For centuries it has been a tradition for Leonardo scholars to try to identify the artist’s hand in other paintings produced by Verrocchio’s workshop before The Baptism of Christ. The painting with the greatest number of ‘clues’ is a small panel of Tobias and the Angel [Plate 7]; it was painted towards the end of the 1460s, around the time when Leonardo joined the workshop as a boy. The image of Tobias and the Angel was very dear to Florentine bankers because it showed the successful journey made by Tobias to recover his father’s money. These bankers, who had business branches dotted across Europe, often sent their own sons around the world and regarded this image as a good omen for the safety of these young travellers.
The composition reproduces the classic grouping used in Florence, which was also chosen by Pollaiolo, an artist in open competition with Verrocchio. The scene is not very successfully staged, owing to the sloping ground that makes the two figures of Tobias and the angel appear to slide rather than walk. This clumsiness is indicative of the efforts and difficulties related to the conquest of spatial congruity and encountered at the time in Florentine painting. These difficulties emerged above all from the attempt to produce a natural portrayal of several moving figures. The landscape is simplified, the sky clear save for the small, transparent clouds that float without moving, proof of the absence of breeze. The figures are outlined through highly calligraphic lines that do nothing to define their rather ungainly anatomy.
The scene as a whole seems archaic, an expression of that simplification that Vasari, in his life of Verrocchio, would criticize as excessive ‘hardness’.12 But precisely for this reason it comes as something of a surprise to encounter two small details that conjure up the intervention of a young artist who painted differently, using an original manner, and who gracefully brought to life the dog and the fish that Tobias carries hanging from a wooden stick. The tradition that attributes these details to Leonardo is based on a decidedly weak argument: Verrocchio’s inability to render in naturalistic detail any subject that did not interest him, whereas his young pupil would have announced in this very painting his profound curiosity for the animal world. This would not really have been enough to warrant the young and very inexperienced pupil’s intervention in this painting. However, the two details and the singular style in which they are painted also reveal a technical specificity, since reflectography has shown that they were added at a very advanced stage in the painting’s execution, over a landscape that had already been painted. The rapidly executed portrayal of the running dog, whose tufts of hair subside into uniform waves like those of a turbulent stream, has admirable freshness and undoubtedly raises the question of authorship. At all events, if this is truly Leonardo’s first ‘recognizable’ contribution, it must date from the late 1460s, and therefore goes back well before the angel in the Baptism, where he demonstrates a maturity of execution that presupposes some years of technical practice.
Much more interesting is the case of the first painting that can be ascribed entirely to Leonardo, when he evidently started to paint independently, even if he was still part of Verrocchio’s workshop. This painting is the Annunciation [Plate 8], a panel that is not easy to interpret – so much so that it was widely believed to be by Ghirlandaio and was only attributed to Leonardo after 1905, when some of Leonardo’s drawings in Oxford were published, including a study of the angel’s right arm [Plate 9].
On the one hand, the painting presents the characteristic softness and sfumato already found in the angel from the Baptism, thereby identifying a precise stylistic character, and on the other it shows the kind of ingenuity in the use of perspective that points to a young painter of undoubted talent, but one who had not yet mastered perspective and spatial composition and was too unsure of his ability to construct a narrative told through images. For these reasons the painting can be dated to the early 1470s, when Leonardo was nearing the age of 20; and, for reasons linked to the corporation, it must postdate his joining the company of Saint Luke in 1472 – a date that converges with the stylistic findings and shows us the painter in the final stages of his training.
