Part Three
He is a poor pupil who does not go beyond his master.
Forster MS 3, fol. 66v
In about 1477 Leonardo set up his own studio in Florence. This was a natural progression: he had been ten years with Verrocchio as pupil, apprentice and assistant. The portrait of Ginevra shows him already breaking the envelope – it is visibly linked to the Verrocchio ambit, but its poetic tone is something entirely new. He now enters into the first, difficult period of independence: a young maestro in a crowded, competitive market.
The first clear sign of his new independence is a contract he signed on 10 January 1478, but there is another document, recently discovered, which gives us a curious hint of the ambience of Leonardo’s bottega. It is a letter from Giovanni Bentivoglio, Lord of Bologna, to Lorenzo de’ Medici, and it concerns a young man whose name is given in the letter as ‘Paulo de Leonardo de Vinci da Firenze’.1 There was a flutter of excitement in the Italian press when this came to light in the 1990s, since the formation of his name could suggest that this Paolo was a hitherto unsuspected son of Leonardo da Vinci. A moment’s reflection makes this unlikely: for reasons implicit in the letter, Paolo cannot have been born much after 1462, when Leonardo was ten. Far more likely is that he was an apprentice of Leonardo’s. As noted, it was conventional for an apprentice to take on the name of his master, as Verrocchio had done.
So it seems we have here the name of one of Leonardo’s first apprentices, and with the name comes a story. From Bentivoglio’s letter, which is dated 4 February 1479, we learn that Paolo had been sent away from Florence ‘some time ago’, because of the ‘wicked life he had followed there’. This exile was to ‘reform’ him and to ‘remove him from the bad company he kept’. It seems that Lorenzo de’ Medici was personally involved in this, for when Paolo arrived in Bologna he was promptly imprisoned, and Bentivoglio specifically says that this was at Lorenzo’s request: ‘In compliance with letters from Your Magnificence he was put in prison.’ Paolo spent six months in jail, but after his release, ‘having purged himself of his sins’, he ‘devoted himself to the art of marquetry, which he had already begun to learn there [i.e. in Florence], so that he has become a skilled craftsman, and pursues it as his trade’. He is now anxious to return to Florence, and his brothers have written to Bentivoglio asking for this. This is the motive of Bentivoglio’s letter – to seek Lorenzo’s ‘benevolent permission and good pardon’ so that Paolo can return. He is a reformed character, says Bentivoglio; he promises henceforth ‘to be an honest man, and live in an orderly manner’.
It is a spicy story, and it leads back to Leonardo, who is identified patronymically as Paolo’s master. Given that he was in jail in Bologna for six months, and had thereafter established and supported himself as an intarsiatore or marquetry artist, we can say that the date of Paolo’s scandalous exit from Florence must have been at least a year, if not more, before the date of the letter – thus late 1477 or early 1478. We can reconstruct the situation retrospectively, as follows. In 1477 Leonardo had a Florentine apprentice or servant named Paolo. He was probably a teenager. He had brothers whose social status was not negligible: Bentivoglio twice mentions them in his letter. He perhaps did not have a father, whose role the brothers seem to be taking in the affair – this would tie in with his status as Leonardo’s adoptive ‘son’ in the studio sense. He already had some training in marquetry, the highly skilled and much demanded craft of inlaying wood. He lived, however, a ‘wicked life’, and was involved in ‘bad company’ (mala conversatione), and by early 1478 he had been hustled out of the city. The nature of this wickedness is not actually stated, but it is very likely that it was homosexuality. A further imputation – only an imputation, but hard to avoid – is that among the bad company from which young Paolo needed rescuing was his master, Leonardo da Vinci. And so to the names of Jacopo Saltarelli and Fioravanti di Domenico we add another of Leonardo’s boyfriends. That he is also, within the workshop convention, Leonardo’s ‘son’ is a detail that Freud would have enjoyed getting to grips with.
Thus a whiff of scandal hangs over Leonardo’s fledgling studio. Little more than a year after his brush with the Officers of the Night, he is once again touched by charges of homosexuality. Lorenzo de’ Medici perhaps had notice of that first scandal, since it also touched a member of his mother’s family, and he is certainly involved in the expulsion of Paolo di Leonardo.
Despite this inauspicious overtone, Leonardo received his first recorded commission as an independent painter on 10 January 1478.2 It was a commission from the Signoria for a large altarpiece to hang in the chapel of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Capella di San Bernardo. He was not actually the Signoria’s first choice for the job – the commission had been turned down by Piero del Pollaiuolo the previous month. It seems a highly prestigious offer, and it was backed up with a cash advance of 25 florins, paid in mid-March, so it is curious that Leonardo never delivered the work. It is his first abandoned project, the first of the renegings which will dog his professional career.
