Leonardo Da Vinci's Treatise of Painting: The Story of The World's Greatest Treatise on Painting - Its Origins, History, Content, And Influence.

By Richard Shaw Pooler

This book traces the story of the world's greatest treatise on painting - Leonardo Da Vinci's "Treatise of Painting". It combines an extensive body of literature about the Treatise with original research to offer a unique perspective on:
•         Its origins, and history of how it survived the di

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vernon Press
• Release date: Apr 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781622730483

Richard Shaw Pooler

Edward A. Hudson (PhD, Harvard), working with Harvard's Dale Jorgenson, pioneered computable general equilibrium models in the 1970s. He applied these models to understanding the "energy crisis" and to analyzing energy policies. Dr Hudson then moved to strategy consulting, advising corporations and governments in the United States and New Zealand. This included advising on the great deregulation carried out in New Zealand in the 1980s and 90s. He has now returned to researching and writing on economic growth.

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Leonardo da Vinci’s

Treatise of Painting

The Story of the World’s

Greatest Treatise on Painting

Its Origins, History, Content and Influence

Richard Shaw Pooler

Copyright © 2014 Vernon Press, an imprint of Vernon Art and Ascience Inc, on behalf of the author.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Vernon Art and Science Inc.

www.vernonpress.com

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014942094

ISBN 978-1-62273-048-3

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1      Leonardo 1452

Chapter 2      Florence First Period 1466-1483

Chapter 3      Milan First Period 1483-1499

Chapter 4      The Wandering Years 1499-1503

Chapter 5      Florence Second Period 1503-1506

Chapter 6      Milan Second Period 1506-1513

Chapter 7      Rome 1513-1515

Chapter 8      France 1516-1519

Chapter 9      Leonardo’s Will

Chapter 10      Leonardo’s Legacy

Notes, Codices and Manuscripts

Chapter 11      Francesco Melzi and the Treatise of Painting

Chapter 12      An Earlier Treatise on Painting

Chapter 13      Orazio Melzi and the Dispersal of the Manuscripts

Chapter 14      The Manuscripts that have Survived

Manuscripts that went to France

Manuscripts in Spain

Manuscripts that went to England

Manuscripts in Italy

A Manuscript in America

Other Collections

Stemma of the Dispersal of the Manuscripts

Chapter 15      Other Treatises on Painting

Chapter 16      Manuscript Copies of the Treatise of Painting

Chapter 17      The Codex Huygens

Chapter 18      The Printed Editions and their Development

Stemma of the Printed Editions

Chapter 19      The First Printed Edition - Du Frêsne 1651

Chapter 20      Complete Editions of the Codex Urbinas

Chapter 21      Art Theory from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance

Chapter 22      Leonardo’s Development of Art Theory

The Concept of Painting as a Science

The Concept of Observation

The Concept of Vision

The Concept of Colour and Light

The Concept of Forms

Chapter 23      The Influence of Leonardo’s Art Theory

Chapter 24      Leonardo’s Reputation and Influence

1500-1600

1600-1700

1700-1800

1800-1900

1900-2000

Chapter 25      Leonardo’s Art Today

Sculpture

Architecture

Paintings

The Provenance of Leonardo’s Paintings

Postscript

Appendices

Appendix 1 Selected Manuscripts copied from the Codex Urbinas

Appendix 2 Printed Editions of the Treatise of Painting

Appendix 3 Extant Vincian Manuscripts

Appendix 4 The Concordance

Appendix 5 Dates of Manuscripts and Paintings

Appendix 6  The Life of Leonardo da Vinci by Paolo Giovio

Appendix 7 Leonardo da Vinci by the Anonimo Gaddiano

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise of Painting is still being reprinted nearly 500 years after his death. It is arguably the most important treatise on the theory and practice of art ever written. Yet it had to wait till the middle of the 17th century to be published for the first time, more than 130 years after Leonardo’s death in 1519. It is surprising how many treatises were written and published by artists and architects throughout the Renaissance, and even up to the 18th century – but there was always that gap in the record, the omission of Leonardo’s own work, until part of it was first published in 1651.  Up until then, his many manuscripts circulated freely among artists and thinkers of the day, and were recognised even then as being outstanding and ground-breaking. So much so that many were copied time and again, and parts of them ended up in the treatises of other writers and artists. That was common practice at the time and cross-pollination of ideas in different treatises was usual, without the acknowledgement of sources that is essential today. Nevertheless, Leonardo’s thinking can be traced from his original manuscripts through many others to show his influence long before his own work was published.