The painting renders a theme that was very common in Florence and central Italy. The kneeling angel, shown in profile in a small courtyard surrounded by a low stone wall, stretches out the right arm to salute Mary and to announce the birth of Jesus. Mary is a very young girl, intent on reading as she sits in front of the open door of a well-to-do mansion [casa signorile] whose door jambs and cornerstones with bosses [pietra bugnata] are typical of Florentine architecture of the period. The angel shows an almost perfect profile, while Mary is turned three quarters towards the viewer and looks in the direction of the angel without quite identifying its position, almost as if the girl was so surprised to find this presence in her flower garden that she could not pinpoint the winged messenger’s precise location. Rather than through their eyes, their relationship is established through the counterpoint of their arms: the angel’s right arm is outstretched, while Mary’s left arm is drawn back in surprise, almost pushed by the former.
The scene is moved very close to the lower edge of the painting, towards the viewer, to leave room behind it for a beautiful aerial view of the landscape beyond the trees, a clear announcement of the landscapes with which the painter will be consumed later on. It is a transitional painting, in which everything is new but still tied to a recognizable practice. The landscape in the background is perfectly representative of this very early announcement of a new world in Italian painting – in the first instance the trees, whose profiles were so dear to the paintings of Verrocchio and Florentine artists: their clean, dark silhouettes were typical of the Tuscan countryside, especially the cypresses, the oaks and that symmetrically ‘shaped’ tree with pruned branches that had become so fashionable in Florence after Benozzo Gozzoli had introduced it into his orientalizing landscape of the Journey of the Magi in Palazzo Medici. In Leonardo’s hands the tree is pruned so carefully that its precise geometry makes it look more like fairground machinery, a land of coccaigne, than like a living plant.
Beyond the silhouetted trees, so familiar in Florence that almost identical versions can be found in the backgrounds painted by Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Verrocchio himself, appears the vast, new and entirely ‘Leonardesque’ panorama, with two vanishing points that fade into the mountains, which in turn almost blend into the sky. On the right, an ancient seascape reveals a fortified city with towers and lighthouses to guide the ships. On the left is a wild countryside crossed by a river that winds far away towards the rocks and the misty sky – so different from the clear Umbrian skies that marked the works of Perugino and Raphael and persisted into the early years of the following century. This landscape already contains the sense of completion found in an entire painting, and it is perhaps the part to which Leonardo dedicated most care because in the workshop where he accomplished his apprenticeship attention was focused on the definition of drapes and on the poses of the limbs, while the landscape was simplified according a tradition that was by then centuries old.
The other extraordinary innovation of this painting is the strongly androgynous figure of the Madonna, who looks more like an adolescent boy than a Virgin. Her disconcerted expression is the most successful part of the entire painting: there are no shadows to detract from the regularity of those features and the scene seems to have been painted at sunset, when the diffused light produces no contrast on the faces – as Leonardo would later recommend in his [treatise] Libro della pittura. There are no shadows on the angel’s face either, but it is almost childlike and its complexion is less luminous because the light, coming from the top left, might have left the face in shadow were it not for the reflections of the white sleeves that throw highlights onto its cheeks. The softness of the light is a very innovative element, as is the landscape in the background. There are no overly sharp contrasts between light and shade, everything is very serene and Mary’s figure projects a faint shadow over the threshold of the door, where the diffused light seeps into the building and singles out a red cloth, an almost metaphysical and disturbing presence.
The surprise of the annunciation is represented by Mary’s raised hand, an excellent example of the progress of studies on gesture that is perfectly in keeping with the research undertaken by Verrocchio’s workshop. The gesture has been studied in painstaking detail and the angle of each finger is well controlled, even if the pictorial technique and the colour seem less successful than the face. The other hand, stretched out onto a bookrest placed on a finely sculpted marble altarpiece, betrays uncertainty in the pose and is poorly joined to the arm and shoulder. The whole right arm seems to occupy the space awkwardly and lacks harmony, apart from having been lengthened in exaggeration. There is a complete lack of spatial control in the painting and this is its greatest weakness.