The new altarpiece was to replace an earlier painting by Bernardo Daddi which showed the apparition of the Virgin to St Bernard, and the agreement indicates that Leonardo was to produce a painting on the same theme. No trace of any sketch or study for aVision of St Bernard can be found among his drawings, but it is just possible that an echo of this ghostly work is discernible in a painting by Filippino Lippi. According to the Anonimo Gaddiano, Leonardo had actually started work on the painting, and it was later finished from his preparatory drawings by Filippino. There is indeed an altarpiece by Filippino showing the Vision of St Bernard: a fine work, now in the Badia Fiorentina. It was painted in the mid-1480s for the Pugliese family chapel at Marignolle, near Florence; the donor, Piero del Pugliese, appears bottom right. Is the Anonimo right? Is that cluster of Madonna and angels on the left – which can certainly be called ‘Leonardesco’ – an actual rendition of a lost Leonardo cartoon of c. 1478? It is possible, though one of the angels has a strong affinity with Leonardo’s Annunciation, and does not therefore need a putative lost drawing to explain its Leonardesque look.3
A partially obliterated sentence on that page of notes and drawings which mentions Fioravanti di Domenico reads: ‘[… ]mbre 1478 inchomincai le 2 vergini Marie’. The date may be September, November or December 1478. Which are the ‘two Virgin Marys’ or Madonnas that Leonardo began at that time? And are they the same as the two Madonnas that appear in his list of c. 1482, which itemizes various works he had done in Florence and was taking with him to Milan? They are described on the list as ‘a Madonna finished’ and ‘another almost, which is in profile’.
Kenneth Clark believed that the Madonna in profile was the Litta Madonna, now in St Petersburg. The finished painting is certainly later: it is a product of Leonardo’s Milanese studio, probably from the end of the 1480s. But Clark argues that it was begun in Florence, and was brought to Milan in precisely the unfinished state mentioned in the list of 1482. In its finished form it has manifestly non-Leonardian aspects, such as the strange changeling head of the child: these are the work of one of his Milanese pupils, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio or Marco d’Oggiono. But there is a silverpoint studio drawing for the head of the Madonna, done on greenish paper, which is certainly by Leonardo.4
The Florentine genesis of the Litta Madonna remains unproved. We are on much surer ground with another Leonardo painting in the Hermitage – the Benois Madonna (Plate 9). Stylistically it belongs to Leonardo’s first Florentine period. It is very probably one of the ‘2 vergini’ he began in 1478, though whether it is also the ‘finished’ Madonna of the 1482 list is less certain: some aspects of the painting seem to lack finish.
This small (19 х 12 inches) oil painting, somewhat inexpertly transferred to canvas in the nineteenth century, is one of Leonardo’s most underrated works. It has, for all its imperfections of detail, a sweetness and freshness and movement which immediately lift it beyond the posed, hieratic elegance of the Verrocchio Madonnas with their blonde hair and lifted little fingers. This Madonna is demonstrably a girl, not even a very beautiful girl. Her long, braided, auburn hair cascading down her left shoulder suggests for a moment the Simonetta Cattanei look – but only for a moment: again one has a sense of the role-models which Leonardo is conspicuously rejecting. She is the antithesis of Botticelli’s languid, pretty, almond-eyed Madonnas. The great Bernard Berenson – who always preferred Leonardo’s drawings to his paintings – found her frankly ugly: ‘a woman with a bald forehead and puffed cheek, a toothless smile, blear eyes and furrowed throat’.
Also quite foreign to Verrocchio is the new dark, velvety tonality of the painting. The figures are lit dramatically amid the suggestive greys and russets of the background. The tone is muted, modest, domestic. Technical examination shows an underlying preparation of dark umber, with the colours spread over it ‘in sediments, like a dew’.5
There are enigmas about the detail. There has been some retouching: the Madonna’s neck and the child’s right hand show signs of a later, flattening brush; the lower part of the drapery has also lost something. But it is the mouth which usually causes the viewer problems. The Madonna seems, as Berenson unkindly stresses, to be toothless. According to de Liphart, who examined the work in 1909, her half-open mouth revealed ‘the presence of her teeth almost imperceptibly drawn on the black preparation beneath’, but these vestiges seem now to have disappeared completely due to oxidization of the varnish.6 The empty window is also problematic. Has something been unaccountably covered over here, or is it an original Leonardian trick? Deprived of the view it expected, the eye turns back with a renewed sense of the interiority of the scene. The high placing of the window gives the couple a sense of sequesteredness. They are not on view to the world: our glimpse of them is privileged. This is reinforced by the absence of eye-contact – neither mother nor child is looking at the spectator; the scene is enacted between the two of them, and is centred on the flower which the child contemplates. This small white flower is not, as is sometimes said, a sprig of jasmine, which is a five-petalled flower (and is represented as such in the Uffizi Leda), but is a member of the four-petalled family known as Cruciferae. According to the botanist William Embolden, it is probably the bitter cress, Eruca sativa, which traditionally symbolized Christ’s passion, both in its cruciform shape and in its bitterness.7 As in the later Madonna of the Yarnwinder, the Christ-child contemplates a symbol of his own future agony. The mother who smilingly proffers the flower does so unknowingly; she is shielded from her tragic future as the child is from his.
