4
Landscapes à la Leonardo and the First Solo Painting
In the Renaissance, artists, eager for viewers to feel themselves present in their painted stories, used landscapes to enhance the illusion. If their works represented events that were distant in time and place—which was often the case, as the most popular subjects were biblical stories, historical events, and mythological fables—they tried to bring these distant events closer to their viewers’ homes by setting them in familiar scenery. This intimate connection between viewers and paintings was especially important for religious stories.
A new form of devotion for the laity had emerged in the course of the fifteenth century and had spread rapidly from the Low Countries to Italy and other parts of Europe. It was called modern devotion, or devotio moderna, and it promoted an intense, personal relationship with God through frequent meditation on the divine. One of the best ways to experience the divine individually was to project oneself into a scene from Christ’s life. Authors wrote books to instruct the faithful, not just the clergy, in how to achieve this deep, individual immersion, and artists achieved the same goal by setting biblical events in local landscapes rather than in the harsh desert of the Holy Land. This is the reason landscapes became more and more important in Renaissance art, although they remained backdrops to narrative stories and were never considered in themselves worthy of entire paintings, or even drawings.
Leonardo did not challenge this practice, at least not on the face of it. His landscapes were still part of religious stories. But the way he laid down mountains, rocks, rivers, and meadows on his panels, the way he transformed traditional stories by setting them outdoors, the way he immersed people and things in nature and the atmosphere, in effect gave landscapes a whole new dimension. No longer backdrops, they were fully integrated with the people in the foreground, essential to both the depiction of their states of mind and to the creation of a deep connection with the people who looked at his paintings.
Indeed, the first documented work by Leonardo is a small landscape that he sketched in ink. He drew it on a folio-sized sheet, about nineteen by twenty-nine centimeters, which he had previously washed with pale pink (Figure 1). He thought that “to paint objects in relief painters should stain the surface of their papers with a tint that is medium dark, and then put on the darkest shadows, and finally the principal lights in little spots, which are the first that are lost to the eye at a short distance.”
From a high vista point that takes in a wide panorama of the valley below, he sketched the Arno River, which slowly winds its way to the Tyrrhenian Sea. A fortified medieval castle defiantly juts out from the edge of a high cliff that rises on the other side of the valley. The sun sets in the west, casting shadows on the right of the image. Treetops, rocks, and marshes all seem out of focus, as if they were screened by particles of dust in the air or blown by strong wind, or both. There are no people in this landscape, which Leonardo most likely imagined as the backdrop of a narrative painting.
It is a scene of uninterrupted beauty and majesty, not dissimilar to the magnificent panoramas that one can see from the town of Vinci, looking down to the valley, the Arno River, and the marshes of Fucecchio. Leonardo’s drawing recalls landscapes that would have been familiar from his childhood. But, as the art historian Alessandro Nova has put it, this “landscape did not start as an autonomous and pure landscape; it has become one.”
Leonardo began the drawing with a lead stylus that left faint marks. Later, at his desk, he reworked these almost invisible signs with a light ink and then retouched the sketch with a darker ink, adding details to the rocks and trees.
About fifteen years later, he wrote a detailed note about teaching artists “how to portray a place accurately” using “a piece of glass as large as half sheet of royal folio paper,” which they had to affix to a machine in such a way “that you cannot move it at all.” He told artists to shut an eye or entirely cover it and then “with the brush or a piece of finely ground red chalk mark on the glass what you see beyond it. Then trace it onto paper from the glass, and pounce it onto paper of good quality, and paint it if it pleases you, making good use of aerial perspective.” We do not know if he himself followed this procedure in sketching his first documented landscape.
But we do know that he took the highly unusual step of dating this drawing. On the top left corner, in reverse handwriting, using a notary script called mercantesca that was typical of lawyers, notaries, and merchants, he wrote:
On the day of Our Lady of the Snow
On the 5th of August 1473.
On the back he jotted, not in reverse, the name of a friend—Giovanni Morando d’Antonio—and added, “I am happy [sono chontento] [sic].” These are the oldest notes in Leonardo’s handwriting that have come down to us. Leonardo was twenty-two years old. He was still a member of Verrocchio’s workshop, but he was also an independent painter. About a year earlier, he had started paying dues to the Compagnia di San Luca, the Florentine confraternity that painters joined in order to practice as independent artists.
