6
The Unfinished Painting
For centuries, ever since Christian theologians began to stress the need to teach religious stories to as wide a public as possible, painting was fulfilling a role it had never been suited for—storytelling. This approach continued to persist down to the Renaissance. Although by that time there were pocket-sized editions of the Bible translated into the vernacular, most people could not read even those, while religious services continued to be conducted in Latin. So it continued to fall to art to transmit Bible stories to the majority of Christians. That was why religious paintings always seemed so teeming with details. To understand them, viewers had to find the visual plot (the storyline) and follow it through both the time period and the space the work covered. People in the Renaissance knew how to look for the main thread of a picture, and they had no trouble “reading” these paintings and deciphering the stories they told. Put more simply, they did not see art the way we do. They read art in a way we no longer can.
Leonardo had no problem painting biblical scenes that told a storia. He continued to do so throughout his lifetime. But having had a new conception for art that would seem to stop time to reveal the soul, he found himself facing a dilemma: how could he reconcile storytelling with a focus on the inner lives of the people he painted so that those who looked at his figures would be moved to experience feelings like theirs? As he put it later, he wanted his figures to “move those who behold and admire [his narrative paintings] in the same way as the protagonist of the narrative is moved.” But he was also fully aware of another truth: “I have universally observed among all those who make a profession of portraying faces from life,” he wrote, “that he who paints the best likeness is the worst of all composers of narrative painting.”
His first painting, the Annunciation, revealed an artist still grappling with Renaissance rules for how paintings should be executed and with his own instinctive sense of what makes a painting great—and how to employ optical effects to reveal states of interiority. He made some mistakes, but he had become proficient in the oil technique and had learned how to combine corpi, mezzi corpi, and glazes, and to paint delicate objects such as Mary’s veil. But apart from moving traditionally interior scenes outside, he was very much still locked into the conventions of traditional Renaissance painting.
With Ginevra, he had broken free, and the results were stunning.
Could he also break free with narrative paintings? Could he create not just a psychological portrait but a psychological narrative, one that served the needs of the church while also moving its viewers, telling them something profound about the world and their place within it?
This dilemma came to a head when Leonardo perhaps least expected it to—when he accepted a commission with the potential to fully confirm his skills as a painter. It was around the year 1480. Now he would interpret in his own way the biblical story of the three wise men from the East who came to Bethlehem to adore the Christ Child—the Adoration of the Magi (Figure 6).
The evidence suggests that Leonardo was eager to paint the Adoration, and that he worked on it incessantly for roughly two years, which is why what happened next is so mind-boggling. Until he had to actually paint what he had conceived and fully sketched out, he had been deeply involved in the work, employing to the fullest his remarkable talent for drawing. After completing his brilliant preparatory work for the Adoration, he did the unthinkable.
He walked away.
Today, just as he left it, the Adoration hangs in the Uffizi Gallery, alongside paintings he did finish. Until a recent restoration, which removed layers of yellowed varnishes that had been added over the centuries, most visitors to the Uffizi rarely did more than glance at it before moving on. But the artistic community—both scholarly and practicing—has made it one of Leonardo’s most studied works. Most come to study it because they believe that in its unfinished state, this painting takes us as close as we are ever likely to get to the mind of a Renaissance genius.
But we can get much closer to that creative mind—much closer to understanding what made Leonardo Leonardo and how he changed Renaissance painting—if we turn our gaze away from what he accomplished in this would-be painting and focus instead on what he failed to do, and why he failed to do it. Why could he not finish a painting he was so eager to paint? What stood in his way?
The Augustinian canons of the monastery of San Donato a Scopeto commissioned the painting for their church, which was in a remote location called Bellosguardo, which literally means “beautiful view,” on the southerly hills of Florence. To get to Bellosguardo, one had to exit the city walls from Porta Romana, the south gate that leads to Siena and Rome, and take a difficult walk along a steep and winding road to the top. The trip was taxing for both people and horses, but the setting was ideal for prayer and spiritual concentration and the view from on high was breathtaking: the city laid open with its red rooftops aligned along narrow streets, the cathedral’s dome and the Signoria palace in full view.