As many have noted, the perspective of the stone ashlar does not work well and the spatial sequence created by the marble altar, Mary’s chair, the angel and the balustrade is rather incongruous. However, there was little alternative, given the boy’s self-taught approach and the lack of perspective studies in a training workshop that specialized above all in sculpture. Normally an apprentice would enter the workshop around the age of six or seven years (Michelangelo certainly did so at the age of nine) and start to learn the foundations of perspective drawing. In Leonardo’s case, talent meant that he was certainly encouraged to copy details, using an instinctive ability to draw from real life, but what is missing in his early works is the spatial organization that would have been learned through regular exercises in the workshop.
The spatial inconsistency in this painting would continue to make itself felt in the works that followed shortly afterwards. Young Leonardo’s progress was erratic and his interest in painting was for the present focused on light, landscape and drapery, which began to acquire that monumental character that would mark all the master’s subsequent paintings. The study of drapery in Verrocchio’s workshop was a fundamental moment in an apprentice’s training, as surviving studies by Leonardo and Lorenzo di Credi show. Verrocchio’s other pupil, Lorenzo, who produced work of great quality, even if not at the level of Leonardo’s excellence, clearly shows that Verrocchio’s teaching method, using plaster-soaked fabrics draped over clay models, allowed the apprentices to make enormous progress there by comparison to other workshops.
The definition of the drapery was exceptionally important because the solemnity of the figure relied largely on the style of the clothes worn, and these became a separate field of study [Plate 10]. It is difficult to imagine how this could have been otherwise in a city that owed its centuries-old wealth to the production and international trade of woollen cloth. In the Annunciation in the Uffizi, the Virgin’s drapery is displayed in a superfluous manner; it is spread even over the back of a chair that we do not see – yet we sense that it is incongruous because of its excessive width behind the Virgin’s shoulders. It was this need for solemnity that prompted the young artist to exaggerate the size of the Virgin’s enormous blue mantle (whose folds reveal a golden lining) to the point where the girl would have found it very difficult to walk. Even the red fabric that can be glimpsed inside the doorway may point to a family of cloth merchants as the patrons of the painting. Lengths of cloth, the foundation of Florence’s wealth, were displayed in heaps on the street or hung from buildings on 24 June, the patron saint’s day, alongside displays of gold and silverware, and in this case they embellish the scene of the Annunciation. At the same time, the red fabric and its brilliant tone add depth to the space behind the Virgin, on the threshold of the house, which would otherwise have been rather uncertain and awkward.
Another painting, a little later than the Annunciation and similarly executed in Verrocchio’s workshop, where Leonardo was acquiring his own recognizable style, is the Madonna of the Carnation [Plate 11], now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. This is a small panel painting that would have been destined for private devotional use by a rich merchant. The theme of the Virgin and child was the most recurrent one in productions around the 1470s and its iconography was rigidly fixed by numerous early models. Even in the fourteenth century, many paintings show a seated Mary holding the child while offering him a flower, as in Beato Angelico’s Pala di San Domenico at Fiesole [Plate 12]. It was difficult for Leonardo to avoid the rigid iconography of the time; yet the artist, who had now passed his twentieth birthday, had to impose his own recognizable personality and style, which would set him apart from other painters in Florence – the best known being Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Botticini, Filippo Lippi and Perugino.
Leonardo made a carefully pondered choice, which was to add to the innovations that Flemish painting had introduced to Florence, enriching them with that entirely Florentine capacity for realistically portraying the human figure and its emotions. Mary is seated in a closed and dark environment, which allows for the outline of her figure to be highlighted, while behind her the scene opens, with a striking contrast of light, onto the countryside and, in the distance, a chain of mountains that had never been painted with such realism before. The figures of Mary and the child are, once again, pressed into the foreground and linked by a bond of affection that was new to the genre. Mary looks down, at the flower she is handing to the child, and her composure seems just a little animated by a spark of pleasure in the child’s effort to grasp the flower. Contrary to the rigid earlier images that were still linked to a medieval solemnity, the child’s gesture is entirely appropriate to a young infant and must have been observed by Leonardo as he watched mothers playing with their babies.