His manuscripts were written in the last thirty years of his life and cover an astonishing range of subjects. He wrote about anatomy, hydraulics, the horse, perspective, flight, optics, mechanics and much, much more. He in fact tried to compile an ‘encyclopaedia’ of knowledge which he illustrated with drawings in a number of different manuscripts, and those that survive are today in major collections around the world. It was from those manuscripts, and others that are now lost, that Leonardo’s comments on art were copied and compiled by Francesco Melzi into a manuscript known as the Treatise of Painting, and later renamed the Codex Urbinas that is now in the Vatican library. It is that manuscript that became the basis for the printed editions of the Treatise of Painting, which were initially abridged editions. This text tells the story of how the Treatise of Painting came about, how it developed, and how it was eventually published, and its subsequent influence.

So much has been written about Leonardo, his paintings, his personality, his background, his extraordinary inventions, and so on. Those topics are not within the scope of this text. This attempt to write about the origins and development of the Treatise of Painting is confined within narrower parameters.

The first part is really a brief overview of where Leonardo lived at different times of his life, and which paintings and manuscripts he produced in each place. It shows how his interests began to move beyond painting, and how he started recording his thoughts on a wide range of subjects in a number of manuscripts. The writing of those manuscripts became a parallel activity to the planning and production of his paintings, and many of them contain preliminary sketches and details for various paintings, as well as his thoughts on art, science, mechanics and the world around him.

The subsequent history of his manuscripts after Leonardo reached the end of his life then follows, showing what happened to them, which survived and where they are now.  Part of that story is how the manuscripts dispersed, many were lost, others were rescued, some reconstructed, and some were despoiled. One of the manuscripts that was lost was Melzi’s Treatise of Painting itself. Despite that, the fascinating figure of Cassiano dal Pozzo made great efforts to compile a Treatise of Painting from other copies of early manuscripts, and he was successful. At last, in 1651, Leonardo’s Treatise of Painting was published in Paris, in Italian and French more or less simultaneously.

With Leonardo’s Treatise of Painting in print, there arose the obvious question, ‘What does it say?’  There is therefore a chapter which attempts to define what the Treatise of Painting actually says about the theory and practice of art, showing how Leonardo took fragmented theories from the Middle Ages, and helped establish a unified theory of art in the Renaissance.

1651 was a watershed year. Now that Leonardo’s thinking on art was available in printed form, albeit in an abridged edition, it had a growing influence on other writers on art, notably in France, Spain, Germany and Holland. It influenced the Academies, especially in Paris, Rome and then England, and was read and commented upon by a growing number of artists, writers and critics. Then came the publication of the complete editions of the Codex Urbinas, starting with the Manzi edition of 1815.  Finally, facsimiles appeared of Leonardo’s surviving manuscripts, accompanied by a flood of critical commentary.

This text begins by showing how his painting and the compiling of his notes proceeded as parallel activities. The story of what happened to his notes then follows.  The subsequent history of his paintings is then briefly traced, detailing their provenance, and where they are now.

Several books on Leonardo’s work have touched on different aspects of Leonardo’s Treatise of Painting. This text attempts to trace the complete story of the Treatise, its origins, history, development, content and influence. The twists and turns in the events that led to its survival are remarkable, but so was its influence.

Leonardo 1452

Ser Piero da Vinci,¹ 26 years old, lived in the small village of Vinci, consisting of perhaps twenty to thirty houses, which lay 35 kilometres west of Florence. His title ‘Ser’ indicated that he was a notary, as was his father, and his father before that.  The family lived together in a large house owned by Piero’s father Ser Antonio, in a typical rural community that depended on the cultivation of olives, vines and medicinal herbs for its livelihood.

About 3 kilometres away lay the small hamlet of Anchiano, and there lived Caterina in a farmhouse. Until recently that was the accepted scenario. Piero and Caterina met, and in the middle of 1451 their friendship turned to passion.  Like countless other village romances, the result was that the sixteen year old Caterina fell pregnant, with the subsequent illegitimate birth of Ser Piero’s first son in the spring of 1452. 