The view has hardly changed over the centuries, but the church is long gone. In 1529, the Florentines themselves destroyed it, together with everything else that stood on those southerly hills, to keep the army of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V from using it for shelter during a siege. All that remains today are stacks of dark building stones amassed in the place where the church once stood, and a few columns that were temporarily brought to safety—together with the Augustinians themselves—inside the walls of the city before the siege. Leonardo’s painting was to be for the main altar of this rural church.
When he got the commission for the Adoration, Leonardo was about thirty years old and had some presence in the city’s artistic milieu. He had also had some contact with the law. In April 1476, he was arrested on charges of sodomy, together with three others, one a well-off young man related to the Medici. The group was acquitted. In the judiciary record it was reported that Leonardo “is with Verrocchio” (sta con Verrocchio), which meant that he had stayed in Verrocchio’s workshop as an independent artist. Five years later, in April 1481, another judge forced him to compensate a tailor for an extravagant cut of green satin the artist had failed to pay for. But, as far as we know, his career did not suffer from these events. In fact, quite the contrary. At age twenty-four, Leonardo was regarded as one of the best artists in the city. In 1478, the Signoria, which hired only the best artists, commissioned from him a painting for a chapel in their palace. As far as we know, Leonardo did not even get started on this public work, which would have further enhanced his fame; years later, he had to return the advance of twenty-five florins he had received for it. He was not chasing fame and money, after all. He was more interested in testing the limits of his new way of painting.
The Adoration would become the new challenge for him.
He was so eager to paint it that he accepted unusually harsh terms. He agreed to deliver the painting within twenty-four months, or “[thirty] months at the most,” which was an aggressive schedule for a large altarpiece, and to “forfeit all his work” if he failed, leaving to the Augustinians the option to “do with it whatever we wished.” He would be paid a sum of 300 florins over a period of three years, which was a respectable amount (most altarpieces of similar size cost about 100 florins, although there were exceptions, and a handful of painters were paid as much as 400 or 500 florins). The oddity was that this sum came as expected revenue from one of the canons’ properties. Even odder was that Leonardo could use only 150 florins of that revenue to cover the cost of the painting, including colors and materials, because the Augustinians had previously allocated the remaining 150 florins for the dowry of a destitute girl; they wanted Leonardo to meet payments for the girl’s dowry in their stead. In short, Leonardo received no cash in hand and had to pay up front for materials, including expensive colors such as lapis lazuli, ultramarine, and gold, and he had to pay installments of the dowry.
It is hard to imagine that his father, who served as the monastery’s notary from 1479 onward, would have advised him to accept this contract. Most likely, Ser Piero intervened to convince the patrons to ease the terms when his son could not meet his contractual obligations; indeed, the patrons sent the artist “a barrel of red wine” and “a hopper of wheat” to help him make ends meet. They also agreed to pay a bill for pigments Leonardo had obtained on credit from the Gesuati, the monks who were apothecaries and made the highest-quality pigments in Florence. They also were willing to advance twenty-eight florins from their own reserve for the payment of the dowry because, as they themselves admitted, “time was passing by and such a late payment [from Leonardo for the dowry] was reflecting badly on us.” The canons were as eager as Leonardo to see the Adoration.
The story of the Adoration celebrates the revelation of Christ’s divinity to the gentiles. It is known as the Epiphany, which comes from the Greek word epiphaneia and literally means “manifestation” or “appearance.” Florentines had (and have) a special attachment to this story, and every year on January 6, the day the Magi arrived in Bethlehem, they reenacted the kings’ journey in the streets, transforming them into locations in Jerusalem and the Holy Land. The costume parade ended in front of the cathedral, where a hut was built for the Virgin, the Child, and Joseph. Local Florentines acted as holy figures, and animals and hay were brought in to complete the scene. A confraternity of the Magi had formed to prepare for this event, and over time it had become one of the city’s most powerful institutions. The Medici were members, as were all the leading families. It is likely that as a city resident Leonardo attended these processions and that he was familiar with the confraternity of the Magi.
