captions (although
point, pen and ink with
wash on pink prepared written in reverse, easily read), a most atypical concession on the artist’s
paper, London, British part.
Museum (1886-6-9-42).

C The Trustees of the It is perhaps of some significance that the extinguished-flame motif
British Museum/Art recollects and transforms the theme that Sandro Botticelli employed
Resource, NY.
six years earlier in his standard for Giuliano’s joust. In contriving the
allegory, Leonardo may have felt that he was competing for attention
with Botticelli, who, by that time, had probably already begun to con-
sult with Medici court literati about the content of his mythological
paintings of Primavera (Spring) and Pallas and the Centaur, commis-
sioned by Lorenzo’s second cousin, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco (both
pictures now in the Uffizi). In Leonardo’s mind, the award to Botti-
celli of the contracts for those major works may have signaled that his
colleague was solidifying his position as the Medici family’s painter of
choice. The allegories were to serve as decorative centerpieces for the
household the patron would soon establish with a new wife.
More disconcerting still for Leonardo would have been the real-
ization that Botticelli, a tanner’s son, was the favored artist for pictures
22. Leonardo and Allegorical Conceits for the Medici Court 147
Figure 63.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies of Figures of
Fortune and Fame, Shields
around a Flaming Tree
Stump, c. 1481, pen and
ink with wash, London,
9-15-482). C The
Trustees of the British

Museum/Art Resource,
NY.
of a highly intellectual and philosophical nature, such as the Primavera,

layered with classical allusions and oblique marital references that the
Neoplatonists of the court had provided. The general perception in
Florence may have been that Botticelli was the best painter for erudite,
classical subjects and Leonardo for scenes and details of natural beauty.
As we previously noted, Verrocchio and his shop hardly ever tackled
or developed much of a reputation for rendering antique subjects.
Writing around 1488, one proud citizen of Florence, Ugolino Verino,
compares Botticelli to the ancient Greek painter Apelles, known for
his complex allegories, and Leonardo to the antique master Zeuxis,
remembered for painting on a wall a bunch of grapes so lifelike that
birds pecked at them. If this was the common view of the two artists,
then Leonardo must have been further demoralized when he saw the
finished Primavera, in which Botticelli showcased his skills in landscape

and still-life, painting no fewer than thirty distinct species of plants
and flowers.
Botticelli’s influence again proved inescapable when, around the
same time, Leonardo struggled to devise another allegory, perhaps
related to his Fortune and Death sheet. On a drawing in the British
Museum (fig. 63), marked by fits and starts, he developed a scenario
featuring Fame and Fortune. As always, his “thinking on paper” spilled
from right to left and from bottom to top. He began at lower right
with the figure of Fortune, precariously balanced on toe-point, an
unpredictable, shifting wind blowing her long hair forward and the
gown from her chest. With what appears to be a round buckler,
she extinguishes a fire that blazed through a pile of shields, war tro-
phies assembled around a tree stump. Inspecting what he had drawn,
Leonardo must have realized that the viewer would not easily grasp the
meaning of the flaming shields – they probably stood for military fame
– and that the conceit of the dropped dress was less than inspiring.
Commencing again at top right, he quickly sketched Fortune in
stylus and then started to retrace his lines in pen and ink. He advanced
only as far as the head and shoulders when he suddenly had a minor
inspiration (or misgiving) and decided to represent a personification
of Fame, at left. Fame, he wisely concluded, albeit unoriginal, would
be a more elegant surrogate for a smoking mound of battle souvenirs.
Once committed to the figure of Fame, he let his pen and brush fly
with abandon, realizing her in a painterly flourish of ink washes. In
the process, Leonardo cannibalized the toe-point pose of (the lower)
Fortune. Thus, if he wished to avoid monotony, he would have needed
to find a different way to complete the figure he had begun at upper
right. For whatever reason, he did not address the issue, and his ideas
seem to have progressed no further. Unfortunately, he appears never
to have translated into paint his glorious figure of Fame, which recalls
certain Verrocchio angels and, more strongly, in pose and propulsion,
those of Botticelli – a grudging tribute on Leonardo’s part. In their
sweeping movements, the Fame and Fortune of the drawing also
recollect the mingling women who enliven the background of his
Adoration of the Magi.
If Leonardo’s first allegory of Fortune referred to Lorenzo, then
one logically may wonder whether the British Museum drawing was
intended to honor his brother, Giuliano, because the only measure of
22. Leonardo and Allegorical Conceits for the Medici Court 149
fame the young man had achieved, before Fortune snuffed out his life,
was based on his military prowess or, better to say, “aptitude.” His coat-
of-arms (impresa) was a broncone, a tree stump, with flames shooting
out from where the branches had been cut off. Vasari describes it,
in one place, as a troncon tagliato, or severed trunk. Discernable on
Leonardo’s crested, trophy shields are a rampant-lion device and what
might be a fleur-de-lys. Neither motif was specifically associated with
Giuliano, but both were symbols of Florence – the lion a variation
on the marzocco, the heraldic, leonine emblem of the city. Although
Leonardo would later invent his own, imaginative allegorical language,
at this point in his career, he was in no position to improvise extensively
on established Medici imagery.
23. Early Ideas for the Last Supper
W hile conceiving the ill-fated ADORATION OF THE MAGI,

Leonardo, who always played out myriad variations on
an idea or theme, also created numerous, vibrant drawings for an
Adoration of the Shepherds, Nativity, and Virgin of Humility (a northern
European convention in which Mary and the Infant Christ are shown
seated on the ground) – that is, the whole range of traditional, artistic
subjects that dealt with the first days after the Incarnation (fig. 64).
The fluidity of his mind was such that the subjects probably evolved
with the movement of his pen. This free flow of thought extended
as well to the disposition of Saint Joseph, who in some studies has
lost the sweet-natured puzzlement one usually sees in Renaissance
portrayals, appearing, instead, severe and admonitory. In contrast, on
other sheets, Leonardo joyfully imagined the attendant angels as the
most nimble and daring of aerial acts and the Christ Child and Saint
John as almost acrobatically inclined.
Very comparable squirming babies, no doubt rendered at approx-
imately the same time, appear in a remarkable series of studies by
Leonardo representing the Virgin and Christ Child with St. John the
Baptist, on a sheet now preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York (fig. 65). Touchingly, he has carefully observed and recorded
the movements of an infant who wishes to get off his back – struggling
mightily with hands and feet flailing, or else reaching up to his mother
in the hope that she will lift him. Although Leonardo appears never to
have translated into paint any of these lively figural groups, he would
revisit them years later when devising his majestic altarpiece known as
the Virgin of the Rocks (Louvre) and a long-lost picture of the mythical
Leda and the Swan, a mortal woman with the lascivious god Jupiter, in
avian disguise, surrounded by their newly hatched brood.
151
Figure 64.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Study for an Adoration of
the Christ Child, c. 1481,
pen and ink, Venice,
Gallerie dell’ Accademia
(256). Cameraphoto
Arte, Venice/Art
Resource, NY.
The seeds of another major painting were also sown among

Leonardo’s studies for the Adoration of the Magi – two spirited, pen-
and-ink sketches (c. 1481) for a Last Supper accompany Adoration draw-
ings on a sheet preserved in the Louvre (fig. 66). Presumably made
without a commission for a painting in hand or in mind, these Last
Supper studies, together with those for the Adoration, can be regarded
almost as a pictorial catalogue of various responses to divine reve-
lation or pronouncement. Imprints of a brief and spontaneous, cre-
ative ferment, the drawings would nevertheless endure in use, serving
Leonardo as stimuli or models for decades. At bottom left, he por-
trays an uncharacteristically agitated Christ, finger pointing and hand
on heart, announcing at the Last Supper that one of the apostles will
betray him. Just above, the apostle John, devastated by the news, buries
his face in his hands. At right, a lively group of discussants sits around a
table, prefiguring the dynamic interaction of the apostles in Leonardo’s
subsequent Last Supper designs and painting.
The artist’s decision to represent this most dramatic moment was
not, contrary to much that has been written, an innovation on his part.
23. Early Ideas for the Last Supper 153
Figure 65.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Designs for an Adoration
of the Christ Child, c.
1481–82, metalpoint
with pen and ink on
pink prepared paper,
New York, Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art
(17.142.1). Image copy-
right C Metropolitan
Museum of Art/Art
Resource, NY.
Again, Leonardo followed Florentine precedent, notably the Last Sup-

pers of Andrea del Castagno (1445–50) and Domenico Ghirlandaio
(1480), created for the refectories of Sant’ Apollonio and Ognissanti,
respectively. Indeed, Ghirlandaio’s recently completed picture may
have been the catalyst for Leonardo’s flickering thoughts on the sub-
ject. However, he chose to make the actors’ gestures more emphatic
and obvious than those of Ghirlandaio: as Leonardo would later advise,
“figures must be done in such a way that the spectators are able with
ease to recognize through their attitudes the thoughts of their minds.”
Ultimately, when he painted his famous Last Supper (c. 1495–97) for
the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, he chose not to
show Christ in the act of speaking but in the immediate aftermath,
just as Castagno and Ghirlandaio had done in their frescoes. Further-
more, like his predecessors, Leonardo portrayed Saint John in his early
Figure 66.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies of Four Male
Figures, Half-Length
Studies of Christ and St.
John, Studies of Figures in
Conversation at a Table, c.
1481, pen and ink over
leadpoint, Paris, Louvre
Resource, NY.
Louvre drawing and in later, preliminary studies for the mural, as over-
come by emotion and collapsed on the table (but not in the painting
itself, where John swoons to the left). John’s presence in the mural,
never questioned until recently (in popular literature), was required
not only by scripture but also by Leonardo’s need for dramatic, pic-
torial contrast, for the telling foil the wilting saint makes to the figure
of Christ, a calm axis of resolve.
By the time he worked on the Milan painting, Leonardo, through
experience and better-honed powers of observation, had learned a
good deal more about human anatomy, psychology, and physiological
reactions. Now almost invisible in the poorly preserved mural, but
Figure 67.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Head of Judas,
c. 1493–95, red
chalk on red-ochre
prepared paper, Windsor
(12547). The Royal
Collection C 2010
Her Majesty Queen

Elizabeth II.
seen clearly in his preparatory drawings (figs. 67 and 68), is the subtle
range of emotions he could capture, including his observations of vol-
untary and involuntary responses: the bulge of an artery in the neck
or vein in the forehead of the traitor Judas, trying unsuccessfully to
conceal his anxiety; the prominent Adam’s apple of James the Greater,
conspicuously rising with his emotion; the faces of vulnerability and
of denial, both conscious and unconscious. In shock, Matthew absent-
mindedly and pathetically busies himself with a fish on a plate; the
hands of some apostles pointlessly clutch their garments or hang in
desperation. Barely legible in the painting (more so in early repro-
ductive prints) is the network of nervously crossed feet beneath the
table.
Leonardo’s perceptive and keen focus on veins and arteries in the
preliminary drawings for the Last Supper is likely owed in part to his
familiarity with the writings of Aristotle, who was one of the first
to advance a psychophysical theory of emotions, connecting them
to cardiovascular manifestations. For the Greek philosopher, unaware
of the functions of the central nervous system, the brain had no
Figure 68.
psychological significance; he believed that the heart was the center of
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies for the Last the soul and of feelings, engendered by the warm blood that collected
Supper, c. 1493–95, red
there. He and his cardio-centric followers thought that blood, literally,
chalk, Venice, Gallerie
dell’Accademia (254). simmered in that organ when a person became angry. This became
Alinari/Art Resource,
a commonly held notion in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; even
NY.
the folksy little Fior di virtù quoted Aristotle in reporting that anger
“is a disturbance of the soul caused by a vengeful afflux of blood to
the heart.” According to similar reasoning, when an individual was
afraid or surprised, the warm fluid would “flee” from the brain and
the cooler, upper parts of the body to the heart, where it could induce
palpitations.
Although Leonardo knew of the nervous system and preferred to
locate the soul in the brain, he nevertheless concurred with Aristotle’s
estimation of the heart as the center for the blood and its “vital spirits.”
Thus, in rendering the engorged veins in the heads of the upset
apostles, Leonardo astutely noted the sudden movement of blood –
he simply had its direction incorrect. Such misconceptions would also
undermine the validity of his work when he attempted to “map out”
the vascular system in his anatomical drawings of that period. He
regarded it as an inverted branching tree, with sanguinary flow mainly
from top to bottom, rather than in a circulatory loop. Unfortunately

for the artist, a true understanding of the circulatory system, and the
functions of the heart, would not be attained until the seventeenth
century, with the empirical research of the English physician William
Harvey.
24. Leonardo and
the Saint Sebastian
C losely related in style to the early LAST SUPPER and

