In early 1481 Leonardo was commissioned to paint a large altarpiece for the Augustinian monastery of San Donato at Scopeto, a village outside the city walls not far from the Prato Gate. It was a rich monastery, which also purchased works by Botticelli and by Filippino Lippi. From 1479 its business affairs had been handled by Ser Piero da Vinci, who is likely to have been involved in the commission, and perhaps in the rather tricky details of the contract. In so far as the contract seems unsatisfactory from Leonardo’s point of view, one discerns an element of exasperated difficulty – something has to be done to get Leonardo on his feet, and this is the best that Ser Piero can manage.
The initial agreement was made in March 1481; it stipulated that Leonardo should deliver the painting ‘within twenty-four months, or at the most within thirty months; and in case of not finishing it he forfeits whatever he has done of it, and it is our right to do what we want with it’. These terms are not unusual, but suggest that Leonardo already has a reputation for unreliability. The form of payment, however, is unusual. He does not apparently get any cash in advance. Rather, he receives ‘one-third of a property in the Val d’Elsa’ which had been bequeathed to the monastery by ‘Simone, father of Brother Francesco’. The property is inalienable (‘he can make no other contract on it’), but he has the option, after three years, of selling it back to the friars, ‘if they so wish’, for the sum of 300 florins. With this property comes a complication: Leonardo is obliged to pay ‘whatever is necessary to furnish a dowry of 150 florins for the daughter of Salvestro di Giovanni’. This entailment was probably part of the original bequest by Simone father of Francesco – paying a dowry for some poor family of one’s acquaintance is a form of charity found often in wills of the period. Leonardo also undertakes to provide ‘the colours, the gold and all other costs arising’ at his own expense.66
The upshot of this curious contract is that the monastery offers to pay Leonardo 150 florins (the agreed value of the property minus the debt entailed with it). This payment is in arrears (he cannot sell the property for three years), and does not include any provision for expenses. The final sum is not bad, but the circumstances are inconvenient. The property in the Val d’Elsa – a rustic region to the south of Florence – is the only thing he receives up front: perhaps he went to live in it.
By June, three months after the initial agreement, the difficulties of the situation are becoming apparent. He has had to ask the monastery to ‘pay the above-mentioned dowry, because he said he does not have the means to pay it, and time was passing, and it was becoming prejudicial to us’. For this service his account with the friars has been debited 28 florins. It is further docked for sums advanced by the monastery to purchase colours for the work. Also in June, we learn, ‘Maestro Leonardo the painter’ has received ‘one load of faggots and one load of large logs’ as payment for decorating the monastery clock. In August he ‘owes us for one moggia [about 5 bushels] of grain which our carter carried to him at his own house’. (This house is presumably the property in Val d’Elsa.) And on 28 September – the date of the last document in the series – he ‘owes us for one barrel of vermilion wine’.67
These are the realities of Leonardo’s circumstances in 1481: he cannot afford to buy his paints; he buys grain and wine on credit; he does odd jobs for the monastery and is paid in firewood. And, as the nights draw in, the first lineaments of the altarpiece begin to take shape on a panel of poplar wood.
The product of this contract, and of these straitened circumstances, is the Adoration of the Magi, the last and greatest of his early Florentine works (Plate 10). It is the largest of all his easel paintings: 8 feet tall and nearly as wide (2.46 х 2.43 m). The dimensions, and the unusually square format, presumably reflect the space available above the altar of San Donato.
The painting was never delivered (which is perhaps just as well, as the monastery was completely demolished in the early sixteenth century). It was left unfinished when Leonardo departed for Milan in early 1482. According to Vasari, he left it for safe-keeping at the house of his friend Giovanni de’ Benci, the brother of Ginevra. It passed into the Medici collection sometime before 1621, when it was listed among the paintings at the Palazzo Medici. It is now one of the most famous paintings in the Uffizi, though it is more accurately an underpainting. The complex composition has been blocked in, but much of the detail is perfunctory: it is a work still in draft. The paint media are lamp-black mixed with diluted glue, and lead white. There is some over-painting in brown, though it has recently been questioned if these marks are Leonardo’s. The painting’s overall tawny-brown tonality is due to discoloration of later layers of varnish.
The subject-matter is one of the most popular in Renaissance painting – the arrival of the three kings or magi to pay homage to the infant Christ at Bethlehem. Leonardo would undoubtedly have known Benozzo Gozzoli’s fresco in the Palazzo Medici and Botticelli’s version of the subject in Santa Maria Novella, commissioned by Giovanni Lami of the Guild of Money-changers in about 1476. (This, now in the Uffizi, is the second of four surviving Adorations by Botticelli: the earliest, perhaps before 1470, is in the National Gallery in London.) Leonardo has used all the conventional ingredients, but the painting is revolutionary in its handling of the large group. This is not a procession but a stormy swirl of figures and faces – over sixty figures altogether: people and animals. In its cloudy unfinished form there is something ambiguous about this populousness: this crowd in attitudes of worship and wonder seems almost a mob. The mother and child are enclosed in space, a still point at the centre of the picture, but the press of the crowd around this space suggests also their vulnerability. Something is about to engulf them. This vortex of menace foretells the child’s story as surely as the symbolic gifts proffered by the kings.