Certainly, he was familiar with the versions of the story Florentine artists had painted. His peers had lavished their attention on the mesmerizing details of the kings’ journey—their luxury brocades, their travel companions who chanted and played music as they rode, and the exotic animals that accompanied them. But, unlike his peers, Leonardo did not represent the story as a happy cavalcade touring through gorgeous landscapes—this approach stressed the pageantry of the event, not its spiritual significance. Nor did he represent bystanders next to the Virgin and Child as if they were calmly attending a regular church function, which is what Botticelli had done for the funerary chapel of a banker a few years earlier. Judging by the many different gestures of the figures Leonardo would paint, it seems he was more interested in how people reacted to the manifestation of divine truth.
The evangelist Luke had quite an interesting take on people’s reactions to the Epiphany. Instead of writing about the Magi, Luke wrote about a group of shepherds who kept watch over their flock in the hills around Bethlehem and were visited by a divine messenger at night. “An angel from the Lord appeared to them,” Luke wrote, “and the glory of the Lord shone around them; and they were filled with great fear.” The angel spoke to them: “Fear not,” he said, announcing that the Messiah was born; they would recognize him because he was an infant “wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.” An angelic choir appeared in the sky and chanted God’s praises. After the angel left, the shepherds talked to one another and decided to proceed to Bethlehem, where they found the Child with his parents. They stayed to adore him and then left to disperse the news to the world. “All who heard it,” Luke continued, “wondered at what the shepherds said to them.”
Florentine artists and patrons had showed little interest in Luke’s shepherds, but artists from the northern cities of Bruges and Antwerp had favored them. The scene offered the possibility of showing how a large group of common people, not just kings and notables, reacted to divine revelation; it was also more in tune with modern devotion that stressed individual, nonhierarchical ways of experiencing the divine. The Augustinian canons were fully aware of the importance of individual experience, for their monastic order was a fervent supporter of devotio moderna across Europe.
To combine the traditional Florentine adoration of the Magi with the northern adoration of the shepherds was a major departure from the narrative sequence of the sacred text, which reported that the Magi and the shepherds adored the Child at different moments. But it was an artistic license an artist could take because it was eminently attuned with the way people in the Renaissance understood revelation.
What counted in revelation was not the chronological succession of events, because what was told was not a storia, a narrative. What counted in revelation was that brief moment when all possible clues from the past, the present, and the future come together to reveal a divine truth. If in order to convey this feeling an artist had to assemble a group of figures who had never historically been together, so be it. This was far from an esoteric position. None other than Bonaventure, a famous Franciscan medieval theologian whom Pope Sixtus IV canonized in 1482, had written that “the story does not always follow chronological order” but is nonetheless organized according to a system. That system is not chronology but rather “typology”—an arrangement according to correspondences, presupposing a deep similarity among events that on the surface appear unrelated. According to this line of reasoning, it was perfectly acceptable to combine the different times—past, present, and future—of a religious story in one single image.
The point was to show how people from all walks of life reacted to the manifestation of the divine. As Leonardo himself wrote years later, a great artist should aspire to represent as many different emotions as possible: “terror, fear, or flight or, indeed, grief, weeping, and lamentation, or pleasure, joy and laughter, and similar states.” In his Adoration, some figures would kneel, like the Magi. Other figures would be shocked, just like the shepherds were shocked by the angel’s apparition and the sudden light that broke out of the night sky. Others would talk to one another, and others still would be shown in the act of talking to others, sharing the news around the world. Each figure would be different, for Leonardo remarked that a painter should never repeat “the same pose […] in one narrative” or “the same movements in a single figure, be it in its limbs, hands or fingers.”
His earliest sketches for the painting were beautiful pen-and-ink drawings in which he explored compositions that were closer to northern versions of the Adoration. In these, the Virgin knelt beside a Child lying on the ground. But he discarded them and settled instead for a more traditionally Florentine composition with the Child on his mother’s lap.
But that is all he conceded to tradition.