From an artistic point of view, this beautiful landscape was not exceptional. In fact, it was conventional.
The drawing replicated a successful scheme for vast panoramas invented by Jan van Eyck, an artist from Bruges whose works were admired in Florence. Van Eyck had figured out a way to create the illusion of expansive views, even on panels as small as five or ten inches. His trick was to paint some natural features—usually rocks, sometimes trees—in the middle of the scene: these natural features worked as a kind of visual proscenium, giving the illusion of depth. Verrocchio had adapted a van Eyck landscape with rocks for use as a base for some of his paintings, although he had enlarged van Eyck’s landscape scene from its original, diminutive size to a larger one that often filled half of the painted surface. The Pollaiuolo brothers had done something similar, most notably in an altarpiece representing the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (although in their case the landscape took up about two-thirds of the entire panel).
To date a painting was exceptional, but the way Leonardo wrote the date on this drawing was common. In the Renaissance, most people did not keep track of the days of the month numerically, as calendars and clocks were not household items, and even many educated people, who may have owned luxury spring-driven clocks or had sundials installed on the walls of their palaces, did not know how to read them. What most people used to keep track of time were breviaries, books that listed prayers to be read every day, with each day dedicated to a saint or a sacred event. Days of the month were identified by the name of the saint or the event commemorated on that day. For instance, March 25 was the Day of the Annunciation because that was the day Gabriel appeared to the Virgin to announce her miraculous pregnancy. December 8 was the Day of the Virgin’s Conception. August 5 was dedicated to Saint Mary of the Snow in commemoration of a miraculous summer snow that fell in Rome in the year 352.
One wonders, though, why Leonardo took such an unusual step of dating this small sketch. What did it mark for him? Was there something about it from his point of view as an artist that was worth celebrating?
We have established that the view was conventional, that the date was uncommon but also unremarkable—but what about Leonardo’s marks on the page?
A few rapid, spiraling touches suggest fuzzy treetops seen through humid air.
Curved strokes form treetops, perhaps trembling in the wind.
Disciplined diagonal hatchings identify mountains in the distance.
Faint horizontal lines mark the damp valley and fumes coming from the marshes.
Tiny vertical touches mark trees and towers immersed in humidity, lost in the distance.
Thin lines hint at the crests of distant mountains.
Thinner lines suggest crests that were even more distant, more immersed in the atmosphere, less defined.
The faintest lines indicate the place farthest away, the coastline where the Arno River reaches the Tyrrhenian Sea, about fifty miles in the distance.
Why did Leonardo sketch this way?
Alhacen explained that air contains small particles—water vapor, smoke—and that these minuscule elements collide with “forms” coming from the objects in all directions, causing these forms to scatter even more and generating additional lights, colors, and reflections that are so dense that they create a veil of sorts over everything in view. The philosopher explained that air becomes thicker and thicker with distance, and that the thicker it becomes, the more it affects how things appear to the eye.
But in his catalog of “visual illusions,” Alhacen also explained that it was not just that faraway things looked smaller than those nearby. More important, they looked different. Nearby trees displayed nuances of greens and browns, and flowers in close-up had distinct colors—yellows, pinks, reds, and violets. Each item of greenery had a distinct contour, and each leaf and plant could be identified. But those same shapes and colors that were distinct and brilliant at close range blended into one another in the distance, with some becoming undifferentiated shapes of darkish green; those farthest away acquired blurred edges and a bluish veil. The lines separating lighted areas from shaded areas became fuzzy, especially in human faces and bodies.
Verrocchio had created stunning drawings of female heads that captured the effects of the atmosphere on their faces, which, Vasari reported, “Leonardo was ever imitating for their beauty.” But no artist, not even van Eyck, not even the great Andrea or the Pollaiuolo brothers, had found a satisfactory way to replicate the effects of the atmosphere on nature—how it blurs contours, reduces faraway objects to a dot, makes detail indistinguishable, and blends colors and shadows. In their landscapes, things in the far distance—towers, trees, houses—were smaller in size and somewhat bluish, but their details were as distinct as those in the foreground. Even the artists of an earlier generation who were familiar with optical writings—Brunelleschi and Ghiberti—had struggled with rendering the atmosphere. No wonder. It was far from obvious how to make palpable what is ineffable and yet fundamental to how we perceive the world.
