Frank Zöllner: Leonardo Da Vinci

Frank Zöllner: Leonardo da Vinci. The Complete Paintings and Drawings. Köln 2003. Life and Work I The young artist in Florence 1469–1480 Amongst the great figures of the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci remains one of the most enigmatic of them all. Although he has bequeathed to us the most extensive body of writings of any artist of his generation, rarely amongst these thousands of pages of manuscript do we find references to his personal opinions and feelings. We do not even have a very clear idea of what he looked like, and tend to picture him in two ways. On the one hand, we imagine Leonardo as a - bearded old man – as he has come down to us in the so-called Turin Self-portrait (Cat. 213/ill. p. 12) and in a drawing by his pupil, Francesco Melzi (1493–1570; ill. p. 8). On the other hand, we see him as a handsome youth, the embodiment of the Florentine Early Renaissance ideal of beauty, of the type that Leonardo himself drew many times (Cat. 184–185, 198, 203, 205) and which adorns, in an androgynous variation, the signet of an ”Achademia Leonardi Vinci” which he founded (ill. p. 8). Rarely, in visualizing Leonardo’s appearance, do we imagine a man in his prime, an artist between the ages of 30 and 60, the period of his career during which he produced most of his works. The reasons for this are essentially twofold: in the figure of the old man with the flowing beard, Leonardo appears to us as the wise inquirer and thinker, as someone who, through long years of study, has acquired a wealth of ”scientific” knowledge and reached a venerable old age in the meantime. In the handsome youth, on the other hand, we see the untutored genius who has outstripped his old teacher even before completing his apprenticeship (see below). The wisdom associated with old age is thus just as much a characteristic of Leonardo and his art as the precocious talent that was with him from his earliest youth and would remain with him to his life’s end. In his Lives of the Artists, first published in 1550, the biographer Giorgio Vasari (1511–_1574) takes up the story of the talented young Leonardo, who was born on 15 April 1452 in Vinci, not far from Florence. In his typically anecdotal fashion, Vasari describes how Leonardo’s artistic career began as follows: Ser Piero, Leonardo’s father, ”one day took some of Leonardo’s drawings along to Andrea del Verrocchio (who was a close friend of his) and earnestly begged him to say whether it would be profitable for the boy to study design. Andrea was amazed to see what extraordinary beginnings Leonardo had made and he urged Piero to make him study the subject. So Piero arranged for Leonardo to enter Andrea’s workshop. The boy was delighted with this decision, and he began to practise not only one branch of the arts but all the branches in which design plays a part.” While the tale of the young genius who had already mastered the fundamentals of his future métier even before commencing his apprenticeship may be a commonplace of art history, it undoubtedly contains a grain of truth. For the young Leonardo must have demonstrated an extraordinary aptitude for drawing at a very early age. No other artist of his generation left behind such an extensive, authentic and at the same time innovative graphic œuvre. Leonardo’s earliest surviving drawings from the 1470s already display the talented handling of metalpoint and pen to which Vasari pays enthusiastic tribute. Typical of Leonardo’s sheer pleasure in drawing are the small, often playful sketches of figures in motion, executed with short, energetic strokes of the pen (Cat. 1, 7–8, 110–111, 113, 115). Exercises in rendering three-dimensional objects are thereby joined by excursions into pure imagination. At the same time, other drawings from Leonardo’s early years demonstrate the scrupulous accuracy and graphic precision that all artists had to learn during their training. One such is his silverpoint drawing of an older man, the so-called Antique Warrior (Cat. 191/_ill. p. 9), probably - executed c. 1472 or shortly afterwards, in which Leonardo takes up a figural type employed in his master Verrocchio’s (1435–1488) workshop and derived from the works of classical antiquity. It is possible that young artists such as Leonardo honed their draughtsman’s skills by making studies of works of this kind. Indeed, at one point in his posthumously compiled Trattato di pittura (Treatise on Painting), Leonardo advises artists to copy the works of ”good masters” in order to learn how to ”represent objects well in relief” (McM 63). Whatever the case, we may assume that the young Leonardo, like other artists at the start of their