Adoration of the Magi studies and so, presumably, from the same
period (c. 1480–81) are a couple of small but vital drawings that
Leonardo made of Saint Sebastian, now preserved in Bayonne and
Hamburg (figs. 69 and 70). The black chalk sketch in Bayonne would
seem to be the earlier of the two studies; the frontal stance of the saint
there is repeated faintly in leadpoint in the Hamburg sheet, where it
serves as a starting point for further elaboration in wiry ink contours.
Although his extant studies are few and no painted Sebastians by him
survive, Leonardo seems to have become somewhat preoccupied with
the saint during his first Florentine period. The list he drew up of
his artistic possessions around 1482, shortly after settling in Milan,
mentions eight drawings of the saint.
According to legend, Sebastian was an officer of the Praetorian
Guard under the Roman emperor Diocletian in the third century.
He was ordered to be shot with arrows when he was discovered to
be secretly Christian. The popular subject would have been especially
attractive to Leonardo, as it was to other Renaissance artists, because
it afforded the opportunity to portray a full-length, standing male,
nearly nude. Images of Sebastian, who miraculously recovered from his
wounds, were almost always in demand due to the centuries-old belief
that he was a protector against plague, alleged in ancient times to be
caused by the arrows of the Greek god Apollo. Leonardo’s designs may
have been intended either for small-scale, private devotional paintings
or for ex-votos, pictures made in gratitude for deliverance from the
disease. Plague raged throughout Europe between 1478 and 1480,
and in late 1479, there was a devastating outbreak in Florence, which
159
Figure 69.
Leonardo da Vinci,
St. Sebastian,
c. 1480–81, black chalk,
Bayonne, Musée Bonnat
Resource, NY.
24. Leonardo and the Saint Sebastian 161
Figure 70.
Leonardo da Vinci,
St. Sebastian Tied to a
Tree, c. 1480–81, pen
and ink over leadpoint,
Hamburg, Kunsthalle
(21489). Bildarchiv
Preussischer Kulturbe-
sitz/Art Resource,
NY.
closed down workshops and took the lives of more than 20,000 people,
most buried in the cemetery of the hospital of San Martino della
Scala, including Verrocchio’s onetime master and friend, the sculptor
Antonio Rossellino and his two young sons.
No doubt, when Leonardo made his sketches, the painted Saint

Sebastians of the Pollaiuoli (fig. 23) and Botticelli (then in the church
of Santa Maria Maggiore) were in the back of his mind. However, the
tilted-back head and forked tree of Leonardo’s drawings suggest that,
paying private homage, he may have consulted as well the marble Saint
Sebastian (c. 1476–78) in the nearby town of Empoli by the respected
Rossellino – a tiny man with grand talents. Perhaps Rossellino’s mas-
terpiece, this life-sized Sebastian showed his prescient and profound
assimilation of Hellenistic Greek sculpture, offering an authoritative
model for those with similar ambitions.
Whatever his immediate sources, Leonardo obviously found the
usual, frontal pose of the saint wanting, and so experimented with at
least three other positions, twisting the head and legs in opposition to
the torso. In wishing to convey the saint’s struggle, the artist probably
looked for ideas to Lorenzo the Magnificent’s two prized, antique
sculptures of the satyr Marsyas bound to a tree. Although both sculp-
tures are lost, we know from written descriptions, other versions of
the works, sketches, and carved gems that one of these (inherited from
Cosimo) was a “hanging” Marsyas type, with arms fastened high on a
tree, and the other was “seated” – more leaning – against a tree trunk,
with legs bent and swiveled together to one side, similar to those of
the Hamburg Sebastian. Leonardo would have watched when Verroc-
chio, at the request of Lorenzo (who had acquired the piece himself),
restored and completed the fragmentary “seated Marsyas,” carving and
attaching new legs and arms, perhaps in 1477 or 1478. The stunning,
repaired Marsyas, realized in “stone the color of blood” with natural
white veins that simulated those of human flesh, must have made a
powerful impression on the young artist. So inspired, Leonardo much
enlivened his saint, arriving at the extreme, spiraling form of contrap-
posto, or counterpoise of limbs and weight, that would come to be
ubiquitous in the next century and celebrated – or condemned – as
the figura serpentinata, or serpentine figure.
25. Saint Jerome
W hen leonardo, in the waning years of the plague,

depicted another extremely popular male saint, the peni-
tent Jerome in the wilderness (fig. 71), he employed what is sometimes
called the “dark manner” of the Adoration of the Magi, where light
forms emerge from a tenebrous background. His powerful painting of
c. 1480–82, now in the Vatican, is probably contemporaneous with the
Adoration and was left in a similarly unfinished state. The Saint Jerome
may have been intended for the Benedictine church and religious
complex of La Badia in Florence, another long-standing institutional
client of Leonardo’s father. Perhaps not coincidentally, Filippino Lippi
supplied the monks there with a painting of the subject in the later
1480s; Lippi, it should be recalled, had earlier fulfilled Leonardo’s
abandoned commissions for the Palazzo della Signoria and S. Donato
a Scopeto.
At a certain point, Leonardo may have begun to recommend Lippi
for projects that he was unable to complete. As his works attest, the
younger artist well understood and sought to emulate the older master’s
innovations. Lippi’s compositional drawings show his desire to achieve
the intricate, comprehensive unity of Leonardo’s Adoration, and his
Badia Saint Jerome is reminiscent of the Vatican work. Leonardo must
have admired his abilities (and appreciated his imitation) and, perhaps,
felt a special bond with an artist who was similarly defined by his
illegitimate birth. Lippi, on at least one occasion, apparently tried to
reciprocate Leonardo’s goodwill and generosity, when, in 1500, he
asked him to take over a commission for an altarpiece for the church
of SS. Annunziata, a double-sided panel with a Deposition from the Cross
on the front and an Assumption of the Virgin on the back. (Reverting to
the usual pattern, Leonardo, for unknown reasons, aborted the project,
163
and several years later, Lippi executed the Deposition and Perugino the
Assunta.)
Aside from having coined the cautionary phrase “avoid like the
plague,” Saint Jerome was not, like Sebastian, associated with the dis-
ease. Nevertheless, Leonardo’s painting of the nobly suffering Jerome
would have offered some consolation and encouragement to febrile
victims of the illness. According to his letters, as a young person,
Jerome had retired for four years to the Syrian desert. There, after
a while, the severe heat, asceticism, and deprivation caused him to
experience vivid sexual hallucinations and intense lust, which he tried
to dispel by beating his chest. In his strength of will and reason, he
became an exemplar for the Benedictines and other monastic orders.
The Golden Legend, the apocryphal compilation of saints’ lives, relates
that during his retreat the compassionate, if crazed, Jerome also pulled
a thorn from the paw of a lion, thereafter his devoted companion
in the wilderness. Leonardo was faithful to the scene and conditions
described in Jerome’s vivid letters:
in that vast solitude which is scorched by the sun’s heat

and affords a savage habitation for monks – whenever I saw
some deep valley, some rugged mountain, some precipitous
crags, it was this I made my place of prayer, my place of
punishment for the wretched flesh. – My face was pale
from fasting, and my mind was as hot with desire in a
body cold as ice. Though my flesh, before its tenant, was
already as good as dead, the fires of passion kept boiling
within me.
Reacting to unseen powers, Leonardo’s lion roars as the emaciated

saint strikes his chest with a rock to drive out his own bestial and
carnal spirits. In one of his moralizing tracts on animals, Leonardo
wrote that, at the sound of a lion’s roar, “Evil flees away, shunning those
who are virtuous.” During the day, the artist would have observed and
drawn the Florentine pride of lions (symbols and mascots of the city)
stretching in their cages behind the Palazzo della Signoria. On most
evenings, he would have heard their ferocious sounds when he visited
his father’s house on the via Ghibellina.
Situated in the most isolated and barren wilderness imaginable, the
penitent Jerome beseeches God, to whom he bows in courtly fashion,
to witness his act of contrition. The vantage point of the picture, which
25. Saint Jerome 165
Figure 71.
Leonardo da Vinci, Saint
Jerome in the Wilderness,
c. 1480–82, oil on
panel, Vatican, Musei
e Gallerie Pontificie.
Scala/Art Resource,
NY.
implies that the viewer is on the ground before the self-humbled saint,
is unprecedented, as is our direct access to his private meditation. At
the same time, Leonardo establishes rapport, compositionally, between
the saint and the lion through their complementary arabesques, as well
as a visual analogy between the saint, seemingly excavated from stone
rather than painted, and the background rocks, traditional symbols of
endurance and faith. Although this latter connection is inadvertently
reinforced by the monochromatic, incomplete state of the picture,
it nonetheless points to Leonardo’s tendency to analogize, a way of
thinking that caused him to associate cloth folds and hair growth with
the movement of water, human veins with the root systems of plants,
and human faces and temperaments with those of animals.
Although out-of-doors, Jerome is oddly trapped within a confined
space, bounded by stone formations, a metaphor for his emotional
isolation and spiritual predicament. The looming rock arch behind
him is crudely suggestive of a tomb, and the round structure to his
immediate left vaguely resembles a well or baptismal font. (Some-
what counterintuitively, in the Bible, wells are commonly located in
the wilderness, as in Genesis 16:14.) If the painting were finished,
these features might less ambiguously allude to the themes of death,
ablution, and rebirth, and the small church, just faintly sketched in
the right distance, where the rocks open to the light, would more
clearly indicate the path to redemption. The building, redolent of
architectural designs by Alberti, also serves to remind the viewer of
the intellectual Jerome’s divine calling, through Pope Damasus, to put
“the offices of the Church in order,” as a church leader and admin-
istrator. He became one of the four fathers of the Western Church,
settling in the year 386 in Bethlehem, where he translated the Bible
into Latin. This is the version known as the “Vulgate,” which became
the official Catholic text.
In his geologically informed rendering of the rocky backdrop,
Leonardo has built on a very old landscape tradition. He was likely
measuring himself against, and perhaps in his own mind surpassing,
many of Florence’s grand old masters, such as Giotto and Masaccio,
who often painted massive stone formations in the backgrounds of
their pictures – theatrical sounding-boards for their narratives. He saw
those Florentine artists as commanding figures in the history of paint-
ing, who had advanced the discipline through their direct recourse to
nature. He also considered the periods immediately succeeding them
to be marked by decline, as subsequent painters, he believed, foolishly
looked only to other art rather than to nature. Leonardo’s historical
outline implies that he, a country boy like Giotto, was the leader of the
third great wave of art’s resurgence through commitment to nature.
In this way, he turned his provincial background into a virtue and
advantage. He wrote:
After these [artists] came Giotto the Florentine, and he –

reared in mountain solitudes, inhabited only by goats and
such like beasts – turning straight from nature to his art,

began to draw on the rocks the movements of the goats
which he was tending, and so began to draw the figures
of all the animals which were to be found in the country,
in such a way that after much study he not only surpassed
the masters of his own time but all those of many pre-
ceding centuries. After him art again declined, because all
were imitating paintings already done; and so for centuries
it continued to decline until such time as Tommaso the
Florentine, nicknamed Masaccio, showed by perfection of
his work how those who took as their standard anything
other than nature, the supreme guide of all the masters,
were wearying themselves in vain. Similarly I would say
about these mathematical subjects [contemporary paint-
ings heavily reliant on mathematical ratios and perspective
constructions] that those who study only the authorities
and not the works of nature are, in art, the grandsons and
not the sons of nature, which is the supreme guide of the
good authorities.
Leonardo’s views appear to have been influential, because the three