And so it was not majesty or beauty that drew Leonardo to that particular landscape. It was the humid atmosphere of the marshes that filled the entire valley on that hot summer day—a day bright enough to allow him to do what no artist had ever done before: capture, at least in black ink, the dense atmosphere that obfuscated the contours of treetops, rocks, marshes, rivers, coastlines, valleys, and mountains.
That is what that hot summer day in August of 1473 meant to Leonardo: it was the date he succeeded in rendering with black ink on washed paper what had eluded others—the effect of the atmosphere on how we perceive the world.
But could he accomplish the same with colors and brushes?
The bottega had recently received a commission for a new painting of Gabriel’s visit to Mary, at which she was told that she would bear God’s child (Figure 2). To this day, we do not know who commissioned the painting, who led the patron to Verrocchio, or even where the finished painting was meant to hang. All we know is that Verrocchio, confident that Leonardo was ready, entrusted the commission to him.
Leonardo was indeed ready, ready to make this work a test case for his new way of painting. By the early 1470s he was unquestionably the most talented painter of the workshop.
The Annunciation was one of the most frequently represented stories from Mary’s life. This was not surprising, since Renaissance theologians thought that, for the purposes of human salvation, the Incarnation—when God became flesh in Mary’s womb—was even more important than the Crucifixion. In Florence, the story took on added civic significance since the New Year did not start on January 1 but on March 25, which was the Annunciation feast day. Florentine authors wrote plays about the meeting of Mary and Gabriel, bringing the story into the midst of Florentine everyday life, just as artists set the scene in typical Renaissance houses. One of the most famous theatrical representations was a play written by a Medici supporter, Feo Belcari (1410–1484), which was performed regularly in the Florentine church of San Felice during the years when Leonardo apprenticed in Verrocchio’s workshop. Leonardo may well have been among the audience at one of those plays.
Belcari’s play was based on the vivid description that the evangelist Luke had provided of Mary’s shifting emotions during the event (Luke 1:34–35). Taken by surprise by Gabriel’s sudden arrival, she was afraid. She was not reassured by the news Gabriel delivered—that she would bear a child who would be the son of God—as it defied all she knew about the laws of nature. Incredulous, she asked: “How will this be since I do not know a man?” Using an optical metaphor, Gabriel said that the Holy Spirit would pass through her body and make her pregnant without altering her virginal status, just as a shadow changes the way an object within its borders looks without actually altering the object itself. “The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee and the power of the Highest shall overshadow you” were his words. The comparison was an apt one. The explanation made sense to Mary, who believed his words and submitted to divine will.
To an artist deeply interested in optics, the story offered the opportunity to paint a shadow that was divine and optically correct—not to mention the challenge of rendering Mary’s shifting emotions.
Leonardo was determined to avoid what he had seen in the works of some of his contemporaries. He criticized a Mary who “looked as if she would, in desperation, throw herself from a window,” and had equally harsh words for “an angel who looked, in his act of Annunciation, as if he would chase Our Lady from her room with movements which displayed as much offensiveness as you might show to your vilest enemy.” His Annunciation, in other words, was not going to depict a veritable assault. To the contrary, it would capture Mary’s emotions at the very moment when the immaterial divine spirit passed into her and miraculously made her pregnant.
Traditionally, the Annunciation was an indoor scene set in Mary’s bedchamber or an area next to it. But this indoor setting created sharp shadows that, as Leonardo wrote years later, give a “wooden effect” to people’s faces and make it hard to represent nuanced emotions. And so he placed his Annunciation outdoors, in the garden of Mary’s villa, which he imagined on a hill, overlooking a magnificent view that telescopes out from the garden into a park and then seamlessly merges into a busy river, a harbor city, and a mountain range. Sun rays coming from the left cast shadows toward the right. Suffused light from the sky reflects and disperses those shadows in myriad directions, making visible the particles of the air, smoothing edges, softening shadows, and enveloping everything. These were perfect, realistic lighting conditions to create nuanced shadows that would make evident the smoothness of Mary’s face.
In this setting, Gabriel casts on the grass his optically correct shadow, which points toward Mary, who casts her own shadow behind her, on the external wall of her own house, which is a fashionable Florentine villa with rusticated corners and square windows. Their cast shadows move in the same direction, along the same trajectory, and suggestively make visible the moving of the divine shadow through Mary’s body.