By observing real life, Leonardo left behind his predecessors’ examples and gave a foretaste of a method that he would develop with enormous success in the years to come. With open, ungainly arms, the child leans towards the flower and tries to catch hold of it, before – we might imagine – squashing it and trying to put it into his mouth. This completely natural gesture was innovative in sacred paintings because, unlike in the scene depicted in the altarpiece by Beato Angelico, which is very close in time, here the child is not a miniature adult man who fetchingly mimes the act of grasping the flower but a real infant, still uncoordinated in his movements, who tries to accomplish what is for him a difficult task. We are looking at one of the first ‘real-life’ paintings of the Renaissance and at one of Leonardo’s first successful attempts to capture and reproduce the natural world.
The chubby infant is shown in all his ungainliness as he raises his left leg in order to thrust his right arm towards the flower, while also pressing his right heel into the cushion that yields, creating deep folds. Only the infant’s face shows more composure than a real baby would if engaged in such an arduous task. Everything else is in perfect accord with the action. Even his physical form matches the standards recommended by Florentine pedagogues: ‘nourish the male infant well and dress him as you can, tend to him justly and honestly … dress the female infant well, but she is not concerned about how she is fed, provided she is alive. Do not keep her too fat’.13
By creating a slightly forced spatial view (we are still at a relatively immature phase of perspective study), the artist includes in the right-hand foreground a transparent glass vase filled with flowers that somewhat incongruously hides Mary’s elbow. The transparency of the glass and the highlights on the flowers pay homage to the glass vases depicted in Flemish paintings at the feet of angels and Madonnas; these vases almost surpassed the figures themselves as a focus of attention. The vases in Hugo van der Goes’ Portinari triptych [1473–8], which arrived in Florence a little later [1483], for example, steal the limelight from the child who is lying behind them on the straw.
The virtuoso portrayal of the transparent glass is repeated, to even greater effect, in the gathered veil that falls over Mary’s breast and in the large jasper brooch fastening it, in which the painter shows the brilliant reflection of a ray of light from the window. To give even more drama to the ‘light source’ placed just above and to the left of the Madonna, as was customary in painting, Leonardo separates the Madonna from the landscape behind her by using that dark wall with twin double-arched windows that rested on elegantly slender marble columns. This allows the light to focus on the figures, creating a composition without distractions.
It was finally possible for Leonardo to construct the image through the use of light, thanks to the use of oil paints, with which he experimented freely in this painting. For instance, he increased the quantity of oil in the skin tones of the Virgin’s face in order to refine it gradually, using a series of velature. The effects of light on bodily flesh would have been impossible to create with tempera, since the density of the medium produced a dry and compact quality of colour, which could be combined only in homogeneous blocks. With oil paint, on the contrary, the colour could be made to vary imperceptibly, producing an almost endless series of tonal shades. Leonardo was able to use these imperceptible gradations to reproduce the slightest shimmer of light, and above all to soften transitions in a way that tempera would never have allowed.
Some of the technical features of this work are extraordinarily important to our understanding of the evolution of Leonardo’s painting. The shaded area of Mary’s face, including her neck, suffers from excessive ‘craquelure’, which is very obvious when seen at close quarters. These exaggerated cracks, which are caused by the oil as it dries (just like the cracks that appear on the soil after prolonged drought), are particularly evident due to the fact that too much oil was used to emulsify the pigment. Leonardo was experimenting with different ratios of oil and dissolved pigment, since he could not rely, in Florence, on a Flemish ‘school’ that was already skilled in the use of this medium. In the shaded part of Mary’s face, the possibility of softening the slightly darker colour produced by the light prompted him to add too much oil to the mixture, and the polymerization of the oil resulted in the appearance of those highly visible cracks in the layers of paint.