Whatever the nature of their affair, Ser Piero refused to marry her, but went to some lengths to make the birth of his first son respectable.  He had him baptised by a priest, with five men and five women present from the community. This was recorded by the child’s grandfather Ser Antonio, who wrote:²

‘My grandson was born, son of Ser Piero, my son, on April 15, Saturday, at three in the night.³ He was named Lionardo. He was baptized by the priest Piero di Bartolomeo, …’

… and then he listed the ten villagers who witnessed the baptism.

This was done to record the birth of Lionardo as his first son, a proper and full member of his family, despite the fact that he was illegitimate, and it is this document that records the birth of Leonardo da Vinci, who was to become a towering genius of the Italian Renaissance.

It is curious that Leonardo’s mother Caterina was not mentioned in the record of Baptism.  There may have been a deliberate effort to keep quiet about her, perhaps to protect her and her prospects. Or was it to emphasise that he was Ser Piero’s first son, and that was the family in which he would grow up, and in which the decisions would be made? Very little is known of Caterina – just her name. There is no picture,⁴ her family name is not known, or even the place that she came from before she lived in Anchiano, and even that is not certain.  It has been said that she was just a peasant, but this is contradicted by the Anonimo Gaddiano who claims in his collection of short biographies⁵ that she was ‘nata di buon sangue’, or ‘born of good blood’. He may not have been correct, of course,  but more about him later.

There is a view that her anonymous background could be explained by slavery, which was still part of the Florentine economy. There were more than 550 slaves in Florence at the time working for wealthy families. She could have been born to a mother in slavery, and placed in an orphanage as a foundling – perhaps. Researchers in Italy⁶ have scanned 200 fingerprints from 52 papers that Leonardo handled, and they have identified his left index fingerprint. Distinctive features in the print suggest his mother may have had middle-eastern origins, which would account for a background in slavery.

What supports this theory further is that Ser Piero had a good friend, the wealthy banker and silk merchant Vanni di Niccolo di Ser Vanni. When he died, he left his house in the via Ghibellina in Florence to Ser Piero, and bequeathed his slave girl, Caterina, to his wife Agnola. Was this Caterina the mother of Leonardo? There is no record to prove she lived in Anchiano at all, and she may have lived in Florence. There is no further record of her after Vanni’s death in 1451, when she may have been freed. However Caterina was a common name given to slaves at the time, so it could have been another. Nevertheless the thought is enticing that Ser Piero would have visited his good friend Vanni in Florence, and the slave girl Caterina could have been available to him when he stayed overnight, resulting in her pregnancy.

There are other references to Caterina in Leonardo’s notes, referring to a housekeeper, but there is one reference to Caterina which Leonardo made forty two years later that is of particular interest.  He visited Caterina in hospital in Milan, and paid the expenses for her burial the following year. The reference does not add anything to our understanding of who she was, or her background, but it invites the thought that she was Leonardo’s mother. It is an assumption that she was his mother, and not another Caterina. But for Leonardo to pay her burial expenses strongly suggests she was someone close to him, such as his mother, and no other Caterina fits that scenario. But, back to the present…

It is known from a tax return dated 1457, that Leonardo was then living with his father in the large family home in Vinci.  It would be more accurate to note that Antonio, Leonardo’s  grandfather, was effectively head of the household for most of Leonardo’s childhood, as his father Piero was so often absent, working in Florence. The tax return refers to Antonio, Leonardo’s grandfather, and his wife Monna Lucia, his two sons, Ser Piero and Francesco, Albiera, the wife of Ser Piero, and Leonardo.

Soon after Leonardo’s birth, Ser Piero met Albiera di Giovanni Amadori, and married her that same year. His marriage to Albiera was possibly pre-arranged, with the custom of the time which was that the woman would bring a dowry to the marriage, and a notary would presumably expect a good dowry.  In likelihood, Caterina was unable to provide this and Ser Piero would certainly not have married a slave.

Caterina married a local man, known as ‘Accattabrighe’, or ‘the quarrelsome fellow’, a few months after Leonardo’s birth, and they produced five children of their own.  Accattabrighe, whose full name was Antonio di Piero Buti del Vaccha, was a furnace worker producing lime for mortar and pottery.