Having decided on the outdoor setting of his Annunciation and the kind of effects he was after, Leonardo set to work on the panel. A carpenter prepared it for him out of three planks of wood from local poplars. Usually, carpentry amounted to about 15 or 20 percent of the total cost of a painting, which may seem a high percentage to us today. But we have to remember that carpenters were better equipped than painters to select the right wood, cut planks without nodes and cracks, and frame the entire structure so that it would last for centuries, as it did. The cost was worth it.
Leonardo worked on the framed panel, which he layered with gesso to obtain a smooth, white surface to draw on. His first layer was the so-called gesso grosso, a thick mix of animal glue, chalk, and white pigment that adhered well to the panel, although it was hard to spread because of its rough texture. Leonardo spread it evenly with a large brush, but because of the frame he could not reach the edges: when the brush hit the frame, Leonardo raised it and moved it to another area, lifting also a small portion of gesso grosso, which created a barb, or ricciolo, as modern conservators call it. If we look carefully, we can see this ricciolo at the edges, which is proof that the panel remains its original size. (Had the panel been cut, the ricciolo would have disappeared.) Atop the gesso grosso and its ricciolo, Leonardo applied a layer of gesso sottile, which was more finely ground and made the surface perfectly smooth and ready to be drawn on.
His first decision concerned the location of the focal point of the narrative scene and what to represent in that important spot. He fixed this point according to the golden ratio, a measure Renaissance painters favored to define the proportions between a panel’s height and its length because it added a subtle and pleasing balance to their works. The golden ratio is indicated by the Greek letter “phi”; it establishes how to divide a straight line in two different segments so that the proportion between the entire line and the longest segment equals the proportion between the longer segment and the shorter segment. But this quite technical definition could be reduced to a simple geometrical procedure, which had become a basic practical skill used in the studios of Renaissance artists.
Later in life, Leonardo created beautifully shaded diagrams to demonstrate the relations between the height and the width of rectangles—revealing the golden ratio. They were illustrations for a book, On Divine Proportions (De divina proportione), written by his friend Luca Pacioli. But that was around 1498, about twenty-five years after he used the golden ratio to fix the geometrical focal point of his Annunciation. Now, on that crucial spot, he did not paint Mary or Gabriel, but a high mountain with faded colors and undefined outlines.
He made preparatory sketches for this panel, but apart from one beautiful drawing of Gabriel’s arm wrapped in a soft, almost transparent gauze held by ribbons floating in the air, and another that served as a guide for the lily, they are all lost.
Lost are the geometrical drawings he made with compasses and straightedges to foreshorten Mary’s villa, which is indeed a true showpiece of linear perspective. It demonstrates Leonardo’s mastery of that hallmark of Renaissance art. We know he made a preparatory drawing because we can still see the indentation that the stylus left when he traced the drawing to transfer the palace’s design from paper to panel.
Lost as well are the drapery studies that we know he made because we can see traces of how he transferred them to the panel. We cannot see these traces with our naked eye, but we can see them thanks to infrared photography, which, cutting through the paint layers, reveals little dots of spolvero, or “pouncing,” a technique used to transfer drawings onto panels that was particularly effective for details such as folds, petals, stems, nostrils, eyelids, and chins. Here is what Leonardo did: he pricked tiny, closely spaced holes along the contours of his preparatory drawing. Then he positioned the drawing on the panel and sprinkled the holes with charcoal dust. The dust left minuscule dots on the panel. He then connected the so-called pounce marks using a brush dipped in black ink.
But when it came to shading the drapery, the long hours he had spent with his fellow apprentices copying folds from real fabric, wet with plaster, under mixed lighting conditions, paid off. He drew the shadows freehand, directly on the panel.
And lost, too, are the perspectival drawings for Mary’s lectern—a wooden stand atop a richly decorated marble base, covered by a transparent veil, to support Mary’s magnificent prayer book. Leonardo had modeled the marble base after the design his master had created for a Medici tomb, and constructed the foreshortened lectern on the panel carefully—his foreshortened lines are now visible from underneath the colors due to the aging of the pigments. He shaded lion legs, acanthus leaves, shells, volutes, garlands, rosettes, and festoons, all ancient motifs that his master had rendered in marble and bronze for the Medici tomb. Leonardo modeled them so masterfully that, with paint, he created the illusion of three-dimensional sculptural pieces. Twenty years later, Leonardo would write that painting is superior to sculpture because it creates with paint the illusion of depth that sculpture only achieves in three-dimensional space.