He made sketches of the figures, first in the nude and only later draped in heavy cloaks, because a painter should “attend first to the movements appropriate to the mental attitudes of the creatures in the narrative.” He studied them frontally and in profile or from the back, their arms crossed in front of their bodies or hanging beside them, their hands pointing to the sky or placed on their foreheads to shade their view. He studied their hands and their gestures, their bent bodies, their straight legs, their arms stretched out in the act of offering or held close to the chest in the act of prayer. Later, he made this recommendation to artists in training: “do not draw the limbs of your figures with hard contours or it will happen to you as to many different painters who wish every little stroke of charcoal to be definite”; in so doing, those mediocre artists create figures that have “a beautiful and graceful and well-defined rendering of these limbs,” but those limbs do not move in a manner that reflects “the intentions of their mind [i concetti della mente loro].” He called these body movements of figures “the beauty and quality of their limbs.”
He focused on the buildings in the background. He sketched a perspective drawing, which is perhaps one of the most spectacular perspective drawings of the Renaissance. Its size was almost exactly eight times smaller than the painted surface, which made for an easy enlargement process (the drawing measures half a Florentine braccia, or about 11.5 inches, and the painted surface 4 braccia, or about 92 inches). It took hours of work to draw each line with geometric accuracy and to mark the areas of most intense light with minute brushstrokes of whitewash. He positioned buildings at the sides to create a vast landscape in the center and added figures and animals. He was supposed to transfer this preparatory drawing to the panel using one of the techniques he knew well from previous works.
He did not.
The panel that sat in front of him was a large square of about ninety-six by ninety-six inches (today it measures ninety-six by ninety-four inches because a section at the bottom was cut out at some point). It was made of ten irregular planks of poplar wood, which had been patched together with glue, nails, and crossbars. Leonardo covered it with a thick layer of gesso, glue, and other materials to minimize any irregularities in the wood and squared the area he would actually paint by incising four lines around the edges (this area measures exactly four Florentine braccia, or about ninety-two inches). He proceeded to transfer the architectural drawing, and the first step was to fix the focal point of the painting, which he did according to the golden ratio, just as he had done in the Annunciation. He divided the panel into three rectangles based on that ratio, and used the same ratio to fix the painting’s focal point. There he stuck a nail. Recently, restorers found the exact spot where Leonardo started his Adoration over five hundred years ago: a small hole underneath the brown paint of the tree trunk, right behind the Virgin. This was not just a tree. It was a reference to her descent from the biblical Tree of Jesse, the genealogy of the Child Christ.
As he had done in the Annunciation, Leonardo did not transfer the perspectival drawing of the architecture but opted instead to sketch the buildings anew, directly on the panel. He tied a string to the nail, stretched it toward some additional points he had marked on the panel’s edge, which are no longer visible, and traced a line that corresponded to the stretched string with the help of a rod. The operation was laborious, but the first line of his Adoration was drawn. More than one hundred additional lines had to be drawn, and those were just for the buildings, not for the figures. No wonder he cut corners. Some geometrical lines he sketched freehand—no ruler, no rod, no string, just his eyes, which were good enough for making approximations. He had learned from Alhacen about “visual illusions” and about the limits of what the human eye can detect. No viewer would have been able to notice that the lines of his architectural background were not mathematically precise, but everybody would have been under the illusion that they were. As he proceeded, he repositioned things. The big building on the left he redrew to free up space for a broader landscape, and he got rid of the central hut altogether as it was too intrusive. In its place he sketched a big rock and two trees.
When he started work on the figures, he changed pace. He was a compulsive draftsman, and that immense surface, covered in white gesso, marked only with skeletal geometrical lines, had an irresistible pull for him.
Although no artist had ever drawn an entire composition directly on a panel, certainly not on a panel of that size, this is precisely what he did. Infrared photographs taken in preparation for the recent restoration are revelatory. They allow us to “see” how Leonardo sketched on the panel without much of a fixed plan—freehand, no cartoons or other aids, just following his fancy as the figures emerged from his mind.
At first he sketched in soft chalk, since chalk marks can be erased easily with feathers, but soon he moved to metal point, which is unforgiving. Metal point is a black chalk with such a fine point that it looks like metal and leaves faint silvery traces. It requires a slightly rough surface, such as paper prepared with some wash of color, or a gesso panel, for the particles of metal point to leave a mark on the surface. Metal point also leaves indentations no feather can erase. But Leonardo loved metal point.
