In the summer of 1472, at the age of twenty, Leonardo was registered as a member of the Florentine painters’ confraternity, the Compagnia di San Luca. The company’s ledgers record that ‘Lyonardo di Ser Piero da Vinci dipintore’ was charged 32 soldi for the privilege of membership. This included 16 soldi for his annual subscription, to be paid in monthly instalments from 1 July 1472, and 10 soldi as a contribution to the company’s observances on the feast-day of St Luke, 18 October.76 St Luke, who was supposed to have painted a portrait of the Virgin Mary, is the patron saint of painters. Also registered as new members in this year were Verrocchio, Botticelli, Perugino, Domenico Ghirlandaio, the Pollaiuolo brothers, and Filippino Lippi: the cream of Florentine painting in the early 1470s.
Founded in the mid fourteenth century, the Compagnia di San Luca was a loose grouping or sodality of painters of all sorts. Others were established in Siena and Milan, and later there were versions in Paris, Rome and London. (The last of these, St Luke’s Club, also called the Virtuosi, was founded in 1638 by Anthony Van Dyck, and met at the Rose Tavern in Fleet Street.) The original Florentine Compagnia had a religious overtone, but it was essentially an artists’ ‘club’, and no doubt a convivial one. It was distinct from the painters’ guild, the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, though it shared some of the guild’s functions. Many of its members were also members of the guild, but this was not obligatory (as is shown by the appearance of Filippino Lippi in the 1472 register, aged about fifteen and too young to be a guild member). In practice the guild’s control over artistic affairs was much in decline, and many artists preferred not to join. This decline was largely due to the increasing mobility of artists in search of patronage: the guilds had a strictly local axis of influence, and art was becoming a national and international market. We don’t know if Leonardo ever became a member of the Arte dei Medici e Speziali – the guild records are fragmentary – but there is no evidence that he did.
The records of the Compagnia di San Luca are also very patchy, and it is not clear why all these painters are recorded as joining in the same year; possibly there had been an earlier hiatus in the company’s activities. None the less, Leonardo’s appearance in the company’s libro rosso is a tangible marker in the otherwise shadowy chronology of his artistic development. By mid-1472 he is a dipintore: a practising painter.
What whole paintings had Leonardo done by this time? There are various possibilities (leaving aside his contributions to Verrocchio’s Tobias, which are charming but limited), and the most obvious is the Annunciation, now in the Uffizi (Plate 5). It was probably painted for the monastery of San Bartolomeo at Monte Oliveto, in the hills south-west of Florence. It was certainly there by the late eighteenth century, when it is first documented.77 In 1867 it was bought by the Uffizi; according to a label on the back of the panel, it was then hanging in the sacristy at San Bartolomeo. Its oblong format suggests it may have been designed to be placed above the furniture of the sacristy: there is a similarly shaped intarsia Annunciation by Giuliano da Maiano in the north sacristy of Florence cathedral. It is known that San Bartolomeo was partly rebuilt in 1472 – the portal, attributed to Michelozzi, bears this date – and the painting may have been commissioned as part of the refurbishment. Today the monastery is a military hospital.