Drawings for the landscape are not lost because he never made them. He sketched a broad outline of the landscape in black ink directly on the panel, and did not even bother to fill in the details—he added them later, working directly and confidently with colors.
Drawing and modeling came easily thanks to his master’s teaching. Coloring was an entirely different matter.
The painting technique Verrocchio used was tempera. It involved mixing pigments with a binder that dissolved in water—usually egg yolk. Over the centuries, Florentine artists had achieved unrivaled mastery of this technique, which offered considerable advantages. It was durable, which patrons appreciated, and it dried quickly, which permitted artists to speed up the application of one layer over another. Its drawback was that its brushstrokes never fully blended together, each stroke remaining visible even if applied with very thin brushes. Most artists saw no problem with this limitation. Not so Leonardo.
He had come to admire the paintings by northern artists that Florentine bankers and merchants had brought to Florence from Bruges, Antwerp, and Brussels. These northern works displayed brilliant colors and an array of optical effects, from shiny fabrics and brocades to transparent glasses and reflected shadows—in stark contrast to the effects achieved using tempera colors. Instead of mixing colors in egg yolk, northern artists diluted them in oil. The resulting mixture was more malleable than tempera, which allowed for greater nuance. It dried slowly, which was a drawback, but this long drying time also opened up possibilities for experimentation. Leonardo’s master had never painted in oil and could not teach him. But he had taught him something much more valuable: never cease searching for the best materials and techniques to get your works to express what you want them to express. Leonardo made the continuous perfecting of his work one of the leading principles of his life as an artist, and years later wrote about it in notes intended for his book on painting:
I remind you, O painter, that whenever you, in your own judgement, or in the opinion of another, discover some error in your works, you should correct it so that when you do show the work you do not also display the error. And do not make excuses to yourself persuading yourself that you will be able to rebuild your reputation with your next work, because painting does not die in the act of its creation as does music […]
With oil, Leonardo could paint over a partially dried layer so that the two layers would blur into one. He could rework colors while they were still wet. He could retouch contours, adjust tones, and mingle outlines. He could even use his fingers to blend still-wet brushstrokes to create fuzzy outlines. More important, he could mix pigments with just a bit of oil to obtain opaque colors, known as body colors (corpi), which were perfect for drapery and buildings. But he could also dilute the same pigments further and apply them as semitransparent layers (mezzi corpi, literally “half bodies”) in order to depict the shining texture of foliage. Experimenting further, he could mix the smallest quantities of pigment with oil to obtain a nearly transparent glaze, which he could apply in multiple layers. He could vary the tone and thickness of each layer to achieve an astounding variety of optical effects. These glazes were perfect for rendering transparent fabric, such as the veils that covered Mary’s hair and her lectern—they could capture the “gradations” of light and shadow that “are infinite upon a continuous surface which is in itself infinitely divisible,” that is, a surface that can be divided into smaller and smaller parts ad infinitum.
It took Leonardo a while to figure out that too much oil in the mixture makes colors wrinkle excessively once they dry, or slide off the panel instead of sticking to it. But oil became his technique. He might have learned by trial and error, or perhaps Verrocchio sent him to another workshop to perfect his art, a practice that was not uncommon. The Pollaiuolo brothers, for instance, had become masters of the oil technique, and although they were rivals they also participated in plenty of exchanges with Verrocchio’s workshop.
Leonardo learned to apply imprimitura, an oil-based layer, over his preparatory drawings on the panel to insulate the wood from the pigments he would later apply. Painters typically did not retouch their designs once they had applied the imprimitura, but Leonardo often made adjustments as he began to paint. Thanks to infrared photography, we can see what Leonardo changed between the making of his preparatory drawings and the application of his finishing touches, his pentimenti.
In the case of the Annunciation, Leonardo determined only later that Gabriel’s profile was too low. He raised it a tad so that Gabriel looks at Mary straight on, reinforcing the intensity of their exchange.