There is an irony in the sad fact that Ser Piero’s attempts to produce a family with Albiera were unrewarded for eleven years. At last Albiera fell pregnant, only to die in childbirth in 1464. 

Within a year Ser Piero had married again, to Francesca di Ser Giuliano Lanfredini. Ten years later she died childless. So, for the first fourteen years of Leonardo’s life he was the only child in the household, which was when he left home and the village of Vinci, and moved to Florence. Then Ser Piero’s fortunes started to change. His ambition, augmented with the Lanfredini connections, led to his appointment in 1469 as notary to the Signoria in Florence. He kept his home in Vinci but acquired an apartment in the Palazzo del Podesta,⁷ and rented a house in the Via delle Prestanze⁸ in Florence, as well as a number of offices. He survived various political upheavals, and became successful and wealthy.

His family and domestic fortunes also changed. In 1475, when he was forty-seven, he married Margherita di Jacopo di Guglielmo who was seventeen years old.  She lived ten more years, and in that time she produced four sons and two daughters. He then married Lucrezia di Guglielmo Cortigiano when he was 57, and fathered a further daughter and five sons, the last being born when he was seventy.  This was in stark contrast to his previous childless marriages, and a considerable number of children late in Piero’s life. These last two wives, Margherita and Lucrezia, produced twelve children between them, one of whom, Maddalena, died shortly after childbirth.

Leonardo never got on very well with his surviving eleven half-brothers and sisters, and the distance between them is hardly surprising as the first was born when Leonardo was about 24 years old, which was ten years after he had left the village of Vinci.  After leaving Vinci, he started his working life in Florence, joining the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio.

It is from these early beginnings that a particular line of development can be traced. Much is now known of Leonardo’s life, and many books have been written about it, although surprisingly, his personality remains an enigma – the man who was really Leonardo is strangely private. The focus here are the strands in his life that contributed to the development of his Treatise of Painting, and the story of how it was written, how it survived turbulent events, its influence, and what is known of it today.

As a very brief background to his working life, Leonardo spent the first seventeen years in Florence.  After that he went to Milan for sixteen years, and then spent further periods in both cities, before travelling to Rome, and finally settling in France. During each of these periods in his life, he painted the few great paintings that have survived, and those that are lost, but are known about.  He also created a small body of sculpture, very little of which has survived.

The other great monument to his genius that survives, and arguably rivals his paintings in importance, is the body of notes that he began when he was 26 years old, and which he continued to compile for the rest of his life.  His intention was to record what he could learn about the natural world around him, and to use his art to illustrate it. A major portion of those notes survives, and most are now in important collections around the world. The various notes that survive are usually referred to as Codices or Manuscripts, for example Codex Atlanticus, or Manuscript K.  For ease of reference, their current names have been used.

In addition to compiling the notes in his manuscripts, Leonardo was determined to order them into different treatises, on various subjects, one of which was to be his Treatise of Painting.  He never brought this enterprise to completion, and what follows is the story of how his Treatise of Painting was compiled, and how it was eventually published.  The first part of this story looks at the periods of Leonardo’s life spent in Florence and Milan, then the time he spent wandering, and his time in Rome and France.  The development and provenance of particular paintings can be attached to each of those places. His first period in Milan was important, because that was when he first began writing his notes after which he kept compiling them to the end of his life, as a parallel and growing activity alongside his painting. At the point at which his life came to an end in France, his notes were inherited by his companion Francesco Melzi, which was the beginning of a turbulent story of how many were lost, some were found years later, and through the astonishing efforts of keen collectors, enough survived to become Leonardo’s Treatise of Painting. 

The beginning of this story depends on information from four sources of reference.  These sources are four people whose comments are the early basis of our knowledge of Leonardo, and the life that he led.  It seems sensible to introduce them at this stage.