watershed periods of art that he defines exactly coincide with those
later identified by Vasari in his Lives of the Artists. There Giotto’s
work replaced the maniera greca of Byzantine-influenced, Italian art;
the painter Masaccio “swept away” the manner of Giotto (Ghiberti is
seen as the pivotal figure in sculpture); and Leonardo is saluted as the
creator of the “modern” style.
Interestingly, the specific touchstone for Leonardo’s Saint Jerome
was not, it seems, a renowned fresco or major altarpiece but, perhaps,
a small, illuminated initial by Francesco d’Antonio del Cherico on a
page in a mid-fifteenth-century manuscript version of Jerome’s Letters
(Epistulae) in the Medici collection. The illuminator presented the
saint, within the letter “D,” in much the same pose and before the
customary, rocky outcropping. Only the position of the right leg and
the hairstyle of the saint have been altered in Leonardo’s painting; he
was given the typical, bald head of Verrocchio’s St. Jerome. Leonardo’s
paraphrase would have flattered Lorenzo, the current owner of the
manuscript (purchased by his father, Piero), in acknowledging the
beauty and authority of the treasured work.
Figure 72.
Workshop Assistant,
after Leonardo da
Vinci, Study of a Studio
Model for Saint Jerome,
c. 1480–82?, silverpoint,
heightened with white,
on purple-gray prepared
paper, Windsor Castle,
Royal Library (12571).
C 2010 Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth II.
Leonardo’s probing exploration of Jerome’s muscle and bone

structures reveal his growing interest in human anatomy and causes
one to suspect that, by this time, he had had the opportunity to exam-
ine cadavers – perhaps some dissected by the brothers Pollaiuolo. It is
unlikely that he performed the dissection of a corpse, himself, until
two decades later, after he returned to Florence from Milan in the
early sixteenth century, and conducted an autopsy on a gentleman
said to have died a centenarian. Moreover, by imitating another of the
Pollaiuloli’s famed workshop practices, Leonardo was able to achieve
the very volumetric, sculptural quality of his figure of Jerome. That is,
like the brothers, he drew a posed studio model from both front and
back to understand better, one might say “stereometrically,” the struc-
ture of the body and its orientation in space. We know this because
there exists a copy after a lost drawing by Leonardo (fig. 72) that
shows his model for Jerome from behind, in basically the same pose
as the painted saint except for the turn of the head. In Renaissance
studio practice, the model used a pole to help him keep his left arm
raised for long periods. Were it not for the right-handed slant of the
hatching, the study, by an unidentified Leonardo assistant, could easily
be mistaken for the master’s – the drawing, otherwise, so scrupulously

follows the style of original.
Although Jerome’s facial type recalls Verrocchio-school depictions
of the saint, and the Pollaiuoli no doubt provided inspiration and mod-
els, Leonardo’s penitent recalls most strongly, in spirit, the sculptures
of Donatello. Above all, the Jerome finds its ancestry in Donatello’s
cadaverous Saint Mary Magdalene (now in the Museum of the Duomo,
Florence), a wooden sculpture of sublimely simulated decay. Leonardo
similarly portrays spiritual release through denial of the flesh – fasting
and abstinence – and, following Donatello, presents the saint as if he
had been weathered by elemental forces, the same forces responsible
for the ravaged landscape.
26. First Thoughts for the Virgin of
the Rocks and the Invention of
the Mary Magdalene-Courtesan Genre
A lthough the painting was never fully realized, saint

Jerome’s densely compact pose attained an important status
in Leonardo’s mind. The artist continued to improvise on the gesture
in several future works, particularly his two versions of the Virgin of
the Rocks, where it evolved (as can be easily traced in his drawings;
see figs. 65 and 73) into the inclusive, sheltering pose of Mary and
where Leonardo’s mysterious, geological formations reappeared as well
(fig. 74). Infrared-light examination of the second Virgin of the Rocks
(now in the National Gallery, London) reveals some relevant chalk or
charcoal drawing on the panel, beneath the paint layers; these outlines
indicate that, before picking up his brush, Leonardo briefly considered
a pose for Mary that was very close to Jerome’s.
Recycled from the Saint Jerome, the tall, cavernous stone formations
in the Virgin of the Rocks would have taken on new meanings in their
new context – metaphorical allusions, traditionally associated with
Mary, from the biblical Song of Songs (2:14):
My dove in the cleft of the rock, in the cavities of walls,

reveal your countenance to me.
One suspects that the painting may also reflect, in its crepuscular
moment, seemingly haunted by the vestiges of rain clouds, other lines
from that passage:
for lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The
flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come –
until the day break and the shadows flee away, turn my
beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the
mountains –. (2:11–12 and 17)
171
Figure 73.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Detail of Sheet of Sketches
with a Nativity, c. 1481–
82, metalpoint with pen
and ink on pale blue
prepared paper, Windsor
(12560). The Royal
Collection C 2010
Her Majesty Queen

Elizabeth II.
In the spirit of these verses, Leonardo’s holy figures miraculously

materialize in quiet isolation, as if the first life on earth, with the
secret, sudden existence of lilies and deer. This is the time of day and
climate that the artist recommended in his Treatise on Painting, saying
in one place that “it is better to make [landscapes] when the sun is
covered by clouds, for then the trees are lighted up by the general light
of the sky and the general shadows of the earth”; and in another “you
should make your portrait at the hour of the fall of the evening when
it is cloudy or misty, for the light is then perfect.” In the Mona Lisa,
this worked to sympathetic effect. In its muted twilight, the brooding
26. First Thoughts for the Virgin of the Rocks 173
Figure 74.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Virgin of the Rocks,
1483–c. 1486, oil on
panel, Paris, Louvre.
Réunion des Musées
Nationaux/Art
Resource, NY.
Virgin of the Rocks harks back, beyond the Saint Jerome, to Filippo
Lippi’s strange and obscure Adoration for the old Cosimo (fig. 2).
Not long before leaving Florence for Milan, Leonardo seems to
have begun to plan a painting of yet another single saint, a half-length
portrayal of Mary Magdalene. Given his difficulties with complet-

ing time-bound, contractual commissions, one wonders whether he
began to consider producing such small pictures on speculation. This
was not a common practice in Florence at that time, but he was con-
cerned about an income: as we previously noted, Ser Piero had cut
off Leonardo’s “allowance” by 1480. He would not receive an inheri-
tance for some twenty-seven years – only after the death of his uncle
Francesco in 1507 and the resolution of an acrimonious lawsuit against
his seven half-brothers over the estate. A notary half-brother managed
to prevent Leonardo from receiving anything from his father, who died
intestate in 1504, but failed to keep the artist from inheriting a farm
and money from his uncle. That a possibly cash-strapped Leonardo
would consider such a speculative sales strategy is corroborated by
remarks he made later in a manuscript:
But see now the foolish folk! They have not the sense
to keep by them some specimens of their good work so
that they may say, “this is at a high price, and that is at a
moderate price and that is quite cheap,” and so show that
they have work at all prices.
Probably around 1481–82, Leonardo made two rapid, pen-and-ink

sketches (on a sheet now preserved in the Courtauld Institute Gallery,
London) of the Magdalene holding or opening a jar of unguent –
her traditional attribute, given that the Bible relates that she, among
Christ’s closest Galilean followers, anointed his feet with oil (fig. 75).
Although half-length pictures of her would become common
throughout Italy in the sixteenth century, in the Quattrocento such
representations were rare, confined almost exclusively to multipaneled
triptychs or polyptychs in which she is only one of several holy figures.
In fact, Leonardo’s idea, to present her in an independent, half-length,
“portrait” format, may be without precedent.
Although his studies are summary, one can discern that he wished
to show the Magdalene not as a haggard penitent, as Donatello had
done, but as the wealthy, promiscuous young woman turned prosti-
tute, described in the Golden Legend. His Mary wears sumptuous layers
of clothes, her hair is tousled, locks straying, and she grasps what looks
to be an elaborate and expensive jar. Her kind expression, barely indi-
cated, is that of the dulcis amica dei, the “sweet friend of God,” as the
amorously inclined Petrarch described her. Undoubtedly, the affluent
Figure 75.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies of Saint Mary
Magdalene, c. 1481–82,
Courtauld Institute
Gallery. The Samuel
Courtauld Trust, The
Courtauld Gallery,
London.
classes that purchased pictures, almost continuously expanding in

Florence throughout the Renaissance, would have more easily iden-
tified with this cordial, splendidly garbed Magdalene type.
The metamorphosis of Mary Magdalene from wretched hag to
beautiful companion of the Lord could only have occurred in the
time and place that it did. From the high-minded deliberations of the
Florentine Neoplatonists over the concepts of love and ideal pulchri-
tude emerged a veritable celebration of female beauty – vanquishing
centuries of medieval misogyny, during which a lady’s attractiveness
was suspiciously regarded as a lustful trap, an instrument of the devil.
Ficino’s elevated notions of amore platonico and of corporeal beauty as

a reflection of divinity filtered down into popular culture and, by the
beginning of the next century, engendered a publishing efflorescence
of love poems and sonnets. The nostalgia for chivalry, particularly
strong in the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent, also helped this cult
of feminine beauty to thrive.
Consequently, there came to be a change of emphasis in the
Magdalene’s story; where once she had been seen primarily as a victim
of sin, visibly stigmatized, now her spiritual journey and awakening
were regarded as life affirming and her inner beauty made mani-
fest. In 1528, the new, positive view and treatment of women was
authoritatively codified in Baldessare Castiglione’s famous manual of
court manners and decorum, The Book of the Courtier, an imaginary
conversation between Lorenzo de’ Medici’s youngest son, Giuliano,
and other magnanimous gentlemen. Castiglione portrays Giuliano as
a passionate champion of women, putting words into his mouth that
have a curiously modern ring:
– tell me, why has it not been established that a dissolute

life is quite as disgraceful in men as it is in women? – if you
will acknowledge the truth, you surely know that of our
own authority we men have arrogated ourselves a license,
whereby we insist that in us the same sins are most trivial
and sometimes deserve praise which in women cannot be
sufficiently punished, unless by a shameful death, or at least
perpetual infamy.
It must remain an open question as to whether Leonardo was respond-

ing in his seemly conception of the Magdalene only to such larger
cultural influences or whether the sin and sexual disgrace of his mother
also affected his views.
Leonardo appears to have waited until he returned to Florence
from Milan in 1500 before developing his “lovely Magdalene” con-
cept further. That year was a Jubilee or Holy Year (Anno Santo), which
meant the Church offered special opportunity for penance: the con-
trite could receive exceptional indulgence, fully cleansing them of sin.
In this atmosphere of atonement, there were external, often very pub-
lic displays of remorse, and famous penitents, such as the Magdalene,
were particularly recalled and revered. During this period, Leonardo
may well have shared his designs (some much more advanced than the
Figure 76.
Francesco Melzi, Flora,
c. 1510, tempera and
oil on wood panel,
transferred to canvas,
St. Petersburg, State
Hermitage Museum.
Scala/Art Resource,
NY.
Courtauld sketches) with the eccentric painter Piero di Cosimo, who

quickly fell under Leonardo’s spell. Piero executed a half-length Mary
Magdalene around 1500–1, and thereafter his oeuvre became increas-
ingly Leonardesque. He even went so far as to follow Leonardo’s advice
of looking at wall stains (in Piero’s case, the dried “spittle” of “sick
people”) to stimulate his imagination, envisioning in them marvelous
“landscapes” and “battles.”
The half-length Magdalene genre remained viable in Florence
until at least the middle of the century, thanks to the generation of
artists who matured around the time of Leonardo’s death, includ-
ing the talented young men Domenico Puligo, Jacopo Pontormo,
Francesco Bacchiacca, and Michele Tosini. Puligo painted a portrait
of an unidentified lady as the saint, now in Ottawa, around 1520;
and between 1526 and 1529, Pontormo executed a moving portrait
of Francesca Capponi, the young daughter of a principal patron, as
a penitent Magdalene. Francesco Ubertini, called Bacchiacca, pro-
duced a half-length Magdalene in the early 1540s. Tosini, around 1550,
more than thirty years after Leonardo’s demise, painted a glamorous