career, trained his hand and eye by making studies of older works of art, and in particular, too, of nature. Typical of such studies of nature are the sketches that Leonardo produced during his apprenticeship, including his earliest dated drawing, today housed in the Uffizi in Florence (Cat. 428/_ill. p. 13). In the top left-hand corner, in his own characteristic mirror- writing, are the words ”on the day of St Mary of the Snow Miracle 5 August 1473”. Executed in pen and ink over a barely visible preparatory sketch, the study shows a view of a valley bordered by hills, leading away towards a distant horizon. The drawing is thought to portray a real landscape, but opinions vary widely as to the identity of the fortified hilltop village on the left. Leonardo’s drawing not only bears witness to the increasing importance of studies from nature in the 15th century, but also demonstrates the efforts artists were making to subordinate the features of the visible world to their own creative will. Thus, for instance, the crowns of the individual trees on the hill on the right are simply sketched in with rapid hatching. In places these hatchings combine to form oscillating patterns that go well beyond the immediate imitation of nature. It is also possible, however, that this same sketch – generally considered one of the earliest autonomous landscape studies in art history – takes up elements used by Leonardo’s teacher, Verrocchio. Patterns and sections of landscape similar to those in Leonardo’s drawing can in fact be found in the backgrounds of several of Verrocchio’s Madonna paintings, as can the motif of vegetation growing over the edge of a cliff. The younger artist perhaps oriented himself in his drawings – as later in his smaller paintings (see below) – towards the style of his teacher. A typical product of Verrocchio’s workshop is the small Dreyfus Madonna, which is occasionally attributed to Leonardo himself (Cat. II/_ill. p. 14) and which reveals some parallels with Leonardo’s Madonna of the Carnation (Cat. III/_ill. p. 15). This little panel, which is also known as the Madonna of the Pomegranate, derives from a compositional type found chiefly in Venice. Verrocchio probably encountered this type during a trip to Venice in 1469 and subsequently introduced it to Florence. In her left hand, the very youthful-looking Virgin holds a split, ripe pomegranate, a symbol of Christ’s Passion. The infant Jesus has taken a seed of the pomegranate with his right hand and holds it up to his mother with an inquiring gaze. This symbolic reference to Christ’s future Passion is reinforced by the stone parapet running across the foreground, which can be interpreted as a reference to the altar and thus to the Eucharistic Sacrifice of Christ. This symbolism is even clearer in other variations on the same compositional theme issuing from the workshops of Verrocchio and Giovanni Bellini (c. 1433–_c. 1516), in which roses and cherries rest on top of the parapet as symbols of the Eucharist. In the context of such contemplative paintings, the parapet thus links the elements making up the intimate devotional scene with a reminder of Christ’s Passion. That the Dreyfus Madonna was intended as the object of quiet prayer in a private home is further underlined by the striking contrast within the picture between interior and exterior. The Virgin and Child are seated in a positively gloomy room. A short stretch of wall behind the Virgin’s head gives way to two windows, one on either side, which are bounded in turn by grey pilasters and further sections of wall. This narrow interior is contrasted with the view, through the windows behind, out onto a bright and expansive landscape, which the artist has portrayed with some care. This landscape reveals parallels with Flemish and Umbrian works from the years around 1470, for example in the highlights placed on the trees in the middle ground and in the overall layout of the scenery. The Virgin’s blue mantle, on the other hand, is more typical of Tuscan – and specifically Florentine – painting: its folds spill over the parapet like an altar cloth and recall similar draperies in the paintings of Lorenzo di Credi (c. 1458–1537). The Dreyfus Madonna is in many respects characteristic of small- format devotional panels of the second half of the 15th century. Behind the tiny piece of pomegranate, barely visible in the Infant’s right hand, lies the artistic assumption that the viewer is standing very close to the painting and thus that the panel itself is hanging in a domestic setting. Indeed, Verrocchio’s Dreyfus Madonna seems to echo the recommendations of Fra Giovanni Dominici (c.

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