Antonio Billi was a Florentine merchant who compiled notes on various artists in the early 1520s.  His original manuscript is lost, but there were two copies made in the 16th century, now known as the Libro di Antonio Billi.⁹

The second source is another Florentine who had access to the Libro di Antonio Billi in the early 1540s, and amplified it to include material from an artist called Il Gavina, or Giovanni di Gavina. Little is known of the author, and as he is anonymous, he is generally referred to as the Anonimo Gaddiano, from his 128 folio manuscript which was owned by the Gaddi family, a famous family of Florentine artists.  This manuscript¹⁰ was unknown until about 1755, when it was discovered in the Magliabechiano collection of manuscripts¹¹ in Florence, but was only brought to the attention of scholars in 1892 by Karl Frey.¹² Because of this provenance, the author is sometimes referred to as the Anonimo Magliabechiano,¹³ or the Anonimo Fiorentino, and simply the Anonimo – the anonymous author of that particular manuscript of Lives. The first part records artists from Classical antiquity, and the second part contains artists from Florence and Siena, as well as other pieces. His comments on the artists from Siena were based on Ghiberti’s¹⁴ Commentarii.¹⁵ There is internal evidence in the form of an angry drawing at the end to suggest that the Anonimo worked on his text until January 1547, and then abandoned it because Vasari’s work had superceded it.

The next source is the key document of the sixteenth century that was to establish Leonardo’s reputation, although somewhat inaccurately. It is of course Vasari’s Lives.¹⁶ The idea for a book of Lives was first mooted at the Papal Court in Rome in the 1540s. Paolo Giovio,¹⁷ the bishop of Nocera and historian at the Papal Court, was approached to write it since he had written a few brief lives in the 1520s. These included one of Leonardo which he wrote on the island of Ischia¹⁸ sometime after 1527.¹⁹ He had probably met Leonardo in Milan or Rome in about 1508, but he also knew Francesco Melzi,²⁰ Leonardo’s companion, and would have relied on him for biographical information.  He turned down the project, but one evening at Cardinal Farnese’s²¹ apartments in Rome he suggested the idea to Giorgio Vasari, who was interested in the proposal, and started working on it. It was a considerable undertaking, and quite an achievement when he produced the first edition of his Lives in 1550. It must be remembered that much of what he wrote was compiled from conversations with third parties, from memories and scandal, from anecdotes and general comment. As a result much about Leonardo is hearsay, as Vasari was only eleven when Leonardo died, and so could never have met him. A feature of his Lives is that he hardly mentions non-Italians, and was very much driven by the idea that European art was Italian Art, and Italian Art sprang naturally and directly from the culture of Ancient Rome. Despite his narrow view, he was very influential, and his Lives with all their inaccuracies spread to other European centres over the years, persisting through subsequent centuries even though many of his comments were from stories he had heard and were completely unsubstantiated. His Lives was the first of several that were compiled by later artists and writers in other countries, and was extensively copied, with the inclusion of their own artists.

The fourth source of reference are the manuscripts of Gian Paolo Lomazzo,²² an Italian mannerist painter who went blind in about 1571 at the age of thirty-three, and turned to writing. He published his Trattato dell’arte della pittura in 1584, which was really a practical guide to painting and sculpture that would be appropriate to particular interiors, following the requirements of art theory which was evolving in the Renaissance from its earlier roots in the middle ages. He followed it with his Idea del Tempio della Pittura in 1590, which was a more theoretical work covering art criticism and abstract concepts.  A point of questionable reliability is his comment that he knew Leonardo’s close friend, Francesco Melzi, who inherited his manuscripts – but more of that later. Nevertheless he mentions Leonardo’s work in both his manuscripts.

Florence First Period 1466-1483

According to Vasari,²³ Leonardo was introduced to Andrea del Verrocchio²⁴ by his father, Ser Piero, in the mid 1460s, probably 1466, and was admitted to his studio, which was just behind the Duomo in Florence. He would have been about 14 or 15.  This move to Florence was not surprising as it would have followed the death of his grandfather, Ser Antonio, the effective head of the household, and ‘in loco parentis’ for Ser Piero. The date of his death is not certain, but it was before 1465.  Another factor would have been the death of Albiera who had died in childbirth in 1464, after trying for eleven years to fall pregnant.  Ser Piero, now about forty, married again the following year to Francesca who was only fifteen, a year or two older than Leonardo. It was clearly time to leave home and for Leonardo to make his own way in life.