Magdalene that corresponds closely in pose to the Courtauld studies.
After he returned to Milan in 1506–08, Leonardo must have
handed off some (now lost) Magdalene drawings or cartoons to his
dedicated followers, Bernardino Luini, Francesco Melzi, and Giovanni
Pietro Rizzoli, called Giampietrino. As a result, an entirely new genre
of half-length, beautiful-lady pictures seems to have grown out of his
workshop. In addition to the numerous Magdalenes that Leonardo’s
disciples produced, such as Giampietrino’s two paintings of c. 1516
and Luini’s of c. 1520, they created many, stylistically related portraits
of courtesans and mistresses, most thinly disguised as the mythological
figure of Flora; a resplendent example, by Melzi, can be found in the
Hermitage Museum (fig. 76).
Most commonly associated with spring, Flora, the ancient Italian
goddess of flowers, in Roman antiquity “presided” over an annual fes-
tival, the Floralia, which was notorious for its licentiousness. During
that celebration, Flora was worshipped as the patroness of prostitutes,
and in her honor nude women danced and public orgies erupted, until
more prudent attitudes prevailed in Rome in the third century a.d.
One legend holds that the rites of the Floralia derived from a posthu-
mous cult dedicated to a wealthy prostitute, who called herself Flora
and bequeathed funds to the state for bawdy parties in perpetuity.
While the painted Floras of Melzi and other Leonardo followers do
not fully exploit this richly sordid history, they do communicate effec-
tively the prurient nature of the deity and of her intended beholder.
Apparently, the popular, half-length Mary Magdalene and courte-
san conceits spread rapidly from Milan and Lombardy to the neigh-
boring Veneto region, where there was no shortage of mistresses and
prostitutes. Many prominent Venetian artists, including Paris Bor-
done, Vicenzo Catena, Palma Vecchio, Bartolommeo Veneto, and,
later, the great Titian turned the themes into a flourishing industry.
With time, the alluring courtesan genre became, virtually, a pan-
European phenomenon. Painters at the court of Fontainebleau and in
pious Antwerp, notably the anonymous artist dubbed the “Master of
the Female Half-Figures,” created several memorable variants on the
subject. Ironically, so far as we know, Leonardo never took the time
to produce a courtesan or Magdalene painting himself.
27. Milan
I n the early 1480s, leonardo watched, no doubt enviously,

as some of his successful contemporaries left Florence for major
opportunities elsewhere. Botticelli and Ghirlandaio had gone to Rome
to work in the Sistine Chapel. Verrocchio was then planning to
move to Venice, having won, in 1480, the prestigious competition
for the design of the monument for the great condottiere Bartolomeo
Colleoni. He died there in 1488, some years before the completion
and installation of his magnificent equestrian statue. Having sought a
papal project for many years, the Pollaiuoli were finally asked in 1484
to create a tomb for Pope Sixtus IV; they immediately relocated to
Rome, where they died in the 1490s.
Apparently, Leonardo, too, wished to leave. By then, he had
learned some bitter truths about Florence and human nature that
Vasari, decades later, would explain:
all persons of spirit will not stay content with being equal,
much less inferior, to those whom they see to be men like
themselves, although they may recognize them as mas-
ters – nay, it forces them very often to desire their own
advancement so eagerly, that, if they are not kindly or
wise by nature, they turn out evil-speakers, ungrateful,
and unthankful for benefits. It is true, indeed, that when a
man has learnt there [in Florence] as much as suffices him,
and desires to become rich, take his departure from that
place and find a sale abroad for the excellence of his works
and for the repute conferred on him by that city, as the
doctors do with the fame derived from their studies. For
Florence treats her craftsmen as time treats its own works,
179
which, when perfected, it destroys and consumes little by

little.
Understanding this, Leonardo preferred to couch his restless optimism

as well as his frustrations – with his circumstances and with himself –
in larger philosophical terms and context:
With a constant joyous longing he awaits the new spring,

always the new state, always the new months, the new
years; for always it seems to him that the things longed
for come too late, and he fails to realize that he is wishing
away his own life. This same longing is the quintessence,
the spirit – which finding itself imprisoned in the soul of
the human body, longs always to return to its emitter.
At Lorenzo de’ Medici’s direction, but possibly after some cour-

teous yet insistent lobbying by the artist, Leonardo traveled to Milan
around 1482. His interest in that city may have been stoked by casual
and enthusiastic remarks made by Verrocchio. The older master had
been responsible for decorating the Palazzo Medici for the state visit
of the Milanese duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza in 1471; for many years
thereafter, he no doubt coveted the commission for the long-planned
equestrian statue of the duke’s father, the great soldier Francesco.
Leonardo would have recalled the Sforzas’ luxurious spending habits,
notably the two thousand horsemen, five hundred pairs of hounds,
and flock of hunting falcons in Galeazzo Maria’s traveling entourage.
Officially an artistic emissary, a diplomatic gift from Lorenzo to
Ludovico Il Moro Sforza (the younger brother of Galeazzo Maria,
assassinated in 1476), Leonardo arrived in the Northern Italian city
accompanied by a gifted, sixteen-year-old musician named Atalante
Migliorotti. The Medici, and Lorenzo in particular, had been long
allied with the Sforzas and heavily relied on them for military support.
Just hours after the attempt on his life, Lorenzo had sent a letter to
Ludovico pleading for protective troops. Having inherited at least
some of old Cosimo’s political instincts, Lorenzo probably suspected
that, before long, Ludovico would replace his young nephew as Duke
of Milan and, in the meantime, would rule as the power behind the
throne. As a present for Il Moro, the young Atalante brought with
him an unusual lute in the form of a horse’s skull. Leonardo carried a
letter of introduction, which he had crafted himself, and a “portfolio”
27. Milan 181
that included a few paintings, many drawings, and at least one piece of
sculpture. The self-promoting, testimonial letter, apparently written
by someone else at Leonardo’s dictation, indicates that he knew Sforza’s
priorities were military:
Most illustrious Lord, having sufficiently seen and consid-

ered the works of all those who are reputed to be masters
and contrivers of war machines, and that the invention
and operation of the aforesaid instruments are none other
than those in common use, I will strive, without disparag-
ing anyone else, to show my intentions to your Excellency,
showing my secrets to you, and then offering all of them for
your approbation, to work effectively at opportune times
on all those things which are briefly noted in part below.
His grand promises were followed by a list of weapons and engi-

neering projects with which Leonardo claimed to have either expe-
rience or brilliant ideas: portable bridges and “methods of destroying
and burning those of the enemy”; “methods of ruining every cas-
tle or fortress, even if it is founded on rock”; bombarding machines
that hurl myriad small stones “like a tempest”; new kinds of chariots;
and various and novel types of guns and catapults. One must suppose
that Leonardo would not have overstated his abilities too greatly and
risked misleading the ruthless and bellicose Sforza. Strangely, however,
he does not seem to have brought drawings to back up his boasts.
The inventory he compiled soon after reaching Milan mentions only
designs for “furnaces,” “gadgets for ships,” and “gadgets for water,”
which may or may not have had defensive applications. Indeed, his
informal, personal inventory, which I now quote at length, records
the useful, “reference” drawings of someone who foremost wished to
continue his artistic practice.
The document reads:
Many flowers copied from nature; a head full face, with

curly hair; certain St. Jeromes; measurements of a figure;
designs of furnaces; a head [portrait] of the Duke [an ideal-
ized likeness of Ludovico Sforza’s father, Francesco?]; many
designs of knots; 4 drawings for the picture of the Holy
Angel; a little narrative of Girolamo da Fegline; a head of
Christ done in pen; 8 St Sebastians; many compositions of
angels; a chalcedony [a carved semiprecious stone]; a head

in profile with beautiful hair; certain forms in perspective;
certain gadgets for ships; certain gadgets for water; a head
portrayed from Atalante, who raises his face [probably a
drawing made while Leonardo and the young musician
rested on their journey from Florence to Milan]; the head
of Girolamo da Fegline; the head of Gian Francesco Boso;
many necks of old women; many heads of old men; many
complete nudes; many arms, legs, feet, and postures; a
Madonna, finished [Benois Madonna?]; another, almost fin-
ished, which is in profile [Madonna Litta?]; the head of Our
Lady who ascends to heaven; a head of an old man with
an enormous chin; a head of a gipsy; a head wearing a hat;
a narrative of the passion made in relief; a head of a young
girl with plaited tresses; a head with a head-dress.
Although in his letter to Sforza Leonardo asserted that he had expertise

in marble and bronze sculpture, he seems to have neglected to transport
examples of those as well, except, perhaps, for the “narrative of the
passion made in relief,” which, for all we know, might have been
executed in terracotta or plaster. He did, however, carry with him a
“head of the duke,” presumably an idea he had for an idealized portrait
of Ludovico’s late father, Francesco. In light of the excitement in the
early 1480s concerning the competition for the equestrian statue of
Colleoni in Venice, Leonardo had accurately anticipated that Il Moro
would be keen to see realized, finally, the equestrian monument to
his father, a grandiose project that had been under discussion at the
Milanese court for over a decade. Leonardo was probably informed
of his possible assignment to the project not long after he landed
in Milan and then officially offered the job by 1483. The ambitious
undertaking, which ended tragically, would occupy much of his adult
life.
Indeed, because of “The Horse,” as the Sforza monument was
called, and countless engineering and festival projects, Leonardo was
never able to step up his painterly production. When he departed from
Florence at about the age of thirty, he left a rather meager legacy of
perhaps five completed paintings (four of them small), two unfinished
pictures, and a piece of sculpture or two – not an impressive output
for fifteen years of artistic practice. On the other hand, he could claim
27. Milan 183
credit for several major artistic innovations, above all, the creation
of the “High-Renaissance” or “Modern” style. In the Adoration of
the Magi, particularly, he had devised a new, comprehensive pictorial
language in which the entire apparatus of forms conveyed content –
in which insightfully rendered human expressions and gestures were
made to conform to an ideal geometry, and where the space itself, in
its abstractness or mathematical perspective, communicated meaning.
Through another invention, sfumato, he had managed to integrate his
fresh and precise “scientific” observations of anatomy and landscape
(as well as symbols and literary tropes) into a smokily cohesive com-
position. His ingenious achievement of this “Modern” or “Classical”
style, as it is sometimes called, would not be fully understood for some
twenty years and, only after Leonardo’s return to Florence in the next
century, assimilated by the likes of the progressive painters Raphael,
Andrea del Sarto, Piero di Cosimo, and Fra Bartolommeo.
During the last thirty-seven years of his life, until his death in 1519,
Leonardo turned out artworks at about the same rate as he did during
his first Florentine period. He created, with some shop assistance, just
a dozen or so paintings, and two of those – the Last Supper and Battle
of Anghiari – began deteriorating almost immediately because of the
“time-saving” experimental media and techniques he had employed.
Considering himself more of an inventor-designer than a craftsman,
Leonardo wished the artistic thought process to be as thorough and
profound as possible, but he tried to streamline the physical act of
creation, and sometimes his works suffered because of it. Still, those
paintings and sculptures that survive – and his drawings for those that
do not – reveal how his art continued relentlessly to evolve and that,
through subtle processes of idealization and his refinement of sfumato,
he brought to his works unprecedented – and largely ineffable –
qualities of expression. In fact, it can be said that in some cases the
complexity and robustness of his ideas (such as those for “The Horse”)
seem to have exceeded known technical means of realization.
28. Leonardo and the
Sforza Court
F or an artist whose designs, more often than not, failed