He loved its thin lines and subtle grooves. He loved to draw again and again over them without losing track of what was underneath. He loved to rework figures, sketching over a drawing he had just completed, the drawing underneath inspiring the one above, which would then inspire another that would replace it. He found this medium especially valuable for discovering the right movements and gestures, finding the best angles for his subjects’ heads, which he preferred neither in full profile nor in full frontal view but rather in original, in-between positions. The selection of the best traits for each figure was mental before it was manual, as Leonardo scanned the web of lines he had drawn, the feeble traces of metal point that kept visible each successive stage of the drawing until one outline emerged out of the many he had traced—the right one to express what was on the figure’s mind. For the Adoration, he repeated the same “scanning” operation for the more than thirty figures around the Child, plus many more in the background.
This was his method of working out figures, and years later he recommended that artists always draw with metal point on tinted paper: when you walk around, he wrote, “observe and contemplate the positions and actions of men in talking, quarreling, laughing and fighting together […] in a little notebook [piccolo libretto] which you should always carry with you. It should be of tinted paper [carte tinte] so that you cannot make erasures.” To draw this way was important because “so great is the infinity of shapes and attitudes of things that the memory is incapable of retaining them all.”
He sketched the central group of his Adoration with metal point freehand on the panel—the three kings, the Virgin, and the Child—and then traced their outlines with a thin brush dipped in black ink diluted with water. The ink strokes were quite rough, but in the finished painting they would look very different: they would be absorbed into the many layers of colors and varnishes he would apply over them, and their harsh outlines would be blurred with the background.
Around the central group, he sketched an adoring crowd composed of a number of dramatic figures (Figure 7). An old man covers his eyes as if to screen them from excessive light—for him, divine revelation is blinding (the recent restoration revealed a caption underneath this old man that identified him as “Giovanni,” which may be a reference to Giovanni Battista da Bologna, the prior of San Donato a Scopeto). Another man points his index finger up to the sky: revelation had come from there (Leonardo repeated this gesture in later works). Yet another raises his hand above his eyes to sharpen his view of the scene. A standing man at the left edge of the scene with his hand on his chin looks pensive; his reaction to revelation was introspective. A youth at the opposite edge seems to invite viewers into the crowd. Others ride horses; they lean to get a better glimpse of the scene to which they point. Others still talk to one another, their gesticulating hands and turned heads revealing the fervor of their conversation. Leonardo had studied this group in separate drawings and had originally sketched them debating around a dining table, subdividing them into smaller groups of three or four, their bodies turned toward one another, their hands in motion.
Eventually, he discarded these seated figures, but he did not forget them. He returned to them about ten years later, when he created his most dramatic psychological narrative, the Last Supper.
Who were all these figures in the adoring crowd? Shepherds? Members of the kings’ retinues? Common people who received the news from the shepherds? Whoever they were, they were not the calm bystanders painted by Botticelli and other Renaissance artists.
Leonardo did not really know what to do in the case of many of these figures. Heads seem to be emerging everywhere—in the small space between the muzzle of a horse and the raised hand of another figure, for instance. Another head with beautiful curly hair appears as a faint image, almost a ghost, but its expression is one of rapture, and nearby figures turn to witness the ecstasy of divine revelation. Infrared photographs show even more heads, which Leonardo discarded.
Before he finished defining every figure, Leonardo moved on to the next step in his process.
He identified the areas of the panel that would be in full light and applied a splash of gray-white wash. These areas included Mary’s head, bust, and arm; the Child’s head; the faces of the figures around the Virgin; the backs of two kneeling kings; the head of a horse on the far left; the rear of another horse in the background. But he did not paint highlights or reflections immediately. Instead, he began with the deepest shadows. Using a diluted greenish pigment, which has since oxidized and looks brownish today, he marked eye sockets, skeletal cavities, drapery folds, and mountains.
Leonardo thought about the Adoration in terms of extreme lights and extreme shadows, which—he knew—he would blend seamlessly into each other as the painting progressed.