The quality of the oil used would be a constant concern for Leonardo, and in the Codex Atlanticus he made painstaking observations on its preparation, aware as he was that even the husk of the seed could interfere with the purity of the final tone. But at the time of this painting his observations were still too elementary and he lacked the necessary experience. The mixture used to paint the elegant veil that fills the central part of the painting was much more successful, and its transparency allows the viewer to glimpse the underlying red of Maria’s blouse in an extremely convincing manner. The same is true of the veil wound around her elaborate hairstyle: he blends the shape of her head into the background shadow by using small flashes of light.
This was a new concept in painting: objects, fabrics and bodies were no longer shown as they were in themselves, constrained by a linear drawing in an abstract catalogue, but as they were experienced, and their perception was filtered by the air and the conditions of the light. An enormous step had been taken towards realistic representation. Leonardo followed an identical process in the child’s body: the outline drawing vanishes, making way for the minute tonal variations produced by the infant’s soft flesh. The light strikes the baby’s back, but the light reflected by his left leg and by the yellow fold of his mother’s mantle lightens the torso and stomach sufficiently to show the liveliness of the flesh even in the shaded parts. The extremely delicate features of the young Madonna are also defined by the light and not by the drawing; the light smoothes the forms without ever being constrained by distinct shadows and hard profiles, as was often the case in paintings by Verrocchio and Leonardo’s other contemporaries – all of whom remained captive to the drawing, which defined the physiognomy with clarity.
The only concession to the old way of describing the body with calligraphic precision is in the hand that offers the flower to the child: a studied hand of such elegance that the gesture becomes almost artificial. The little finger is forcibly separated from the others, as is the case in Verrocchio’s statues, paintings and drawings, and it is possible that the older artist helped the young maestro to define this detail of the painting.
Embedded in the dramatic shadow of the wall behind, the image is extended almost with the same chromatic and tonal values into the countryside beyond the windows. The landscape that appears beyond the dark caesura of the loggia marks a striking new attainment in Leonardo’s research. While the landscape in the Annunciation still sought a compromise with contemporary paintings through the abstract, dark outlines of the cypresses and oaks before losing itself in the atmospheric description of the gorges, in this painting the landscape reveals a new world: no longer the countryside of central Italy, stereotyped through the simplification of its elements and reconstructed by bringing together various objects as if they were only a stone’s throw away, on a clear April day, but rather a truly natural view, almost autumnal in taste, with a prevalence of warm plant tones dominated by the cold colours of the snow-covered rocks. In this landscape Leonardo seems to attain more freedom of invention, as if he were less constrained by the workshop tradition that obliged him, for example, to use that ‘elegant’ but dated gesture of Mary’s hand offering the flower. The natural landscape, created not through the drawing but through rapid movements of the brush point, is an invention that was his very own, because it is not described but solely perceived. There are no silhouetted trees, but woods and green reflections. There are no mountains hanging like backcloths against the sky, but a disaggregation of rocks and colours that soften up from grey to white and then fade into the milky sky, empty of colour and place.
The place was in his mind, where he endlessly reconstructed the effects of his natural observations, trying to define an image that no longer described a place but gave the impression of being inside it. The artist’s lack of interest in the codified description of landscape is such that he not only reproduced a non-existent place but also matched the background colours to the Virgin’s clothing in order to create a perceptive ‘echo’, linking what was on this side of the dark barrier with what was outside it. The warm base of the countryside is a striking reference to the yellow lining of the mantle gathered around Mary’s legs, and the pale bluish grey ring of mountains recalls the greyish blue veil over her blouse. In this way there are not only tonal but also chromatic harmonies within the painting, and the landscape allows the viewer to enjoy the painting without interruption.