to seep down from the conceptual to the material realm,
Leonardo must have found Ludovico’s steady court stipend reassur-
ing. Not wishing to disappoint his sponsor, Lorenzo, or Sforza (as he
had Ser Piero), Leonardo was willing to play almost any role asked
of him at the Milanese court. No design or engineering project was
too minor, be it a belt buckle, a drainage ditch, or a water-driven
gadget for the “bath of the Duchess.” Certainly, under the penetrat-
ing glare of Il Moro, Leonardo had to keep himself constantly busy
and could not revert to some of his bad habits of youth. Watching
over Leonardo, too, were – still affixed to a bell tower – the heads
of those responsible for the murder, six years earlier, of Ludovico’s
brother, Galeazzo Maria. The exceptional, creative cruelty of Il Moro
and Galeazzo Maria, who once had a man nailed alive to his own
coffin, cast an apprehensive pall over all of Milanese life.
Leonardo had accepted as his new patron a man whose enor-
mous power, energy, and artifice equaled his malevolence. Declared
by the political expert Nicolò Macchiavelli to be responsible for the
“ruin of Italy,” the treacherous Ludovico Sforza summoned Charles
VIII of France to Italy to aid him militarily. Bankrolled in part by
Il Moro, the French king and an army of forty thousand men sub-
sequently marched down the length of the Italian peninsula in 1494,
leaving untold destruction and atrocities in their wake, to claim French
sovereignty over the Kingdom of Naples. Meanwhile, Sforza quickly
dispatched with the Milanese secretary of state and anyone else who, he
thought, might undermine his authority. Not coincidently, by Octo-
ber of that year, Ludovico’s nephew, Duke Gian Galeazzo Sforza had
taken ill. Most suspected he had been poisoned. Upon Gian Galeazzo’s
185
death, Il Moro had his widow and children arrested and imprisoned,
and proclaimed himself Duke of Milan.
Leonardo would somehow learn to deal with the complicated
Sforza, who was completely immoral and cynical but who sought
to live within a highly civilized milieu. The self-consciously lesser,
second son of the great Francesco, he was, nevertheless, gracefully
sociopathic, known for his painstakingly courteous and velvety man-
ner. The artist must have intuited that the callous and well-armed duke
was vulnerable to flattery, especially if it was the clever and urbane sort
in which Leonardo excelled. Nevertheless, although life was precari-
ous for all in the Renaissance, the young man from Vinci must have
felt that he continuously walked very close to a precipice. This was
a challenge that he probably enjoyed mastering. He conducted his
sexual life with utmost discretion, because the duke ostensibly banned
homosexual behavior from his court. He was also careful never to
contradict or offend the dark Sforza. A fragment of a letter from the
artist to his benefactor gives us some indication of their relationship,
as its tone and content, though frustratingly incomplete (the page is
torn vertically at right), goes beyond the usual deferential groveling:
My Lord, knowing the mind of your Excellency to be

occupied –
to remind your Lordship of my small matters, and I should

have maintained silence –
that my silence should make your Lordship become angry –
my life to your service I hold myself ever ready to obey –
One is tempted to read as autobiographical an inscription that

Leonardo appended to a drawing while in the duke’s employ: “Oh
slave to human misery, of how many things are you willing to become
a servant for money!” Much later, perhaps during his second period
in Milan (1506–13), he would write on the cover of one of his note-
books the pessimistic Latin verses, Decipimur votis et tempore fallimur: et
mors Deridet curas; anxia vita nihil – “we are deluded by promises and
deceived by time, and Death derides our cares; life is anxiety, nothing
else.” Leonardo’s Latin had not suddenly improved; he lifted the lines
from the Amores of 1502 by the German poet laureate and humanist
scholar Konrad Celtis.
28. Leonardo and the Sforza Court 187
Yet so long as he was able to stay on good terms with Il Moro,

Leonardo knew that he could enjoy a rich existence in Milan. Word
of his ignoble birth and his reputation had not preceded him there,
and, within the bounds of a society more rigidly stratified than that
of Florence, he was free to reinvent himself. Leonardo could try his
hand at most every creative occupation – from architect, to engineer,
to costume and pageant designer, to bard, to painter and sculptor – in
the city and in Sforza’s court, which was then far more advanced in
its protocols and ceremonies, more sophisticated in its entertainments,
and more savvy in its propaganda than its Medici counterpart. Milan
would lead not only to unimaginable triumphs for Leonardo but
also, ultimately, to a measure of equity or justice. Although Il Moro
would die alone and in misery, a prisoner in the French castle of
Loches, Leonardo would expire not, as the legend holds, in the arms
of Francis I but, almost as gloriously, in Amboise in the Palace of
Cloux, as the first painter, engineer, and architect to the French king.
His long journey there represented one of the greatest professional
and social ascents of the Renaissance and acknowledged perhaps the
highest flights of imagination the world has ever seen.
Bibliography with Endnotes
LEONARDO MANUSCRIPTS – ABBREVIATIONS AND LOCATIONS
MS A Institute de France, Paris

Ash I and II MS Ashburnham Institute de France, Paris
MS B Institute de France, Paris
B.L. (formerly known as Arundel MS) British Library, London
MS C Institute de France, Paris
Codice Atlantico Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan
MSs D thru F Institute de France, Paris
Forster I–III Victoria and Albert Museum, London
MSs G thru M Institute de France, Paris
Madrid I and II Biblioteca Nacional MS, Madrid
Triv. (Trivulzio MS) Biblioteca Trivulziana, Castello Sforzesco,
Milan
Turin (Flight of Birds MS) Biblioteca Reale, Turin
Urb. (Codex Urbanas and Libro A)
W. Royal Library, Windsor Castle
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carmen Bambach et al., Leonardo da Vinci. Master Draftsman, exh. cat., Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art, New York, New Haven, and London, 1993
David Alan Brown, Leonardo da Vinci. Origins of a Genius, New Haven and
London, 1998
Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci. An Account of His Development as an Artist,
Cambridge, 1939; rev. ed., Harmondsworth, 1967
Kenneth Clark, The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection of Her Majesty
the Queen at Windsor Castle, 3 vols., London, 1938, rev. ed., 1968
Cecil Gould, Leonardo. The Artist and the Non-Artist, Boston, 1975
189
190 Bibliography with Endnotes
Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci. The Marvelous Works of Nature and Man, London,
Melbourne, and Toronto, 1981; rev. ed. Oxford, 2006
Martin Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Painting, New Haven and London, 1989
Edward MacCurdy, ed., The Notebooks of Leonardo, London, 1906, rpt., Old
Saybrook, CT, 2003
Augusto Marinoni, Leonardo da Vinci. Il Codice Atlantico della Biblioteca
Ambrosiana di Milano, 3 vols., Florence, 2000
C. O’Malley and J. Saunders, Leonardo da Vinci and the Human Body, New York,
1952
Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo. A Study in Style and Chronology, London, 1973
J. P. Richter, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, 2 vols., London and New
York, 1970; with Commentary by Carlo Pedretti, Oxford, 1977
Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, & Architects, tr. Gaston
du C. de Vere, ed., Kenneth Clark, 3 vols., New York, 1979.
Giorgio Vasari, Le opere, 9 vols., ed. Gaetano Milanesi, Florence, 1998
NOTES BY CHAPTER
i. Leonardo was born on Saturday, 15 April, and Leo’s feast day fell on
11 April – the only festa for a male saint that week. Gene Brucker
offers examples of how polite society dealt with illegitimate births in
Renaissance Italy – see The Society of Renaissance Florence. A Documen-
tary Study, New York, 1971, pp. 40–42 and, especially, pp. 218–22. For
the vernacular curriculum in fifteenth-century Florence, see Paul F.
Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy. Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600,
Baltimore and London, 1989, pp. 275–329. Source of Leonardo quota-
tions: “Benedetto de l’abbaco” Codice Atlantico 320 verso; “I am fully
aware . . . ” and “if indeed I have no power . . . ” Codice Atlantico, 327
verso.
It has been suggested that the reference to “Benedetto de l’abbaco” refers

to a textbook; this seems unlikely, because the name appears on a list of
contemporary persons, including the physician Paolo Toscanelli, the notary
Benedetto Cieperello, and the artist Domenico di Michelino. There is no
evidence that Leonardo was ever maligned for his use of the “sinister” hand,
but other left-handed individuals were sometimes singled out for persecu-
tion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, particularly by the Inquisition,
because that orientation was associated with the practice of necromancy.
From the Renaissance, through the period of the witchhunts of English
King James I, beginning in 1604, and until the famous witchcraft trials in
Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, left-handedness was often regarded a sign of
demonic possession or, at least, allegiance with the devil. In Western Europe,
prejudices in favor of the right-handed and against the left-handed find their
origins primarily in the Bible – see, for example, Deuteronomy 33:2, Psalms
45:10, and Matthew 25:31–34.
ii. The Florentine scholar Giannozzo Manetti finished his treatise On the
Dignity and Excellence of Man in 1452 or 1453. The most influential
and eloquent Renaissance treatise on the nobility of the individual was
Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, written in 1486.
For Cosimo il Vecchio’s personality and sense of humor, see Dale Kent,
Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance. The Patron’s Oeuvre, New
Haven and London, 2000, pp. 15–68; and Alison Brown, “Cosimo de’
Medici’s Wit and Wisdom” in Cosimo “il Vecchio” de’ Medici, 1389–1464.
Essays in Commemoration of the 600th Anniversary of Cosimo de’ Medici’s
Birth, ed. Francis Ames-Lewis, Oxford, 1992, pp. 95–113. Cosimo’s
library is discussed by A. C. de la Mare in “Cosimo and His Books,”
in Cosimo “il Vecchio” de’ Medici, pp. 115–56. Cosimo’s lament over his
son’s death recalls Euripides’ Phrixus (fifth century b.c.): “Who knows
but life be that which men call death. And death what men call life.”
Niccolò Machiavelli relates that the first of the expanded Adoration of
the Kings festivals, which “kept the whole city busy for many months,”
was an attempt on the part of its citizens to “cheer themselves up” after
Cosimo’s death in 1464 – see Niccolò Machiavelli, Florentine Histories,
tr. Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Princeton, 1988,
pp. 289–90.
iii. For Cosimo’s artistic patronage, see Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici. Lippi’s
pictures are treated in Megan Holmes, Fra Filippo Lippi. The Carmelite
Painter, New Haven and London, 1999, pp. 122–28 and 174–82; and
Jeffrey Ruda, Fra Filippo Lippi, London, 1993, pp. 224–33, no. 51,
pp. 447–48, no. 58, pp. 465–66. An account of Piero de’ Medici’s life
as well as his literary and artistic pursuits is given in Francis Ames-
Lewis, The Library and Manuscripts of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici, New
York and London, 1984. Lorenzo de’ Medici has been the subject of
countless studies, see among them: F. W. Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici and
the Art of Magnificence, Baltimore, 2004; Michael Mallett and Nicholas
Mann, eds., Lorenzo the Magnificent. Culture and Politics, London, 1996;
and Cristina Acidini Luchinat, ed., Renaissance Florence: The Age of
Lorenzo de’ Medici, 1449–1492, Milan, 1993. For a thorough, recent
study of Lorenzo’s holdings of antique art, see Laurie Fusco and Gino
Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Collector and Antiquarian, Cambridge, 2006.
For Verrocchio’s sculpture, see Andrew Butterfield, The Sculptures of
Andrea del Verrocchio, New Haven and London, 1997. Uccello’s Battle of
San Romano and his works for the Medici are discussed and reproduced
in Franco and Stefano Borsi, Paolo Uccello, tr. Elfreda Powell, New York,
1994, pp. 207–31. no. 14, pp. 307–12, no. 27, pp. 330–31.
Leonardo’s lost design of a Lion Fighting a Dragon for the French king may
be reflected in a drawing, attributed to his student, Francesco Melzi, in the
Städel Museum, Frankfurt, reproduced in C[arlo] P[edretti], “Leonardo at
the Städel Museum” in Achademia Leonardi Vinci (ALV). Journal of Leonardo
Studies & Bibliography of Vinciana, vol. II, 1989, fig. 3. Leonardo may have
regarded the lion as a personal mascot or signature of sorts, because of the
connection of its Latin name, leo, to his own.
For the Platonic Academy, see Arnaldo della Torre, Storia dell’Accademia
Platonica di Firenze, Florence, 1902; and Arthur Field, The Origins of the Platonic
Academy of Florence, Princeton, 1988.
Leonardo’s views about the metaphysics of the Platonists and Neoplaton-
ists are expressed in a brief preamble he wrote to some of his notes on optics:
“What trust can we place in the ancients who tried to define what the Soul
and Life are – which are beyond proof – whereas those things that can be
known and proved by experience remained for many centuries unknown or
falsely understood [?]” (Codice Atlantico 327 verso). For legitimation pro-
cedures and an overview of the problems of the illegitimate in Renaissance
Florence, see Thomas Kuehn, Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence, Ann Arbor,
2002, esp. pp. 167–205. Source of Leonardo quotation: “bestow much more
attention . . . ” British Museum 212 verso.
iv. For Vasari’s report on the activities of the young Leonardo, see Vasari–
de Vere, vol. II, p. 781. The Codice Atlantico is fully reproduced,
with scholarly commentary, in Leonardo da Vinci. Il Codice Atlantico
della Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano, 3 vols., ed. Augusto Marinoni,
Florence, 2000. The story of the luckless giraffe is recounted in Marina
Belozerskaya, The Medici Giraffe, and Other Tales of Exotic Animals and
Power, New York, 2006. Source of Leonardo quotation: “the goldfinch
will carry spurge . . . ” MS H 63 (15) verso.
For Lorenzo’s poetry, see Poesie del Magnifico Lorenzo de’ Medici, Bergamo,
1763, especially pp. 2–3 (sonnets II and IV) and pp. 121–66 (Canto di Pan)
for examples of pastoral verses, and Guglielmo Gorni, “Su Lorenzo poeta:
Parodia, diletti e noie della caccia,” in Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo mondo.
Convegno internazionale di studi, ed. Gian Carlo Garfagnini, Florence, 1994,
pp. 205–23; for Lorenzo’s musical talents, see Frank A. D’Accone, “Lorenzo
the Magnificent and Music” in Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo mondo, pp. 259–90.
v. For a discussion of the Tobias and the Angel, see David Alan Brown,
Leonardo da Vinci. Origins of a Genius, New Haven and London, 1998,
pp. 47–55. A comprehensive study of the lives and careers of the Pol-
laiuoli is provided in Alison Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers. The Arts
of Florence and Rome, New Haven and London, 2005. For the Pol-
laiuolo Annunciation, in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, see Wright, Pol-
laiuolo Brothers, pp. 300–6 and p. 525, no. 58, fig. 245.
vi. For Leonardo’s early machine designs, see Paolo Galluzzi, “The Career
of a Technologist,” in Leonardo da Vinci. Engineer and Architect, ed. Paolo
Galluzzi, exh. cat., Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, 1987,
pp. 41–63. For Francesco di Giorgio Martini, see Giustina Scaglia,
Francesco di Giorgio: Checklist and History of Manuscripts and Drawings in
Autographs and Copies from ca. 1470 to 1687 and Renewed Copies (1764–
1839), Bethlehem, PA, and London, c. 1992; Massimo Mussini, Il trattato
di Francesco di Giorgio Martini e Leonardo. Il Codice Estense restituto, Parma,
1991; and Ralph Toledano, Francesco di Giorgio Martini: pittore e scultore,
Milan, c. 1987. Indicative of Leonardo’s “organic” theory of architecture
is a comparison he makes on a sheet in the British Library (B.L. 138
recto) between stress on a vault or dome and the effects of pressure on
the skin of an orange or pomegranate. Sources of Leonardo quotations:
“it is necessary to have a coat . . . ” MS B 81 verso; “why something
seen in a mirror . . . ” “what sort of a mirror . . . ” Codice Atlantico
1004 recto; “why a dead woman floats face downward . . . ” MS H 31
verso; “the nephew of Gian Angelo . . . ” Codice Atlantico 611 recto;
“the brother of Sant’ Agosta . . . ” Codice Atlantico 966 verso; “among
the great things . . . ” Codice Atlantico 1109 verso; “the body of the
earth . . . ” MS A 55 verso, Codice Atlantico 543 recto, and MS F 62
verso. Leonardo would have been familiar with the use of breathing
tubes because Verrocchio almost certainly employed them in making
life masks and casts of the whole (and upper part of the) body from live
models.
The cross-section illustration of sexual intercourse is on Windsor Castle