Before its transfer to the Uffizi, the painting was believed to be by Domenico Ghirlandaio. It was first attributed to Leonardo in the Uffizi catalogue of 1869. This attribution is now almost universally accepted, though there remain one or two revisionist doubters. What the doubts correctly convey is that the style of the work is hard to differentiate: this is the young Leonardo, still visibly associated with Verrocchio’s shop and its prevalent forms and techniques. David A. Brown sums it up well: ‘Combining innovative and lyrical passages with borrowings and mistakes, the Annunciation is the work of an immensely gifted artist who was still immature.’78 The borrowings are evident in the face and colouring of the Virgin, in the raised little finger of her hand – a typical Verrocchio mannerism – and in the ornate decoration of the lectern, which echoes Verrocchio’s work on the Medici sarcophagus in San Lorenzo, completed in 1472.79 The mistakes are essentially of perspective. The right-hand cypress-tree, for instance, appears to be in the same plane as the other cypresses, but to read it as such would make the receding wall next to it impossibly long. More critically, the spatial relationship between the Virgin and the lectern is illogical. Read from the pedestal upward, the lectern is nearer to us than she is, but read from her right hand downward it should be further away from us. Her awkwardly elongated right arm is a result of this irresolution. Both these compositional errors occur on the right-hand side of the painting. The other side – the angel, the garden, the wonderful melting vistas – seems richer and more accomplished. It has been thought they may have been done at different times. Overall the painting has a certain stylized stiffness, and gains its effect from the ephebic beauty of the angel and from what Martin Kemp calls its ‘myopic focus’ on individual detail.80
The subject was one of the most popular in Renaissance art, and almost every painter of note has one or more versions of it. It dramatizes the moment when the young Mary is visited by the angel Gabriel and is told that she will become the mother of the Messiah (Luke 1:26–38). The text was the subject of much exegesis by commentators and preachers, who expounded the five ‘attributes’ of the Virgin during the colloquy narrated by Luke – conturbatio, or disquiet (‘she was troubled’); cogitatio, or reflection (she ‘cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be’); interrogatio, or enquiry (‘How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?’); humiliatio, or submission (‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord’); and meritatio, or worth, which describes her beatified status after the angel has departed. It can be shown that different Annunciation paintings focus on different ‘attributes’. Thus Filippo Lippi’s in San Lorenzo clearly expresses Mary’s disquiet, as does Botticelli’s in the Uffizi (the one criticized by Leonardo for its overdone gestures – too much conturbatio, in other words), while Fra Angelico’s in San Marco focuses on her humility.81 These show an interesting interrelation between the theology of the pulpit and the visual vocabulary of the studio, but Leonardo’s Annunciationseems less easy to pin down: the raised left hand suggests a remnant of conturbatio, while the expressionless smoothness of the Virgin’s face suggests the onset of humiliatio. There is thus a glimmering of a psychological dynamic, of those accidenti mentali or mental events which Leonardo sought to express in mature works like the Last Supper and the Virgin and Child with St Anne. We sense an unfolding story, an implied before and after, within the depicted moment. This is also conveyed by that problematic right hand: it holds open the book that the Virgin was reading before the angel arrived. This gives a suddenness to this archetypal event: the angel’s visit is still a momentary interruption.
This book is itself a traditional part of Annunciation iconography: Mary is reading an Old Testament prophet on the coming of the Messiah. The look of the page is meant to suggest Hebrew, but the text is in fact visual rhubarb – meaningless combinations of letters. If you look closely you can see that one of the lines simply reads ‘m n o p q’. The riotous spring flowers and grasses of the foreground are also conventional. The Feast of the Annunciation was on 25 March, and was associated with springtime (the biblical location of the episode, Nazareth, means in Hebrew ‘flower’). The lily in the angel’s hand reflects this, and was particularly emphasized in Florentine art because the city’s coat of arms featured lilies. In one aspect Leonardo’s treatment was apparently not standard, however. The preacher Fra Roberto Caracciolo spoke of painters having ‘licence to give angels wings to signify their swift progress in all things’,82 but it appears there were conventions on this. Leonardo gave his angel short, strong wings – real birds’ wings – but these were later lengthened by an unknown and not very sympathetic hand. The extension, in a dull chestnut-coloured paint, stabs into the deeper plane of the landscape, which is vestigially visible through the paint surface of the addition.
Among the various Madonna and Child compositions emanating from the Verrocchio workshop in the early 1470s, one has a particular claim to be by the hand of Leonardo. This is the Madonna of the Carnation, now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. The Madonna is generically in the Verrocchio mould – the pale, rather Nordic, look; the blonde ringlets; the downturned eyes – but she has particular affinities with the Virgin of Leonardo’s Annunciation. They wear the same dusky blue dress set off by red sleeves, and the same golden mantle. The brooch, with its suggestive topazy gleam, is a Leonardo trademark of the future, as in the Benois Madonna and the Virgin of the Rocks. Perhaps most characteristic is the drama of the landscape glimpsed through the loggia behind her – a range of rugged, serrated, rocky peaks quite unlike the more staid Tuscan backgrounds found in other workshop productions, but such a feature of Leonardo’s later paintings like the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, the St Anne, and the Mona Lisa.
Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna of the Carnation.
In the foreground, almost brushed by the mother’s elbow, is a vase of flowers. This serves to identify the Munich panel as the one that Vasari describes in his life of Leonardo as a ‘very fine’ Madonna with ‘a carafe of water with some flowers in it’. The wordcaraffa precisely describes the kind of wide-bellied glass bottle depicted in the painting. Vasari goes on to praise the ‘dewdrops of water’ on the flowers, which are ‘more convincing than the real thing’, but the painting is in poor condition and this detail is no longer apparent. Vasari unquestioningly attributes the painting to Leonardo, and places it within the ambit of his years with Verrocchio. He also says that it was later in the possession of Pope Clement VII. Clement was the illegitimate son of Giuliano de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s younger brother; Giuliano was one of Verrocchio’s patrons, and it is possible that the painting was commissioned by him. Kenneth Clark thought the painting ‘charmless’, but had no doubt it was by Leonardo – it ‘has the unpleasant vitality of immature genius’.83
The intrinsically Leonardian details, the correspondences with the Annunciation, the early attribution by Vasari: these make a strong case for the Madonna of the Carnation as a genuine Leonardo of the early 1470s. Another Verrocchiesque Madonna and Child which is sometimes claimed as his is the Madonna of the Pomegranate in the National Gallery at Washington, DC, also called the Dreyfus Madonna after a previous owner. It is a very sweet painting, but there is nothing to relate it specifically to Leonardo. Clark thought it an early work by Lorenzo di Credi. The softness and roundness of the modelling are very reminiscent of Lippi, and suggest once again the influence of Botticelli in the formation of the Verrocchiesque style.
Also from this period is the famous collaboration between Verrocchio and Leonardo, the dramatic Baptism of Christ, now in the Uffizi (Plate 7). It was painted for the church of San Salvi – Verrocchio’s elder brother, Simone di Cione, was the abbot there, and was probably instrumental in the commission.84 Vasari makes it out to be Verrocchio’s last painting:
Andrea was working on a panel-picture showing the baptism of Christ by St John, for which Leonardo painted an angel holding some garments, and despite his youth he did it so well that the angel was far better than the figures painted by Andrea. This was the reason why Andrea would never touch colours again – he was ashamed that a boy understood their use better than he did.
This is a portable sort of anecdote, and should not be taken at face value. Leonardo was probably about twenty-one when the painting was done, and not therefore a ‘boy’. It is pretty certain he also painted the misty distant landscape in the background: the left-hand side of the landscape echoes the topography of the ‘Madonna of the Snow’ drawing in the Uffizi, the date of which – 5 August 1473 – ties in well enough with the Baptism.
I am never very happy with the conventional idea, launched by Vasari and spun more or less continuously since, that Leonardo’s kneeling angel is the best thing about the painting and knocks his teacher’s work into a cocked hat. This seems pure ‘Leonardolatry’. The two central figures, which are exclusively Verrocchio’s, are very powerful – the features of the Baptist gaunt and hard-bitten; Christ with a humble, half-ugly ordinariness (the face-type an import from the Netherlands, like the blonde Madonnas). I am also struck by the beauty of Christ’s feet, as seen through the prism of the baptismal river, or really a stream, that runs over a bed of reddish-brown rock. The Leonardo angel is certainly exquisite, with his tightly curled golden hair and his alert turning movement. It shows already a subtlety of moulding and movement far beyond that of his master, who remained wedded to sculptural modes. (The figure of the Baptist is closely related to Verrocchio’s bronze Christ at Orsanmichele.) But the human drama, the tragic foretelling, the sense of great strengths greatly tested – these are all Verrocchio’s. If his painted figures lack something in technique, they lack nothing in the raw power of the scene. Beside them Leonardo’s angel seems brilliant but perhaps slightly facile: a prize-winning essay by a young virtuoso.