The harbor in the background was too crowded with details that could not have been visible at such a distance. He chose not to paint half of them.
A bow window jutted out right above Mary’s head in a manner that he must have later determined to be unsightly. So he flattened it.
And Mary’s brooch was too large, its shimmering surface a distraction. He did not paint it, anticipating in practice what he wrote years later: “the resplendent beauty of youth lose[s] its excellence through excessive devotion to ornament.” Painted figures should not be adorned “with costly gold and other expensive decorations.”
Leonardo’s Annunciation broke with tradition in other ways, too. He layered the color base over the imprimitura, but instead of applying a uniform brownish color across the panel, as was the norm, he used different base colors depending on the luminosity of each area. A bright pink was the base color for the gray architecture, which was a clever way to modulate the duller pigment used to render Mary’s palace (today the pink peeks out, still in its full brightness, from the minuscule cracks in the aged gray paint). A brilliant green served as the base color for the vegetation. The sky has no base color at all: Leonardo painted it directly on the bright white gesso preparation. In fact, he left some areas of white gesso completely untouched, which was a great innovation: it made it look as if light came from within the painting. Later in life he wrote: “for those colors which you wish to be beautiful, always first prepare a pure white ground.”
Otherwise, he used traditional colors. Carmine red for Gabriel’s drapery. Azurite blue for Mary’s dress. Copper resin green for the vegetation. He added layer after layer, modulating the thickness of each, moving from a semitransparent body to a transparent glaze to reveal shadows in drapery folds and the tones of leaves, plants, and trees.
The red and blue colors are still quite strong, but the greens have lost their brightness due to oxidation, and today they are a rather undistinguished brown. Leonardo, however, was fully aware of the pitfalls of copper green, even in oil painting; later he wrote that copper green “loses its beauty like smoke if it is not quickly varnished” and, because it is made from a mixture of metallic salts, “it will disappear from the panel on which it has been painted if it is washed with a sponge, especially in humid weather.” But even he could not do much to overcome the shortcomings of copper green.
Mary’s face was harder to paint. Leonardo labored intensely on the delicate, almost imperceptible shadows that were intended to represent her alternating emotions. He painted her face once but was not satisfied. He erased it. He started again on the empty patch, but again he did not like the result. We do not know what displeased him; perhaps Mary’s face came out too stiff, or perhaps her smile was not subtle enough to capture her emotional passage from hesitation to acceptance of divine will. Or perhaps Leonardo simply miscalculated the ratio of oil and pigment, as the excessive wrinkling of her face seems to suggest.
But Mary’s face was not what defined his first painting. What made his first painting stand out so dramatically was what Leonardo did with the landscape. Here, he created thick yet translucent atmospheric effects, effects never before seen in a painting.
The scene was illuminated by direct sunlight, which is red, and by “universal light,” which is “that of the atmosphere within our horizon,” which is blue. Since, as he himself wrote thirty years later, “shadows generated by the redness of the sun close to the horizon will generally be blue,” Leonardo modulated the red and blue colors of these two light sources on people and things depending on their positions. The most striking effect is visible on the architecture. In the palace, the bricks facing the sun are more yellowish than those positioned parallel to the sun, which look more bluish. If we look carefully, a similar effect is discernible on the gray wall delimiting the garden, which appears more yellowish on the left side, closer to the sun, and more bluish near the palace, where it is more exposed to the sky. Similarly, the mountains look more yellowish on the left and more bluish on the right. The same goes for the marble base of Mary’s lectern: the top side that holds the book appears yellowish, since it is directly exposed to the sun, but the vertical side looks bluish, since it is exposed only to the indirect blue of the sky.
No chemical analysis has ever confirmed that Leonardo did actually apply tiny yellow and blue touches to the panel to suggest the washing of sunlight and of blue sky over everything. But that is how we perceive the bricks, the walls, and the lectern. And “visual illusions” were what mattered.
Leonardo’s peers would carefully position figures and objects based on their size—as that is what linear perspective taught—but Leonardo himself went a step further. He was the only one who understood that to enhance the connection between viewers and painted stories, an artist had to modulate colors and shadows with similar precision. It is not as if artists had never paid attention to colors and shadows before, but they had never figured out how to account for their variations due to exposure to different light sources. It was Leonardo who came up with rules for what is called “color perspective”: “with a single color placed at various distances and heights, its brightness will be in proportion to the distances of each of these colors to the eye which sees them.” These were matters Alhacen had discussed extensively in his book.