sheet no. W. 19097 recto. On one manuscript (Forster III 75 recto), Leonardo
wrote “Hippocrates says the origin of semen is derived from the brain.”
vii. Metalpoint, a medium popular in the fifteenth century, employed a

sharp instrument, or stylus (see note xiv), fabricated from silver, lead,
or copper. Used on specially prepared paper, the instrument created a
fine, delicate line (or ribbon) of metal. In the sixteenth century, the
metalpoint technique was almost completely abandoned in favor of red
and black chalk. For Verrocchio’s lost relief, see Butterfield, Sculptures
of Verrocchio, pp. 156–57; and Brown, Leonardo, pp. 68–73. Corvinus’
Palace of Visegrád was intact in 1535 but captured soon thereafter, and
his palace in Buda was seized by the Turks in 1541. The drawing of
Valdéz (Windsor 12484), so similar stylistically to those by Leonardo,
may copy one of his lost studies. For Lorenzo de Medici’s lost antique
cameo of Athena, see Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, pp. 102–
3. Source for Leonardo quotation: “when you – draw a face from
memory . . . ” Ash. II, 26 verso.
viii. The two Medici jousts are discussed in Paola Ventrone, Le tems revient
’l tempo si rinuova. Feste e spettacoli nella Firenze di Lorenzo il Magnifico,
exh. cat., Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence, 1992, esp., pp. 167–205.
For Verrocchio’s Sleeping Youth, see Butterfield, Sculptures of Verrocchio,
pp. 86 and 215, where it is illustrated as fig. 108. For Botticelli’s stan-
dard, see Ronald Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli. Life and Work, London,
1978, vol. I, pp. 42–44, vol. II, pp. 58–60, D15, pp. 166–67. Plato’s
explanation of the two Aphrodites can be found in Plato, The Sympo-

sium, tr. Walter Hamilton, Middlesex and New York, 1951, pp. 45–47;
and Ficino’s exegesis in his Convivium Platonis Commentarium in Mar-
silio Ficino, Opera, Basel, 1576, 11, 7. Also, see Erwin Panofsky (Studies
in Iconography. Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, Oxford,
1972, pp. 141–61) for an overview of the twin-Venus theme in art.
Luca Pulci’s Il driadeo d’amore was finally published in 1489, when it
was attributed, in error, to his brother, Luigi. For the quoted verse
concerning Amor and the sleeping nymph, see Luca Pulci, Il driadeo
d’amore, ed. Paolo E. Giudici, Lanciano, 1916, p. 31.
ix. See Brucker (Society of Renaissance Florence, pp. 204–6) for the pun-
ishment of sodomy in the Renaissance. For Freud’s superannuated
interpretation of Leonardo’s “dream,” see Sigmund Freud, Leonardo
da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, tr. Alan Tyson, New York,
1964; and for recent studies of Freud’s analysis of the artist, see Wayne
V. Andersen, Freud, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Vulture’s Tail. A Refreshing
Look at Leonardo’s Sexuality, New York, 2001; and Bradley I. Collins,
Leonardo, Psychoanalysis, and Art History, Evanston, IL, 1997. Presumably
based on information passed to him from Leonardo’s good friend and
shop assistant Francesco Melzi, the Milanese writer and painter Gio-
vanni Paolo Lomazzo authored, around 1560, an imaginary dialogue
between Leonardo and the ancient sculptor Phidias, which included
the following lines:
Leonardo: “[Salai was] the man whom in life I loved more than all the
others, who were several.”
Phidias: “[did you] play the game in the behind that the Florentines
love so much?”
Leonardo: “And how many times! Keep in mind that he was a most
beautiful young man, especially at about fifteen.”
For Lomazzo’s dialogue, see Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arti,
ed. Roberto Paulo Ciardi (Florence, 1973–74), vol. I, lxxxi, p. 104, and
Collins, Leonardo, pp. 80–81. Sources of Leonardo quotations: “the act of
procreation . . . ” W. 19009 recto; “the painter sits in front of his work . . . ”
Urb. 20 recto; “a painter was asked why . . . ” MS M 58 verso; “a man
wishing to prove on authority . . . ” MS M 58 verso; “O cities of the sea . . . ”
Codice Atlantico 393 recto; “the high walls . . . ” Codice Atlantico 1033
recto; “a woman crossing . . . ” W. 12351 recto; “the kite would seem to
be . . . ” Codice Atlantico 186 verso; “keeps them without food . . . ” MS H
5 verso.
As Collins (Leonardo and Psychoanalysis, pp. 76–77, and esp. p. 204, notes
12 and 13) points out, the evidence concerning the nature of Leonardo’s
relation with his father is mixed. In one letter, the artist addresses Ser Piero
with great concern and affection. However, Leonardo’s bizarre response to
his brother Domenico, after learning of the birth of the latter’s son, casts
dispersions on the filial–paternal bond:
Now in so far as I had judged you to be possessed of prudence

I am now entirely convinced that I am as far removed from
having an accurate judgment as you are from prudence; seeing
that you have been congratulating yourself in having created
a watchful enemy, who will strive with all his energies after
liberty, which can only come into being at your death.
x. Reproductions of Benedetto da Maiano’s sculpture of the Baptist can

be found in Glenn Andres, John M. Hunisak, and A. Richard Turner,
The Art of Florence, New York, 1988, vol. II, pls. 435 and 436; and
Lippi’s Adoration for Lucrezia is illustrated in Holmes, Fra Filippo Lippi,
as fig. 171 on p. 175. In his Treatise on Painting (Urb 46 recto), Leonardo
is adamant that the silhouettes of figures should be blurred, and that
painters should not draw outlines around figures, as had been the Flo-
rentine practice. Source of Leonardo quotation: “poor is the pupil . . . ”
Forster III, 66 verso.
xi. For Vasari’s remarks about Perugino’s repetition of figures and his venal-
ity, see Vasari–de Vere, vol. I, pp. 741–42. For documentation and spec-
ulation on Ser Piero’s involvement with the Annunciation commission, as
well as many others, see Alessandro Cecchi, “New Light on Leonardo’s
Florentine Patrons” in Leonardo da Vinci. Master Draftsman, ed. Carmen
C. Bambach, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2003,
pp. 120–39. For Credi’s Madonna di Piazza predella and the rest of his
oeuvre, see Gigetta Dalli Regoli, Lorenzo di Credi, Cremona, 1966. For
the Madonna that Credi made for Spain, see Vasari–deVere, II, p. 983.
Source of Leonardo quotation: “the greatest fault of painters . . . ” Urb.
44 recto.
xii. For Leonardo’s concern with the theme of vision in his early Madon-
nas, see Larry J. Feinberg, “Sight Unseen: Vision and Perception in
Leonardo’s Madonnas,” Apollo, vol. CLX, July 2004, pp. 28–34. Ficino’s
views and other Renaissance beliefs about the supposed, curative pow-
ers of precious and semiprecious stones can be found in Marsilio Ficino,
The Book of Life, ed. and tr. Charles Boer, Woodstock, CT, 1996, pp. 19,
25, 28, 62–63, 120, 123, and 153; George Frederick Kunz, The Curious
Lore of Precious Stones, New York, 1913; and Larry J. Feinberg, “The
Studiolo of Francesco I Reconsidered” in The Medici, Michelangelo, and
the Art of Late Renaissance Florence, exh. cat., Palazzo Strozzi, Art Insti-
tute of Chicago, and Detroit Institute of Arts, New Haven and London,
2002, pp. 46–65.
xiii. For Leonardo, Alberti, and the optics and neurology of sight, see Fein-
berg, “Sight Unseen,” pp. 28–32.
xiv. For more on the Verrocchio Boy with Dolphin, including views from
various angles, see Butterfield, Sculptures of Verrocchio, pp. 127–135, figs.
164–65, and 175a–d. Created at about the same time as the Child
and Cat studies, a drawing by Leonardo of a Young Woman Bathing an
Infant (Oporto, Academia de Belas Artes) also may record the artist’s
immediate reaction to a contemporary work, Antonio Pollaiuolo’s relief
of the Birth of Saint John the Baptist (c. 1478–80) for the altar of the
Florentine Baptistery. Unusually, Leonardo portrays the nursemaid with
long, flowing hair, immodestly uncovered, and directing her attention
to the baby’s feet. In her hairstyle and foot-washing activity, the girl
evokes Mary Magdalene and causes one to wonder if Leonardo has
invented a new pictorial episode in her (and Christ’s) early life. For
the Oporto drawing, see Leonardo da Vinci. Master Draftsman, no. 21,
pp. 300–3, ill.
In the Renaissance, the sharp tool known as a stylus was used in the
metalpoint technique (see note vii) or lightly to incise lines into paper. In
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, artists often drew their designs in stylus
before employing chalk or pen. This procedure permitted them to make
many alterations to their drawing before applying indelible media.
xv. The most recent account of the Pazzi plot and its intrigues is Lauro
Martines’ April Blood. Florence and the Plot against the Medici, Oxford and
New York, 2003. See also Macchiavelli, Florentine Histories, pp. 319–30;
and Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici. Its Rise and Fall, New
York, 1974, pp. 128–43. As pointed out in note ix, above, Lomazzo’s
primary source for information on Leonardo was the latter’s follower
and friend, Francesco Melzi. For the passage on Leonardo’s drawings
of the condemned, which appears in Lomazzo’s treatise on the arts,
see Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura, et
architettura, Milan, 1585, p. 107.
Sources of Leonardo quotations: “I recently saw an Annunciation . . . ”