Andrea Verrocchio, or properly Andrea di Michele di Francesco di Cione, accepted him into his studio on the Via de Agnolo, and he remained a pupil there until 1477.  He would have started as any typical student, learning the basics of perspective and figure drawing, and copying from the master’s model book on a wooden board with a prepared surface. He would have developed his skills at draughtsmanship working with a lead stylus, and learnt the preparation of panels and surfaces, the preparation of paint, and the transfer of drawings. He would have done early studies of drapery in black and white on linen, copying models draped in cloth soaked in plaster. He would then have modelled in clay, and fired it into terracotta, especially in this particular studio with its wide range of activities.  Only pupils of twenty and older would have graduated to brushes and colours, at which point Leonardo would have moved on to tempera painting and then oils. That should have been in about 1475 if Leonardo had progressed in line with the usual studio program.

Two years after joining the studio, Leonardo joined the Florentine painters’ confraternity, the Compagnia di San Luca, in 1472. This was really an artists’ association or club, not the painters’ Guild, the Arte dei Medici e Speciali. There is no evidence that Leonardo ever joined the Guild, although it has often been claimed that he did.

When Leonardo began his apprenticeship in Verrocchio’s studio, a generation of famous Florentine artists had died within twelve years of each other - Fra Angelico,²⁵ Andrea del Castagno,²⁶ Domenico Veneziano,²⁷ Donatello,²⁸ Fra Filippo Lippi,²⁹ and Paolo Uccello³⁰ who died in 1475, when Leonardo was still working in the studio. But a new generation was flourishing and building their own reputations and Leonardo knew them all – Antonio³¹ and Piero Pollaiuolo,³² Luca³³ and Andrea³⁴ della Robbia, Sandro Botticelli³⁵ and Domenico Ghirlandaio,³⁶ both of whom had worked in Verrocchio’s studio, and several others. In the studio when Leonardo joined were Lorenzo di Credi,³⁷ Il Perugino,³⁸ and Zoroastro,³⁹  amongst many other apprentices engaged in a bewildering range of activities and skills. This was the largest studio in Florence at the time.

It is known that Leonardo collaborated on certain pictures with Verrocchio. Whether these are his first few paintings, or done later as Verrocchio’s attention turned away from painting towards sculpture and metalwork cannot be ascertained as the probable dates of the works are too uncertain and their spread is too wide.

Notable amongst these is the Baptism of Christ which was painted by Verrocchio⁴⁰ in about 1472.  Leonardo appears to have painted the angel on the left, parts of the drapery and the mountains behind. This painting was a commission for the Church of San Salvi in Florence, which had been built in the 11th century by the Vallombrosans as part of their abbey.  The Abbot there in 1476 was Verrocchio’s older brother which undoubtedly secured him the commission, and the painting has been attributed jointly to Verrocchio and to Leonardo since 1510.

Another painting Leonardo probably worked on is Verrocchio’s Tobias and the Angel,⁴¹ dated soon after 1470. Leonardo may have painted the dog and the fish in this painting, and if he did, it could be the earliest example of his work that survives.

He may have also collaborated in a work drawn by Verrocchio called the Adoration with two Angels, dated between 1473 and 1477. ⁴² Modern examination of the painting with infrared reflectoscopy confirms that Verrocchio drew the figures, and the supposition is that Leonardo painted them, but they remained unfinished.  About forty years later, the unfinished kneeling Madonna was completed by another painter.

Then there is The Annunciation which is dated to about 1473. This was painted for the monastery of San Bartolomeo at Monte Oliveto. It was first recorded as being there in the late 18th century. An interesting aspect is that Verrocchio painted with lead based paints and large brush strokes. Leonardo did not use lead and preferred smaller brush strokes. When the painting was X-rayed, Verrocchio’s work with lead paint was revealed, and Leonardo’s angel and background was not. It was easy to identify the areas that each had painted.

Another painting from this time is the Madonna and Child with a Vase of Flowers (or carnation) painted sometime between 1474 and 1477. Verrocchio may have played a part in it, but there is a view that the composition and painterly techniques show that it was clearly done largely by Leonardo. It must have been an ambitious painting at the time, breaking away from the traditional depiction of the Madonna with its strongly accepted conventions, to show her now in a domestic environment. It is richly coloured and shaded, with strong chiaroscuro effects. The dark arches in the background are a counterpoint to the brightly lit landscape beyond exemplifying Leonardo’s theories of aerial perspective. One gets the feeling that Leonardo was not just experimenting with a few new ideas, but really extending his experience to break from the past and explore important new artistic territory – others disagree.