One of the most revealing details in this regard is the hand of an old man (Figure 7). It is made of only two stripes of color, one very dark, the other very light. Leonardo’s plan was to blur them into the layers of colors and varnishes he would apply over them. But he never reached this stage. We can get a sense of how he might have completed this hand if we look at Mary’s outstretched hand in the Virgin of the Rocks (Figure 10), a painting Leonardo started right after he had abandoned the Adoration.
That Leonardo thought about the principles of optics while painting the Adoration is confirmed by recent X-ray analysis of his pigments. For the shadows, Leonardo used one single greenish color made of the same two pigments—copper green and an iron-based earth tone—which he diluted differently depending on the area he had to paint. He mixed the copper green with a greater proportion of earth tone to obtain a more brownish pigment, and with it he painted all the areas that were in deep shadow across the painting. He mixed the same green color with less earth-toned pigment to obtain a lighter brown, and painted with this all the areas that were a bit less in shadow. He used varying ratios of these pigments to capture different gradations of light and shade across the entire painting. Roberto Bellucci, who restored the Adoration in 2015–2017, explained that “Leonardo thought in terms of light and shadows since this initial phase.” Leonardo saw the entire painting in his mind as a balance of light and shadow. For him, the Adoration was an optical problem.
About ten years after he abandoned the Adoration, he created a set of instructions for artists: “First give a general shadow [ombra universale] to the whole of that extended part which is away from the light. Then put in the half shadows and the strong shadows, comparing them with each other and, in the same way give the extended light in half tint, afterwards adding the half lights and the high lights, likewise comparing them together.” But recent pigment analysis shows that he was thinking along those lines when he painted the Adoration. This new evidence raises a question: If Leonardo could envision the entire process he would use to paint the Adoration, why did he not finish it?
His problem was not a matter of what to do but of how to do it.
To be able to finish the painting, he had to know exactly what was going on around each figure and animal, which lights, shadows, and reflections would hit each of them.
The scene’s main source of light was the universal light of the sky; he painted the sky with a thin layer of lead white mixed with a bit of lapis lazuli. Along the horizon he painted with more transparent colors, and while those colors were still wet he smeared them with his fingers, so that their shadows and variations appeared to be “fading into light, seeming to have no end [che paia senza fine].” It is impossible to determine exactly where one color ends and another begins, which is precisely how sky and land look from a distance, when they are affected by the atmosphere. He painted four trees, sketching them first with broad and imprecise strokes, just as he had sketched the juniper behind Ginevra’s head, and then filled in the leaves one at a time. He nearly completed two of the big trees, but two small ones he only sketched.
Another source of light, most probably the sun, lay to the left, and Leonardo marked the shadows it cast from left to right on arches, stairways, and columns. He traced the shadows’ edges with geometrical precision and then blurred them with his fingers to show that they were immersed in the atmosphere. He painted masterfully nuanced shadows on the undersides of arches. These shadowed arches would reappear decades later as illustrations for Leonardo’s notes on “what part of a body will be more illuminated by a light of even quality,” which dealt specifically with outdoor illumination that combined direct sunlight and indirect light from the sky.
In his typically detailed prose, he explained, “The shadow made by the sun, which is beneath the projections of the overhangs of buildings, gains in darkness with every degree of height.”
The most perfect shadows are those on the backside of a rearing horse (Figure 8). He applied a light pigment made of lead white and just a bit of brown to mark the areas of the horse in full light, and added a broad stroke of darker brown for the shaded area. But unlike in other sections of the painting, he covered these pigments with thin layers of varnish to modulate the passage from light to shade. The horse’s backside appears so beautiful and so regular that it looks like a perfect sphere. In fact, it is so masterly shaded that it recalls the highly nuanced spheres Leonardo sketched years later, around 1490, to illustrate his notes on shade and light, which he intended to include in his planned book on painting.