It would take Leonardo another forty years to come up with a simple diagram that explained the science behind the intricate optical effects in his Annunciation.
Between 1508 and 1510, he wrote a passage and drew a diagram that was intended to teach young artists how to paint objects in a countryside illuminated by red sunlight and by the blue light of the sky, which were the very lighting conditions he imagined for his first solo painting. A ball is suspended outdoors in front of a white wall; it is illuminated by the sun and by the sky, which is represented as a hemisphere. Leonardo’s explanation is worth quoting in full not because of its elegant prose—it is not elegant and it is not easy to follow—but because it shows how Alhacen influenced his thinking about the science of art. He wrote:
The surface of every opaque object partakes of the color of its opposite object. Therefore, since the whiteness of the wall is deprived of any other colour, it is tinged with the colour of objects opposite. The objects are in this instance the sun and the sky. Because the sun reddens towards the evening, and the sky shows its blueness […] the cast shadow strikes the white wall with a blue color, and the area around the shadow, there is no view of the sun, according to the eighth proposition of the book on shadows, which states: No luminous body has a view of the shadow cast by it. Where there is no view of the sun on that wall, it is in view of the sky. Therefore, according to the eleventh proposition the derivative shadow strikes the wall with a blue color, and the background of that shadow, which faces the redness of the sun, takes on the red color.
One wonders if “the book on shadows” referenced by Leonardo in this passage is the same one he consulted in San Marco on the desk of the illuminator Gherardo di Giovanni di Miniato in his twenties. If so, this would be further indication that he was thinking deeply about the philosophical implications and physical properties of light at a very early stage in his artistic career.
Leonardo’s originality lay in his distillation of optics into operational rules for artists that went far beyond linear perspective. Around 1490, he wrote about “aerial perspective,” “color perspective,” and the “perspective of disappearance,” but he had no doubt been investigating these topics already when he painted his first solo panel.
The Annunciation was a painting to be proud of. Leonardo displayed mastery of the oil technique and employed the full range of possibilities it afforded. He mixed minute touches of pigments with brushes and with his fingers—traces of his fingerprints are visible on the lectern and elsewhere when viewed under a microscope. He superimposed layers of highly diluted colors to render transparent objects such as Mary’s veil. He combined corpi, mezzi corpi, and transparent glazes to give depth and luminosity to every single element of the painting.
He also adapted the rules of optics to painting and showed that optically correct shadows could make invisible things appear visible, for example the divine spirit of the Incarnation via shadows, or Mary’s emotions via a smile. He was able to accomplish all this because he concentrated his attention on what he later called “the soul of painting”—the gradual blurring of edges, lights, and colors made by the atmosphere, which captured people’s emotions in ways that had never been accomplished before. As his first oil painting, the Annunciation bears traces of sometimes frenzied experimentation, but Leonardo largely succeeded in capturing elusive things in paint: the atmosphere, the landscape, colored shadows, the transparent veil over Mary’s book, Gabriel’s shadow, Mary’s smile. The painting epitomized his later dictum that “if you avoid shadows you avoid glory among the noblest minds.”
And yet Leonardo was still very much a traditional Renaissance painter, dipping a toe only here and there into new waters. He did paint the faces of Gabriel and Mary against darker backgrounds in order to make their features more visible, as Alhacen had recommended. But Mary’s face seems somewhat stiff—even after he painted it twice. And the angel is in full profile, a position that prevented viewers from looking into his eyes and that Leonardo rarely used in future works.
One thing is obvious, however: Leonardo already knew how to paint stunning landscapes. From that moment on, landscapes became one of Leonardo’s signature settings. For everything, from small devotional images to grand altarpieces, he created landscapes with optically correct shadows and reflected colors generated by sunlight mixed with “the universal light of the sky.”
Not all artists were keen on landscapes, however, and one was utterly indifferent to them. Later in life, Leonardo scorned this artist because he “makes very sorry landscapes.” He was referring to Botticelli.