The innovations of this painting were such that the young artist’s reputation in the city was immediately assured and his work began to acquire an increasingly personal character, as is shown by another painting that can be dated between 1472 and 1475: the Benois Madonna [Plate 13]. Indeed many scholars date this painting before the Madonna of the Carnation, but owing to its radical composition it should, in my opinion, be placed after it. Like the Madonna of the Carnation, this painting was also produced for wealthy patrons and intended for private devotion, and it pushes the innovative boundaries of the earlier painting still further forward, definitively settling Leonardo’s account with the legacy of his master, Verrocchio.
Everything that was said about the spontaneity of the infant’s gestures in the previous painting is also true of this small panel, where, with touching concentration, the infant Jesus is intent on grabbing the blossom that his mother offers him. Using his left hand, the child tries to keep his mother’s hand still and to hold on to it as he grasps the little flowers with his right. Here too the left leg presses strongly against the right, trying to attain the balance needed for the child to reach up. But – unlike in the previous painting, where Mary is an unmoving participant with a composure that is traditional but also artificial – here the young woman takes part in the game, smiling and forging a strong emotional bond with her son, underlined – which is also a new departure – by the identical chromatic treatment of their skin; it is almost as if they were a single body with a single smile. The Virgin’s other hand, which holds a sprig – perhaps the one from which she has just picked the flowers – has a completely natural pose, a gesture that overrides, once and for all, the studies accomplished in Verrocchio’s workshop on the elegant (but arid) gestures in sacred paintings.
The much more foreshortened figure of Mary, her slightly tilted head, and the way her body leans a little to refrain the impetuous movements of the child, a real imp who bounces energetically, are the miraculous achievements of an artist who undoubtedly studied the model in real life, as some of his rapid sketches demonstrate – and they capture the scene with the expressiveness of a snapshot [Plate 14]. The concision and speed of these sketches indicate that Leonardo must have spied on peasant girls outside the house, as he often did, while they played with their children, distracted them with small twigs but also watched that they did not catch these twigs, as the movement of Mary’s left hand seems to suggest.
For Leonardo, painting this domestic scene was like opening a window in a room that had been closed for centuries and letting it fill with the air, scents and sounds of real life. Instead of the symbolic representation of maternity, he portrayed the affectionate playfulness of a mother and her child. Here too the main instrument used to breathe life-giving air into the painting is the light. There are no chromatic distractions, since the palette centres on greys and browns that range from the golden yellow of the sleeve to the blue of mantle and blouse, then it returns to the suffused gold of both the mother’s and her son’s hair. The colours are censored to allow light to play a leading role.
As evidence of the fact that the painting closely follows its predecessor, we can point to a series of conclusions and clues that were only glossed over in the former. Leonardo was obsessed with his line of research and would not allow distractions. In the first place, thanks to a more mature technique and better control of the oily emulsion, he prevented excessive craquelure. He found a way – one that suited his expressive requirements – not only to make linseed oil but also to mix it with the pigments. In the brooch, which is identical to the one in the former painting, he could now achieve a perfect reflection of the light from the open window facing the Virgin – a Flemish trick that the young artist, still not much over the age of 20, could not resist including. Another important innovation was the increased contrast between light and shade; throwing some areas of the figures into dense shadow makes the view more realistic, even if it partly hides the image. It is as if the shadow started to grow denser, stealing space from the light; and this is a characteristic that Leonardo’s painting would follow with increasing decisiveness up to its peak in The Virgin of the Rocks.
The first impression made by this painting is that there is much more distance between it and the Florentine Madonnas than one perceives when looking at the Madonna of the Carnation, and this way of concentrating the shadow also forces the elimination of the landscape, leaving space in the top right-hand corner for a single open window – a mullion window again, but without the slender column. Only the sky is visible is through the window, so that nothing disturbs the intimacy of the scene into which we have been almost secretly introduced: taking a miraculous break from her standard portrayal, Mary abandons her sacred composure and dedicates herself to her son’s happiness, unaware of the painter’s gaze.
The air, breath and movement that, according to Vasari, Leonardo brought into painting are all here, in this minute panel painting that measures just 49.5 × 31 cm.