For some figures, such as the kings, the Virgin, and the Child, he painted the undermodeling—a substructure underneath colors and varnishes that gives volume to figures. Usually, artists created this undermodeling with a brownish wash, but Leonardo did things differently. He painted his undermodeling with a bluish wash, perhaps a natural indigo dye. At times the wash was purplish; perhaps it contained a bit of red lac, the translucent, organic pigment that was exceptionally good for deep reds but that faded easily when exposed to sunlight. We do not know why he wanted his undermodeling to be bluish, but we know that he called it “the universal shadow” of a painting. He saw the undermodeling as the work’s unifying structure, which raises an interesting question: did Leonardo think that a bluish wash was the best means he had to render pictorially the atmosphere that penetrates everything? We do know, at least, that Leonardo continued to paint the universal shadow of his works with a bluish wash.
This universal shadow is especially visible in another unfinished painting that was close in date and conception to the Adoration: Leonardo’s Saint Jerome.
In this work, Leonardo conveys the saint’s spirituality through his emaciated but anatomically correct body; Jerome’s face displays the intensity of expression to which Leonardo must have aspired while painting the Adoration.
Another exquisite painting, a small devotional image of the Virgin and Child known as the Benois Madonna (after the name of a previous owner) that was likely painted around the same time, also displays the effects of light and color Leonardo must have had in mind for the Adoration.
A universal shadow is also present in a beautiful sketch from those same years, the so-called Study of the Madonna and Child with a Cat (Figure 9). If he himself followed the recommendation he later made to artists, he based this drawing on rapid sketches made in metal point on the tinted pages of a small notebook he carried on his walks through the streets of Florence—perhaps he recorded the gestures and body motions of a toddler who played with a cat on his mother’s lap. Back in the workshop, he reworked the composition and covered the figures’ outlines with a brown wash to give a sense of the effect of the atmosphere. For Leonardo, outlines were not meant to define color fields or to separate figures—they were malleable boundaries meant to be penetrated by his universal shadow.
These three works, however, are all small panels and sketches with a limited number of figures; in one, the Benois Madonna, the scene is indoors; in another, Saint Jerome, rocks transform the outdoor space into a closed enclave. The Adoration, populated by many figures, set entirely outdoors, posed a much greater challenge.
Leonardo had conceived of his Adoration as containing over seventy figures. But this layout, as stunning and ambitious as it was, was still stuck in the storytelling traditions of Renaissance painting. Those traditions had not in any way impeded his ability to structure the painting or to draw the characters the way he wanted to. But they stopped him dead in his tracks when he tried to paint what was in front of him. For a new Leonardo was now emerging, the Leonardo who wanted to capture the unique response of each and every character as he or she experienced this joyous, momentous event.
Practically speaking, a modern computer would be needed to plot all the vectors of light and shadow and their precise effects, especially on people’s faces. Furthermore, those lines of light and shadow could be captured only if time stood still. Yet the way Leonardo conceived of the painting was far from static. It was meant to capture the escalating excitement as the characters edged closer and closer to the manger to observe for themselves the baby Jesus in his mother’s arms.
So what did Leonardo do when faced with this nearly insurmountable challenge? Did he look at the Adoration the same way eyewitnesses reported he looked at the Last Supper about ten years later, without touching “the work with his hand,” staying “for one or two hours of the day only to contemplate, consider, and examine his figures in solitude, in order to judge them”? Did he ponder the figures he sketched on the gesso and above the imprimitura, the others that emerged through the net of drawn lines, and the ghostly figures that he had erased but that were still visible through the transparent layers applied over them?
He tried to make a few adjustments, and thanks to infrared photography we have a sense of what he did. The hut on the right side of the background had already been drawn and cast in shadow, but suddenly it looked like an unneeded complication. He deleted it altogether and put in its place a wide landscape that opened up the scene and threw diffuse light into the foreground, which helped to unify the picture.
And then there was that dynamic group of armed horsemen fighting with one another. He had captured the force of the fight, which symbolized the Christian struggle in the years after Christ’s birth. He left horses and fighters lingering on the panel, unresolved, thinking perhaps the solution would come to him one day, as indeed it did. Twenty years later, he lifted the fighting horses from the Adoration and put them at the center of his Battle of Anghiari, making what had started as a background scene into an entire composition. It was a great idea, although he did not finish that painting, either.