Urb. 32 verso; “Botticelli said that such study . . . ” Ash. II, 22 recto; “Tell
me if anything . . . ” B.L. 251 verso. For Leonardo’s comments to an absent
Botticelli, see Codice Atlantico 859 recto.
xvi. For additional information, see Brown’s (Leonardo, pp. 101–21) inter-
esting discussion of the Ginevra de’ Benci. Leonardo would also devote
considerable thought and ink to the paragone between painting and
sculpture; for Leonardo and the paragone, see Claire J. Farago, Leonardo
da Vinci’s Paragone: A Critical Interpretation with a New Edition of the
Text in the Codex Urbinas, New York, 1992. The x-radiograph of the
Metropolitan Museum’s Portrait of a Lady is reproduced in John Walker,
“Ginevra de’ Benci by Leonardo da Vinci” in National Gallery of Art.
Report and Studies in the History of Art 1967, Washington, D.C., 1967,
fig. 15. The sumptuary laws of 1472 stipulated that new brides could
wear no more than two brooches, one for the head and one for
the shoulder; and, after three years, the woman could wear only
one brooch. Alternatively, it was long ago proposed that the New
York portrait represents Credi’s recently widowed sister-in-law, who
was named Ginevra di Giovanni di Niccolò (see Federico Zeri, Italian
Paintings. A Catalogue of the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Florentine School, New York, 1971, p. 154). Although this is possible,
we do not know whether that particular Ginevra, married to Credi’s
brother Carlo, was so young when she was widowed. Furthermore,
it is hard to explain why the artist would first paint a face very similar
to that of Ginevra de’ Benci and subsequently revise it to resemble
his sitter. One should also take into account that Ginevra was a fairly
common name in the Renaissance. A useful history of the Lady-and-
Unicorn theme, with illustrations of paintings and prints, is provided
by Margaret B. Freemen, The Unicorn Tapestries, New York, 1976,
pp. 33–65. Sources of Leonardo quotations: “And if you, poet . . . ”
Ash. II, 19 recto; “hearing is less noble than sight–” Ash. II, 19 verso;
“Take the case of the poet . . . ” Ash. II. 19 recto.
xvii. For various portraits of Amerigo Vespucci, see Luciano Formisano et
al., Amerigo Vespucci. La vita e i viaggi, Prato, 1991, pp. 204–19. For
Leonardo’s rebuses, see Augusto Marinoni, I rebus di Leonardo da
Vinci. Raccolti e interpreti, Florence, 1954; Kenneth Clark and Carlo
Pedretti, The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection of Her
Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London and New York, 1969,
nos. 12693–99, pp. 175–77; and Larry J. Feinberg, “Visual Puns and
Variable Perception: Leonardo’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder,” Apollo,
vol. CLX, August 2003, pp. 38–41. A singer, Leonardo seems to
have owned a copy of Guido da Arezzo’s Micrologus de disciplina artis
musicae (c. 1025), which introduced the sol-fa musical system. Source
of Leonardo quotation: “O moro, io moro – ” Madrid II, 141 recto.
xviii. For various views of the Bust of the Young Christ and commentary, see
Martin Kemp, “Christo fanciullo” in ALV, vol. IV, 1991, pp. 171–76,
figs. 2–8, and 11.
Assigning a date to the Young Christ is quite difficult in light of the lack
of comparative material and our utter ignorance of Leonardo’s development
as a sculptor. However, given the piece’s residual connections to Verrocchio
and, in certain respects, to a few of Leonardo’s drawings, such as the Saint
John the Baptist, one may tentatively place it in the second half of the 1470s.
In profile, the bust has the sharp features associated more with Leonardo’s
early profile studies of c. 1478–80 and preliminary sketches for his Adoration
of the Magi (1481) than with his later drawings and paintings of heads. We
must also consider the fact that polychrome, terracotta busts, still popular
in Florence in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, had largely gone
out of fashion by the time Leonardo returned home from Milan in 1500.
By then, when busts were fabricated from terracotta (rarely), they were
most often painted to look like bronze. Sources of Leonardo quotations: “I
obey thee, O Lord . . . ” Forster III. 29 recto; “Fortune is powerless . . . ” W.
12349 verso; “Falsehood is so utterly vile . . . ” Turin 12 recto; “The Lord
is the Light . . . ” Codice Atlantico 543 recto; “The Creator does not make
anything . . . ” Codice Atlantico 19020 recto; “Rejoice that the Creator . . . ”
Codice Atlantico 19022 verso; “How did the waters . . . ” Codice Atlantico
419 recto.
xix. For a recent attribution of the Madonna Litta to Leonardo, see Tatiana
Kustodieva, Leonardo: La Madonna Litta dall’Ermitage di San Pietroburgo,
Rome, 2003.
xx. It was not unusual for a man of Leonardo’s age to receive such paternal
support; the Capponi and Ruccelai families had unmarried adult sons,
some twenty-nine and thirty years old, living with them in the later
fifteenth century – see Francis William Kent, Household and Lineage in
Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai,
Princeton, 1977, pp. 27–29. The names and gifts of the Magi tended
to vary from time to time and from place to place. In Renaissance Flo-
rence, the oldest magus was typically identified as Melchior, who offered
gold; Balthazar as middle-aged and swarthy (rarely black) with a jar of
frankincense; and Caspar as the young magus who carried myrrh. This
is how they were described in the popular, thirteenth-century Laude,
or Hymns of Praise, of Frate Jacopone da Todi, republished in Florence
in 1490. Occasionally, Balthazar was considered to be the bearer of
myrrh, as in Pseudo-Bede the Venerable’s eighth- or ninth-century
text, Collectanea; his portrayal of the Magi was also widely dissemi-
nated for centuries in hymns. If, familiar with this alternate tradition,
Leonardo intended Balthazar, shown kneeling before the Christ Child,
to be understood as holding myrrh, it might explain Saint Joseph’s sullen
expression. An exotic resin used in embalming, myrrh came to sym-
bolize impending death; after the Crucifixion, the priest Nicodemus
prepared Christ’s body with a mixture of myrrh and aloes ( John 19:39).
See Fusco and Corti (Lorenzo de’ Medici, pp. 35–39) for the two bronze
horse heads in Lorenzo’s possession, one of which was, perhaps, not
antique, but a Renaissance copy. From Vasari (deVere, vol. I, p. 688),
we know that Verrocchio also copied horses from antique sculpture.
Source of Leonardo quotation: “Every smallest detail . . . ” W. 19115
recto.
xxi. Leonardo admitted that some of his chariot designs were useless, because
their scythe-like weapons could injure friend and foe alike, and the
enemy could easily spook the horses (MS B 10 recto). For Filip-
pino Lippi’s substitute Adoration of the Magi, see Patrizia Zambrano
and Jonathan Katz Nelson, Filippino Lippi, Milan, 2004, pp. 469–79,
no. 52, pp. 594–96. Perhaps looking at the same (lost) antique relief,
Filippino, in late drawings preserved in the Uffizi (no. 169F) and

formerly in the F. Koenigs collection (Haarlem), drew similar com-
positions with procession, altar, and classical architecture.
xxii. Carmen Bambach suggested that the Allegory with Fortune drawing
could refer to Lorenzo de’ Medici – see Leonardo da Vinci. Master
Draftsman, no. 31, pp. 331–32. For Fortuna in Lorenzo’s poetry, see,
for example, Poesie del Magnifico Lorenzo de’ Medici, pp. 12–13 and 19–
20 (canzoni I and III) and pp. 18 and 23 (sonnets XXV and XXIX).
For Botticelli’s Primavera and Pallas and the Centaur, see Lightbown,
Botticelli, vol. I, pp. 69–89; vol. II, B39, pp. 51–53, and B43, pp. 57–
60. For the Vasari reference to the troncon tagliato, see Vasari-Milanesi,
vol. 8, p. 118.
xxiii. For an illustration of Castagno’s Last Supper, see Andres, Hunisak,
and Turner, Art of Florence, vol. I, pp. 670–71, pl. 379. For Vasari,
Leonardo’s countless studies of drapery had paid off; he lavished
praise particularly on the tablecloth of the Last Supper.
For an explanation of stylus and stylus marks, see note for section xiv.
Source of Leonardo quotation: “figures must be done . . . ” Codice Atlantico
139 recto.
Logically, Leonardo believed that blood, like water, responded to gravity
and flowed down through the body from the crown of the head (MS A 56
verso).
xxiv. For Rossellino’s Empoli Saint Sebastian, see Eric C. Apfelstadt, “A