The next painting from between 1474 and 1477 seems to be indisputably by Leonardo. It is the Portrait of a Lady thought to be of Ginevra de'Benci.  She was the sister of Leonardo’s young friend Giovanni di Amerigo Benci who shared his interest in cosmographical studies. She was born in 1457 into the wealthy Benci banking family, second only to the Medici in wealth. Her father, also Amerigo, was Director of the Medici bank in Geneva, but he died in 1468, still in his 30s. In 1474, Ginevra married Luigi di Bernardo Niccolini when she was sixteen years old.  This painting was thought at one time to be a wedding portrait, but was more likely commissioned by Bernardo Bembo⁴³ the Venetian Ambassador to Florence, probably between 1475 and 1476, who was married but had a very close but supposedly platonic affair with Ginevra. 

It is almost certain that this painting was originally longer.  The back of the painting shows a design of a wreath that was the personal insignia of Bernardo Bembo, but it is truncated.  A further indication comes from a copy of this portrait made by another pupil in Verrocchio’s studio. The copy is longer showing crossed hands.⁴⁴  Both pieces of evidence indicate that this painting was cut down by about twenty centimetres.

The fact that Leonardo painted Ginevra was noted in the Libro di Antonio Billi, in Vasari’s Lives,⁴⁵ and by the Anonimo Gaddiano, who wrote, ‘he painted in Florence, from nature, Ginevra de’ Amerigho Benci, whom he represented so well that his work did not look like a portrait, but like Ginevra in person’. This must have been a revolutionary portrait in its day because it was one of the first to pose the subject looking at the viewer and no longer in profile. That was a break from the tradition that a woman was merely a possession of the head of the household, and a challenging person in her own right. One cannot help commenting that Ginevra’s looks are not robust and healthy, but pale, slightly distracted, and sickly. This supports the sad evidence that she died in 1520 after a chronic illness at the age of 46, a widow, and childless. It is assumed that this is a portrait of Ginevra mainly because of the Juniper tree in the background, as a play on her name. However the Juniper tree was a symbol for sorrow and loss, so this painting could be of another widow, such as Fioretta Gorini, whose husband Giuliano de’ Medici was murdered. Nevertheless the comments of Antonio Billi, Vasari and the Anonimo are convincing.

Both the Anonimo Gaddiano and Vasari  mentioned a Medusa from this time, and Vasari wrote, ‘Today it is kept among the fine works of art in the palace of Duke Cosimo…’,⁴⁶ but it is now lost.⁴⁷ He also mentioned that it was unfinished. For some time, a painting in the Uffizi of Medusa was thought to be by Leonardo. Since the 1860s it has been attributed to a Flemish painter, possibly Franz Snyders of Antwerp,⁴⁸ and was painted in about 1600.⁴⁹ A confusing point is that there is another picture of Medusa in the Uffizi which is by Caravaggio, painted in about 1598, that was commissioned as a gift for Ferdinand the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and presented to him as a gift by Cardinal del Monte.

According to the Anonimo Gaddiano, and Vasari, Leonardo painted a cartoon of Adam and Eve sinning, as a design ‘for a tapestry to be woven of gold and silk in Flanders and sent to the King of Portugal…’ ⁵⁰  It is also now lost, after being given to Ottaviano de’Medici⁵¹ by Leonardo’s uncle, Alessandro Amadori, who was the brother of Leonardo’s step mother Albiera.  This may just be hearsay, as Leonardo was not sufficiently prominent at the time to be designing gold tapestries for royalty.

Those are the paintings that are known from Leonardo’s time in Verrocchio’s studio.  Very little is known of any work he did in clay or sculpture. But there is one important example that has survived, only just, which is now attributed to Leonardo, and it is a terracotta Statue of an Angel. It stands near the West door of the parish church of San Gennaro⁵² in Capannori, and was first recorded in 1773. This work is in several respects a unique example of Leonardo’s work in sculpture, so it was thought that the wall behind it should be repainted to present such an important piece in a better setting. It was brought to the world’s attention when a workman painting the wall behind it dropped his ladder on it, and the upper part of the sculpture was damaged and had to be painstakingly repaired.  It was originally polychrome, and traces of colour remain. Nothing is known of its provenance, but it is assumed that it has probably been there since Leonardo created it sometime between 1473 at the age of twenty-one and 1477.

By the year 1477, Leonardo had worked in Verrocchio’s studio for ten years