He also tried to fix the adoring crowd on the right side of the panel. He had sketched too many people there. He covered the entire area with a thick layer of dark pigment, basically erasing everything he had done. He started over, and these new figures look very different. They emerge from the dark background thanks only to highlights in lead white that define the twisting of their bodies, the crests of the folds in their garments, their hair. Leonardo painted them so differently that many art historians think he painted them some twenty years later. I do agree that Leonardo painted them last. But I do not think Leonardo painted them twenty years later. He likely painted them right before he abandoned the painting. Their different style may be evidence of a last-ditch effort to salvage the panel—and indeed, the unresolvable problem consisted of figuring out how to use atmospheric effects to realistically render human figures. This time around, Leonardo was confronting not just a handful of figures—Gabriel, Mary, or the Christ Child—but over seventy people and eleven animals. It was an optical problem of epic proportions, and it demanded equally epic ingenuity.
Amidst his figure studies for the Adoration, he sketched an instrument to measure air pressure (or, as he put it, “to weight air and learn when it breaks the weather”). This instrument was far ahead of its time. It took another 170 years before Evangelista Torricelli invented the barometer to measure air and famously stated something Leonardo himself could have uttered: “we live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air.” Leonardo had only a rudimentary instrument, which consisted of a stick with a sponge at one of its extremities and a wax ball at the other. When the weather is wet or humid or hot, a sponge absorbs different quantities of water from the air, giving an indication, however imprecise, of the level of humidity and the “thickness” of the air. Why is this instrument sketched amidst figures for the Adoration if not as a testament to Leonardo’s interest in atmospheric effects?
Once Leonardo put down his brush and walked away, however, he never looked back. As brilliant as the scheme was, the painting could not be salvaged. There was no way to paint that adoring crowd with the sophistication and optical rigor he had come to demand from himself. He had raised the bar impossibly high and come to realize that he could not accomplish a coherent treatment of both physical and spiritual light in a painting as complex as the Adoration.
He knew that portraiture and narrative painting were at odds—“he who paints the best likeness is the worst of all composers of narrative painting,” he wrote. He had just learned this the hard way.
The Augustinians waited patiently for over ten years, hoping Leonardo would return to the work, but he never did. In 1496, they finally acquired an altarpiece from one of Leonardo’s dear friends, the painter Filippino Lippi.
As for Leonardo, it took time for him to sort through the lessons from this frustrating experience. With the exception of the Last Supper and the Battle of Anghiari, where the demands of history had to be honored, Leonardo never again conceived a painting with more than four figures. Other artists followed his lead almost immediately, simplifying their own work dramatically. Big, celebratory narrative painting did not disappear—there was always a prince or a king who wanted his family’s history represented in some pageant-like way, or a religious institution that wished to commission a painting representing the life of a saint or of Christ and the Virgin. But there was an unmistakable shift as more and more artists began to venture into psychological waters.
Leonardo would also never use layer upon layer of background again, nor fill it with figures. And he no longer attempted to traverse time or space in a painting but instead focused, laser-like, on representing a single moment. Even when he used multiple figures, there was always a focal point to the work, a place to which the eye gravitated because of some deep psychological pull. In his later works, he often selected details from the Adoration—individual figures, small scenes, an animal, specific gestures—and made whole paintings out of them. He learned to cut to the chase of a story, to eliminate extraneous details, and to concentrate on a select number of figures—often no more than one. He would set those figures in complex settings—in landscapes, loggias, or dining halls—but he would retain control over light and shadow. He would no longer do what he had done in the Adoration.
One need only read the résumé he sent to the duke of Milan around 1483—a résumé that mentioned his skills as a painter only at the very end, saying simply that in painting he “can do everything possible as well as any other, whosoever he may be”—to understand how decisive the failure of the Adoration was. It is often said that Leonardo did not finish the Adoration because he left for Milan—but perhaps he left for Milan precisely because he did not complete the painting.
In any case, everything he painted after the Adoration suggests that it was this painting and his failure to complete it that forced him to rethink what he knew and did not know about the science of optics.
And what he learned would in turn lead him to rethink one of the core aspirations of Renaissance painting.