Leonardo and Botticelli knew each other well, but their art could not be more different. Botticelli was the master of idealized figures who possessed unsurpassed beauty and emotionless expressions, inhabitants of a pure world that was untouched by human feeling and by the particles of the earth’s atmosphere. For him, the study of nature “was of no use.” Leonardo, however, had an appreciation for landscapes that extended even to small devotional paintings.
In a diminutive Madonna of the Carnation he most likely painted for a member of the Medici family shortly after the Annunciation (and that was based on one of his master’s popular models for devotional paintings), the Child plays on his mother’s lap, trying to grasp a flower she holds in her hand (Figure 3). The flower is a carnation, which was considered a symbol of Christ’s passion because of its deep red color, and also because legend has it that it bloomed from Mary’s tears on the way to Calvary. The group is caught between two distinct light sources: one from the left that hits their faces directly, and another, more diffuse source that comes from outside and filters through large windows. Through the windows, behind the Virgin, there is a marvelous landscape with rocky peaks, but Mary’s face is not seen against it. Her backdrop is a dark wall between the windows. As he recommended to artists in later notes, “Always ensure that you are able to arrange the bodies against backgrounds where the dark part of the bodies is offset against a light background and the illuminated part against a dark background.” Leonardo made a compositional motif out of Alhacen’s optical observation that an object has to be placed against a contrasting background in order to be seen best.
This setting—two light sources, natural light filtering from outside into a darker room, a dark backdrop for a face in full light—made it possible to achieve a masterful balance of optically correct colors and tones across the panel: the yellow folds of Mary’s mantle are the brightest spots on her lap because they fall in the most well-lit location. But the same yellow diminishes in brightness in the folds around her shoulder, which are slightly more distant from the viewer—in accordance with what Alhacen said about how the eye perceives colors and what Leonardo would observe later. Similarly, the blue of her dress is more intense in the shadowed areas in the foreground and lighter on her well-lit chest. The yellow and blue of her dress connect visually with the colors of the landscape, suggesting a close connection between Mary, who was seen as the rock of the church, and natural rocks. The flowers in the vase that are closer to the viewer are minutely defined, whereas bushes and trees in the background are undefined.
Above all, Leonardo seems intent on capturing transparency, reflections, and textures. Consider what we see:
A glass ball adorning a velvet cushion, which perhaps refers to the Medici coat of arms.
A vase, its form perhaps based on Verrocchio’s models for bronze luxury objects, in which reflections seen in transparent glass rival the shimmering metal of Leonardo’s master.
A transparent veil, which was a fashionable item for Florentine ladies.
Air that seems even thicker than that of the Annunciation.
Mountains peaks that dissolve into blue and white at the horizon and merge with brownish valleys and hills below.
Mary’s brooch—he did paint a brooch this time—which reflects light like a mirror.
The goal of this carefully calibrated surface of color and light, depicting a Renaissance domestic interior (perhaps the Medici palace?), was to enhance the tender interaction between mother and son so that viewers could participate more fully in the love that connected the two—and also in the drama of the Child’s death that this scene prefigures.
Verrocchio must have been the first to realize what his former pupil had achieved. For one, he had asked Leonardo to finish a panel that he had started in tempera years earlier, and that was lingering, unfinished, in the workshop. This was the Baptism of Christ, a large altarpiece that the monastery of San Salvi had commissioned from him thanks to the mediation of Verrocchio’s brother, who was the prior there (and who, coincidentally, often hired Ser Piero as his notary).
Verrocchio had defined the entire composition, borrowing freely from northern artists. He had brushed the figures with a color base—a verdaccio, or dark green—and painted most of them. Only Christ’s body and the angel on the far left remained unfinished. When Leonardo took over, he did not change his master’s overall design, but he did retouch a telling detail of the landscape (Figure 4). Verrocchio had sketched some trees on the left of the panel. Leonardo erased them and created instead an unobstructed view of mountains and valleys. Now a dense, veiled atmosphere, freed from the trees, flows seamlessly into the foreground and submerges everything: angels, Christ, John—and perhaps even gives the impression of enveloping the worshippers standing in front of the painting.
Leonardo had become a landscape master—landscapes à la Leonardo.
But could these landscapes help Leonardo reveal the minds and souls not just of distant religious figures but also of ordinary people—of the men and women he met in the streets of Florence, those who shared his way of life, his beliefs, his passions?