The panel (as it originally was) has a story of romantic vicissitudes. Its whereabouts until the early nineteenth century are uncertain, though it may be the Madonna and Child described in 1591 as a ‘small panel in oils from the hand of Leonardo’, which was then in the house of the Botti family in Florence. In the 1820s it unexpectedly surfaced in the Crimean province of Astrakhan. According to one account, it arrived there in the baggage of an itinerant Italian musician. By 1824 it was in the possession of the Sapojnikov family of Astrakhan; it was on this date, according to family records, that it was transferred to canvas by a restorer named Korotkov. The painting was later in France, in the collection of the artist Léon Benois, whose wife was a Sapojnikov. After his death she returned to St Petersburg. The Benois Madonna, as it was now called, was exhibited there for the first time in 1908, and was purchased for the Hermitage by Tsar Nicholas II in 1914.
There are three drawings closely tied to the Benois Madonna – a head of a child in the Uffizi, which catches the infant’s intentness as he inspects the flower; a Madonna and child with a bowl of fruit in the Louvre; and a sheet of studies in the British Museum.8These in turn lead to other sketches relating to the Madonna and Child (or anyway the mother and child) which belong to this period. A charming and little-known drawing in the Escola de Belas Artes in Oporto has something of the Benois touch; it shows the child sitting on the mother’s lap while she washes his feet in a basin. Until recently this was attributed to Raffaellino da Reggio, a mid-sixteenth-century follower of Taddeo Zuccaro. In 1965 it was identified as a Leonardo by Philip Pouncey, who spotted some traces of Leonardo’s handwriting showing through from the back. As the drawing has been laid down, and cannot be removed from its mount without risk, only part of the Leonardo text on the verso has been deciphered. (In Leonardo’s mirror-world, of course, the words that show through can be read in regular left-to-right form.) It is a vocabulary list. Seven words can be made out, all beginning with a – affabile, armonia, etc. This relates the Oporto drawing to one in Windsor, which shows a plump baby sitting in the crook of his mother’s arms and which also has alphabetical word lists on the verso.9
Also part of this nexus of drawings of the late 1470s is a sketch of the Madonna and child with the infant St John, also at Windsor. This may have been worked up into a full cartoon, or possibly even a finished painting, since the Madonna and child are reproduced almost exactly in a painting by Andrea da Salerno in Naples. In the drawing the three figures are compressed into a pyramid, a compositional device that Leonardo returned to in the St Anne ensemble twenty years later. There is the hint of a landscape behind the figures, which shows his characteristic love of craggy hills already developed. This drawing is the first version of a grouping which resonates through Leonardo’s work – the meeting of Christ and St John the Baptist as children (an episode found only in the Apocrypha). It recurs in the Virgin of the Rocks, and later in the National Gallery cartoon of the Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist. This grouping is rare in Italian art at this time: Leonardo is innovating, or to put it another way, the grouping comes to him from somewhere other than pictorial convention. Recalling the circumstances of his childhood, one might wonder if this recurrent ‘other’ child, this outsider who looks in at the self-completing duo of the Madonna and Christ, has a particular resonance for Leonardo, whose relationship with his mother seems fraught with a fear of rejection.
But the mood of these Florentine mother-and-child studies is not rejection but celebration: the mother dandling, feeding, washing and – if the Litta Madonna is truly a part of this group – suckling her child. And most joyous of all is the series of the Madonna and child with a cat. As in the Benois Madonna, there is that emphasis on the youth of the Virgin Mother – the young woman almost still a girl. (One thinks of the teenage peasant Mary in Pasolini’s Gospel According to St Matthew.) These sketches are among the most vibrant of Leonardo’s Florentine works. Their rapidity and compassion make them jump off the page: they belong, in the way that a finished painting does not, to the reality of the moment in which they were sketched. These people are actual presences, in the studio or in a room. There are four pages of very rapid sketches: mixtures of pen, charcoal and metalpoint. The figures intertwine – a ballet of movements – as the intent young man scribbles away, the pen hurrying to capture the momentary truth of their bodies and gestures, of their lives. Then come four more finished studies, one of which is traced through on to its verso, where Leonardo experiments with a different position for the head of the mother. The most finished of all, precise and serene, is the lightly washed pen-and-ink drawing in the Uffizi.10
Mothers and children, c. 1478–80. Upper left: head of a child, probably a preparatory sketch for the Christ-child of the Benois Madonna. Upper right: the Oporto drawing known as Il Bagnetto. Lower left: sketches of a child with a cat. Lower right: study for a Madonna and child with a cat.
There is no evidence that these marvellous drawings ever resulted in a painting, except in so far as they are stages towards the greatest of his early Florentine paintings, the Adoration of the Magi, where the child reaching out from his mother’s lap is very similar. But the cat has vanished, and with it goes the vibrant, jocular note of the drawings.