The child reaching over his mother’s arm as he tries to grasp the Cross, the symbol of his Passion, became a topic very dear to Leonardo in this period. On Novellara’s subsequent visit (14 April 1501), when he tried to persuade the artist to add colour to the portrait of Isabella d’Este, he found Leonardo increasingly bored with painting but at work on a small panel that the friar described with his usual connoisseur eye:
The little picture he is doing is of a Madonna seated as if she were about to spin yarns [inaspare fusi]. The child has placed his foot on the basket of yarns, has grasped the yarnwinder, and gazes attentively at the four spokes, which are in the form of a cross. As if desirous of the cross, he smiles and holds it firm, and is unwilling to yield it to his mother, who seems to want to take it away from him.4
There are now two versions of this painting, which was commissioned by Florimond Robertet, the French minister posted to Milan: the Lansdowne Madonnna [Plate 44] and the Buccleuch Madonna [Plate 45]. In certain respects both can be ascribed to Leonardo, but neither is wholly convincing. The former is of higher quality with regard to the landscape in the background and the chiaroscuro of the Virgin’s face, while the latter, which has a simplified and very flattened landscape, gives signs of a talent not up to Leonardo’s standard in the definition of the chiaroscuro, too. Both paintings have been taken from the same cartoon, and recent studies of the preparatory drawings underlying the paint show significant changes between the initial idea and its subsequent development.
This further mystery involving Leonardo’s works can be explained in the light of Novellara’s first letter: Leonardo, who had ‘lost all patience with his brush’, got pupils to execute the paintings he had been commissioned to produce and intervened only occasionally, to correct and improve their work. This practice accounts for the difficulties that arise when assessing these two paintings, and also for the somewhat simplified technique. But the important thing here is that in these two paintings, too – and they are the last ones attributable to Leonardo in this decade – one finds the classicizing physiognomy of the Virgin that we have already seen in the Burlington House cartoon and a rigorous reiteration of her typical physiognomy. By now, for Leonardo, women have high cheekbones, prominent eyelids and a straight nose extending above a small, thin mouth. The lowered eyelids contribute to the elusive, meek nature of their gaze, which is also gentle and detached. The model of this ideal woman is repeated again and again, both in drawings and in paintings, but is also apparent in the male figures (which become extremely rare from this point on) – as in the Saint John that he would paint in the following decade.
Novellara’s letters and the information that the friar managed to extract from Leonardo’s pupils also announce the changes that were happening in the artist’s life: he had lost patience with painting, was lost in a delirium of mathematical studies, and above all was now again attracted by military projects, a field where he clearly felt that his numerous and wide-ranging talents could bear fruit. In the composition of the Madonna of the Yarnwinder one figure is absent again, and deliberately so: that of Saint Joseph, a father who reminded Leonardo too much of his own absent father, whom he avoided even in paint.