New Context and a New Chronology for Antonio Rossellino’s
Statue of St. Sebastian at Empoli,” in Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento
Italian Sculpture, eds. Steven Bute, Alan Phipps Darr, and Fiorella
Superbi Gioffredi, Florence, 1992, pp. 189–203. I prefer to call the
subject of the Pollaiuoli painting the “Shooting of St. Sebastian”
rather than the traditional “Martyrdom of St. Sebastian” for reasons
of accuracy; according to legend, Sebastian survived the ordeal with
the archers and only died later, after he was beaten (and thrown into
the Roman sewer). For Lorenzo’s antique Marsyas sculptures and his
Apollo and Marsyas gem, which reflects the pose of the lost, “seated
Marsyas,” see Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, pp. 39–41, and p.
126, fig. 128. For the figura serpentinata, see John Shearman, Manner-
ism, Harmondsworth, 1967, pp. 81–91. Leonardo explored the limits
of this figural type in his lost painting of Leda and the Swan, known
from surviving drawings.
xxv. For Lippi’s Saint Jerome in the Badia, see Zambrano and Katz, Fil-
ippino Lippi, pp. 254–57 (ill.), and no. 38, pp. 355–56. For Vasari’s
demarcation of the three periods of art, see Vasari–deVere, vol. I,
pp. 300–4, and vol. II, pp. 773 and 775. The manuscript illuminated
by Francesco d’Antonio del Cherico is catalogued in Ames-Lewis,
Library of Piero de’ Medici, no. 4, p. 238, figs. 102–3.
For the Pollaiuolo practice of drawing a model from both front and
rear, see also Antonio’s pen-and-ink Study of a Nude Man from Three Angles
(Louvre, inv. no. 1486), reproduced in Wright, Pollaiuolo, as fig. 119, and his
engraving of the Battle of Nude Men.
Sources of Leonardo quotation: Evil flees away – MS H 18 recto; “After
these [artists] came Giotto . . . ” Codice Atlantico 387 recto.
xxvi. In the later fifteenth century, a number of works for domestic con-
sumption, such as birth trays and other birth-related, painted objects,
were produced for the open market, with only a few the products
of special commissions. The findings of the infrared examination of
the London version of the Virgin of the Rocks are published in Luke
Syson and Rachel Billinge, “Leonardo’s Use of Underdrawing in the
‘Virgin of the Rocks’ in the National Gallery and ‘St. Jerome’ in
the Vatican,” Burlington Magazine, vol. CXLVII, 2005, pp. 450–64.
In her book, Mary Magdalen (London, 1993), Susan Haskins offers
an interesting history of perceptions and images of the Magdalene in
the Renaissance and through the centuries, including the dulcis amica
dei. For the Castiglione “quote” of Giuliano de’ Medici, see Baldesar
Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, ed., Daniel Javitch, New York
and London, 2002, (bk. 3, 138), p. 176. Sources of Leonardo quota-
tions: “it is better to make landscapes when the sun is covered . . . ”
MS G 19 verso; “you should make your portrait . . . ” Ash. II, 20
recto; “But see now the foolish folk! . . . ” Ash. II, 25 recto.
xxvii. For Vasari’s comments about the bitter truths of life in Florence,
see Vasari–de Vere, vol. I, p. 733. Sources of Leonardo quotations:
“With a constant joyous longing . . . ” B.L. 156 verso; “Most illustri-
ous Lord . . . ” Codice Atlantico 1082 recto.
xxviii. Sources of Leonardo quotations: “bath of the Duchess” MS I 28verso;
“let him expect disaster . . . ” MS H 119 verso; “My Lord knowing
the mind . . . ” Codice Atlantico 915 verso; “Oh slave to human
misery . . . ” W. 12698 recto; “Decipimur votis . . . ” MS L cover.
Although Leonardo’s Latin inscription would have to date to 1502 or
later (possibly several years later), the drawings contained within Manuscript
L range in execution from c. 1497 to 1502. Scholars have sometimes misread
the Latin on the MS L cover as “mos Deridet” rather than “mors Deridet” –
that is, “habit derides” rather than, correctly, as “Death derides.” Leonardo
may have learned Celtis’s verses secondhand, through his connections to the
French court; the cynical lines were the motto of the well-traveled Erard
de la Marck, whom French king Louis XII appointed as prince-bishop of
Liège in 1506. Celtis’s lines remained popular in Belgium. In 1546, Susato of
Antwerp used them in a motet.
Index
Alberti, Leon Battista, 9, 13, 20, 83 Flemish painting, 20, 34, 79, 178
I libri della famiglia, 9, 13, 53 Flora, the goddess, 178
Albiera di Giovanni Amadori, 5 Freud, Sigmund, 65
Antonio di Ser Piero, grandfather of Leonardo’s “vulture dream,” 65
Leonardo, 6, 89
Aristotle, 9, 45, 59, 61, 89, 155 Gallerani, Cecilia, 115
ethics, 15 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 19, 153
Giotto, 166
Bacchiacca, Francesco, 177 Gozzoli, Benozzo, 18
Baroncelli, Bernardo di Bandino, 100–104 Procession of the Magi, 18
Bembo, Bernardo, 105
Benci, Ginevra de’, 105–112, 143 Jerome, Saint, 164–167
Boltraffio, Giovanni Antonio, 125 jousts, 14, 28, 55–58, 104, 137, 146
Madonna Litta, 125
Botticelli, Sandro, 19, 40, 57, 79, 99–100, La Piagnona, 26
143, 146, 162 Lady and Unicorn theme, 111–112
Brunelleschi, Filippo, 17 Landino, Cristoforo, 20, 105
Leonardo, 5
Caprotti, Gian Giacomo, called Il Salai, 60 allegories, 56–57, 145–147
Castagno, Andrea del, 52, 103, 153 birth, 5
Castiglione, Baldessare, 176 boyhood, 5–8, 29–30
Caterina, mother of Leonardo, 5, 89 contrast of youth and old age, 89
Cherico, Francesco d’Antonio del, 167 drawings, 36
Cicero, 15 Adam and Eve, tapestry cartoon, 30
courtesan pictures, 177–178 Adoration of the Magi, 139
Credi, Lorenzo di, 67, 73, 77, 82, 86 Adoration of the Shepherds, 151
Madonna of the Pomegranate, 82 Allegory with Fame and Fortune, 148
Portrait of a Lady, 109 Allegory with Fortune, Death, Envy,
Virgin and Child with Saints John and and Ingratitude, 145
Donato (Madonna di Piazza), 28, 67, Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli
74 Hanging, 100
Bust of a Warrior, 47–52
Donatello, 68 Compositional Study for the
David, 17 Background of the Adoration of the
Saint John, 68 Magi, 136
Saint Mary Magdalene, 169 John the Baptist Pointing, 67
Lady with a Unicorn, 111
emeralds and semiprecious stones, 80–82 military devices, 40
Nativity, 151
Ficino, Marsilio, 15, 21, 56, 105, 142, 176 Nursing Madonna in Profile, 125
Fior di Virtù, 9, 65, 112, 115, 156 Nutcracker Man, 47
201
202 Index
Leonardo (cont.) Treatise on Painting, 99, 136, 172

Phyllis Astride Aristotle, 59 in Verrocchio workshop, 22, 27–30, 33,
presumed Self-Portrait, 63 59, 67, 73, 82, 122
Saint Sebastian, 159–162, 182 vision and optics, 34, 80–82, 83–86, 130
sheet of rebuses, 116 visual puns and rebuses, 108, 115–119
St. Jerome, 181 Lippi, Filippino, 142, 163
Studies for a Last Supper, 152 Lippi, Fra Filippo, 13, 17, 40, 142, 173
Studies for the Adoration of the Magi, Adoration of the Christ, 17
134 Adoration of the Christ Child, 71–72
Studies for the Virgin of the Rocks, Luini, Bernardino, 178
171
Studies of Mary Magdalene, 173–178 Magdalene, Saint Mary, 174
Studies of Catapults and Crossbows, 139 Marsyas, 162
Study of a Dog, 30 Martini, Francesco di Giorgio, 39, 139
Study of a Female Head, 77 Masaccio, 167
View of the Arno River Valley, 36, 43 Medici, Cosimo de’, called Il Vecchio
Virgin and Child with a Cat, 87, 90–97 (the Elder), 8, 13–16, 17–18, 162
Virgin and Christ Child with St. John Medici, Giuliano de’, 55–58, 100, 149
the Baptist, 151 Medici, Lorenzo de’, called Il Magnifico
Virgin of Humility, 151 (the Magnificent), 18, 30, 39, 65, 79,
education, 8–11 80, 100, 102–104, 105, 131, 137, 139,
half-brother Antonio, 22, 79, 87 145, 162, 176, 180
half-brother Giuliomo, 87 Medici, Piero de’, called Il Gottoso
homosexuality, 59–62, 65, 74, 186 (the Gouty), 18
illegitimacy, 5, 22–23 Melzi, Francesco, 61, 178
interest in cardiovascular system, 155 Profile Study of Leonardo, 61
inventions, 41–42 Monna Lucia, grandmother of Leonardo, 6,
jokes and riddles, 64 89
in Milan, 180, 185–187
military devices, 139, 181 Neoplatonists, 20, 56, 142, 175
movement of water, 37, 39, 41–42
paintings, 30 Pazzi family, 13, 100–104, 145
Adoration of the Magi, 89, 129–138, 163, Perugino, 73, 142
183 Petrarch, 105, 112, 174
Altarpiece for the Palazzo della Signoria, Piero di Cosimo, 176
97, 142 plague, 26, 81, 140, 159–162
Annunciation, 75, 110 Plato, 9, 56, 83–84, 137
Benois Madonna, 83–88, 94 Platonic Academy, 20, 92, 106
Head of Medusa, 30 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 22, 80
Last Supper, 28, 89, 135, 152, 183 Podestà (Bargello), 22, 26, 103
Madonna of the Yarnwinder, 117–119 Poliziano, Angelo, 20, 57
Mona Lisa, 113, 127, 173 Pollaiuolo, Antonio, 19, 27, 34, 168
Monster on a Shield, 7, 29 Battle of Nudes, 36
Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (Lady with an Hercules and the Hydra, 69
Ermine), 113 Shooting of Saint Sebastian, 70, 132
Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, 105–112 Tobias and the Angel, 34
Saint Jerome, 163–169, 171 Pollaiuolo, Piero, 19, 34
Tobias and the Angel, 33 Annunciation, 37
Virgin and Child with a Carnation, 79, Shooting of Saint Sebastian, 70
87 Tobias and the Angel, 34
Virgin of the Rocks, 151, 171–173 Pontormo, Jacopo, 177
paragone, 107 Pulci, Luca, 56
personality, 59–64 Puligo, Domenico, 177
reversed, mirror-image writing, 10, 145,
146 Rizzoli, Giovanni Pietro, called
sculpture, 121 Giampietrino, 178
Bust of the Young Christ, 121–124 Robertet, Florimond, 118
Sforza monument, 182 Rossellino, Antonio, 27, 161
Index 203
Sebastian, Saint, 159–162 Virgin and Child with Saints John and
Ser Piero di Antonio, father of Leonardo, Donato (Madonna della Piazza), 28
5, 21–22, 29, 75, 97, 142, 174 repair of antique Marsyas, 162
notarial career, 5, 22, 75, 105, 129, sculpture, 47
163 Bartolomeo Colleoni, 50
Sforza, Galeazzo Maria, 28, 180, 185 Boy with a Dolphin, 92
Sforza, Ludovico, 115, 119, 180–183, Christ and Saint Thomas, 121
185–187 Crucifixion, 121
Darius relief, 47
Tornabuoni, Lucrezia, 19, 71 David, 121
Tosini, Michele, 177 Equestrian Statue of Colleoni, 179
Lady with a Small Bouquet of Flowers,
Uccello, Paolo, 20 110
lavamano, 27, 51
Vasari, Giorgio, 28, 29, 72, 73, 75, 78, 113, Sleeping Youth, 56
123, 167, 179–180 tombs for Cosimo, Piero, and Giovanni
Verrocchio, Andrea del, 18, 47, 57, 60, 73, de’ Medici, 18, 27, 76
82, 92, 102, 125, 162, 179 workshop, 26
drawings, 55 Vespucci, Amerigo, 113
Design for a Standard, 55 Vespucci, Simonetta, 57, 113
paintings, 34 Voragine, Jacobus da, 9
Baptism of Christ, 28, 68 Legenda aurea (Golden Legend), 9, 118, 164,
Tobias and the Angel, 33–37 174

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Leonardo da Vinci is often presented as the “Transcendent

Larry J. Feinberg is the Director and CEO of the Santa Barbara

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2011

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data

isbn 978-1-107-00239-5 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of

Figures page vii

13. The Benois Madonna and Continued Meditations on

Bibliography with Endnotes 189

1 View of the town of Vinci page 4

21 Lorenzo di Credi, Virgin and Child with Saints John and

46 Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (Lady with

71 Leonardo da Vinci, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness 165

The origin of this book lies in the engaging lectures delivered by

Director Beatrice Rehl as well as project managers Brigitte Coulton

natural phenomena that he found particularly inexplicable and intrigu-

of his father as well as of his extended family and stepfamily. Although

F ew knew and fewer cared to know about the boy’s birth

As was customary, the newlyweds, Ser Piero and Albiera, moved

office of the town’s chief magistrate (podestà) and a government center

reasons but also because of the remarkable, rejuvenating effect a baby

He would struggle with rudimentary Latin throughout his life and,

I am fully aware that the fact of my not being a man of let-

In another place, he reiterates, somewhat angrily:

if indeed I have no power to quote from authors as they

masters. They strut about puffed up and pompous, decked

We do not know how Leonardo may also have suffered because of

I n the mid-fifteenth century, the medici were not members

C osimo’s patronage of the visual arts was no less impressive

Their son, Lorenzo, preferred writing poetry and collecting gems

Her Majesty Queen

(Ficino sometimes referred to intellectuals who, like Leonardo,

(third century b.c.) and Flavius Vegetius Renatus’ fourth-century vet-

“legitimate” him, a legal process involving the approval of Florence’s

D espite a certain confidence born of his many gifts,

Verrocchio himself, adding the finishing touches to his marble bust of

the Duke of Milan in 1471. Through him, Leonardo gained a useful

Leonardo would have received a bare subsistence wage, probably

according to Vasari, Leonardo prepared for the Medici a tapestry car-

relationship. Lorenzo, who assembled a famed menagerie, enthusi-

How lovely is youth –

Some allowances should be made for the clichés, refrained in subse-

T he earliest surviving traces of Leonardo’s hand – and

as tenors of expression that the literal-minded Flemish, originators of

impact akin to that of the 1819 Paris unveiling of Theodore Gericault’s

Figure 6. engraving of a Battle of Nudes (c. 1471–73) by his rivals, Verrocchio

He meticulously differentiates the layers of stratified rock that com-

P erhaps in the early 1470s, and certainly by the end of

comprehensible and credible images for which written commentary Figure 7.

ters Military), a fourth-century treatise that emphasized the need for

its efficacy or validity. However, another aquatic design he produced

it is necessary to have a coat made of leather with a double

When Leonardo investigated a natural phenomenon, such as a

In the end, even if he could not completely comprehend or explain Figure 8.

existence of Nothing is the greatest of all. This dwells in

Leonardo’s tendency, seen already in his View of the Arno, to

Her Majesty Queen

Hyperinquisitive as he was, he was never a scientist in the mod-

scholars interpreting the ancient writings of Aristotle, particularly his