There are some subtleties of religious interpretation.68 The roots of the central tree snake down to touch the head of Christ – an allusion to the prophecy of Isaiah: ‘There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.’ The broken architecture, with shrubbery growing out of the masonry, is a conventional allusion to the ruined ‘house of David’, which the birth of Christ will re-establish – workmen are just visible, on the stairs, busily rebuilding – but the shape of the building is specifically Florentine. Its columns and arches echo the presbytery of San Miniato del Monte, the oldest church in Florence after the Baptistery, reputedly built on the burial-site of the city’s most famous Christian martyr, Minias or Miniato. Like the façade of Santa Maria Novella in St Jerome, this visual reference anchors formative religious beliefs in a Florentine landscape.
These various components of epiphany iconography are there, but one very basic ingredient is missing. Where is Joseph? Invariably featuring in other Adorations, he is here indistinct. Is he the bearded man in the right-hand group with his hand raised to his brow in amazement? Or is he the pensive figure watching from the sidelines on the extreme left of the painting? Probably the former, but the ambiguity is paramount: the father is unidentified, submerged into the periphery. One might resist a psychoanalytical interpretation of this, but it is a motif too recurrent to ignore – Leonardo always excises Joseph from the Holy Family. He is missing from the Virgin of the Rocks (which narratively takes place during the flight from Egypt, and so ought to include him), and he is missing from the various versions of the Virgin and Child with St Anne, where the third member of the family is not the child’s father but his grandmother. One does not have to be a Freudian to feel that there are deep psychological currents here.
In early 2001 the Uffizi announced its intention to clean and restore the Adoration. This aroused an immediate hue and cry, led by the doyen of anti-restorers, Professor James Beck of Columbia University, New York.69 The painting was too delicate, its shadows and nuances too complex, its patina too intrinsic to be restored. When I spoke about this to Antonio Natali, Director of Renaissance Art at the Uffizi, he used the favourite word of the pro-restoration lobby – ‘legibility’. He spoke eloquently of the painting as a ‘buried poem’. ‘If you were studying Petrarch, would you read a few words here, a few words there? No. It is the same with a painting – you want to be able to read all of it.’
That the painting is in poor condition is not in doubt. The paint surface is covered by a dirty ‘skin’ of later varnishings: heavy mixes of glue, oil and resins. In the darker areas of the panel these have formed a thick brown patina. They also have theimbianchimento or whitening caused by oxidization: those tiny reticulations which glaze the surface – the shattered-windscreen effect. But the opponents of restoration query the idea of legibility, seeing it as a desire to ‘clarify’ something that (in the case of theAdoration, at least) the artist himself deliberately left ambiguous. The current spate of restorations, it is argued, panders to a modern taste for brightness and crispness – for photographic or electronic types of clarity. Restoration is thus a commercial decision by the galleries: a matter of marketing as much as conservation. ‘The real issue is philosophical,’ says Professor Beck. ‘Do we really want the paintings of the past to be modernized? Cleaning this picture is like a seventy-year-old person having a face-lift.’
The technical departments of the Uffizi are in a nondescript courtyard across the street from the gallery. In a small room on the second floor, laid across three trestles so it resembles a large picnic table, is Leonardo’s Adoration. The room is small and white-tiled; there is cream-coloured paper over the windows, admitting the luce velata which is wholesome for paintings. From a hook hang a feather-duster and a supermarket carrier-bag. The vaguely chemical smell makes one think of a medical laboratory or a vet’s operating-theatre. The imagery of medicine, of the painting as a great and aged patient, is frequently evoked by restorers. The situation is somehow intimate: the painting stripped of its gallery grandeur, horizontal, awaiting intervention.
The famous restorer Alfio del Serra prowls around it, sizing it up – these are the early weeks of the process, and the controversy has caused a hiatus. Del Serra is a stocky Pistoiese in his early sixties, with cropped white hair and a short-sleeved shirt. He has the look of an artisan, which is how he likes to be considered. His list of restorations includes works by Martini, Duccio, Cimabue, Giotto, Mantegna, Perugino, Raphael and Titian. Among his recent projects have been Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Leonardo’sAnnunciation. He shrugs about the controversy: it has at least given him time with the painting, time to get to know it. ‘Every restoration’, he says, ‘is a work of interpretation. There are no automatic or universal rules which can be applied in every situation. You need sensitivity, respect, knowledge – to continually ask yourself questions: that is what’s needed.’70
We crouch down and peer beneath at the back of the picture. The panel is formed of ten vertical planks or boards glued together; the transverse supports were added later, perhaps in the seventeenth century. The planks are of a fairly uniform width (about 9 inches across) but a narrower one is stuck on the left-hand edge, presumably to increase the painting to the commissioned size. Del Serra points out the problem of convessità, or bowing, in the middle boards, which threatens to crack the paint surface. This stems partly from the casual attrition of time and humidity, but also reflects Leonardo’s choice of wood 500 years ago. Del Serra explains with diagrams the importance of the original wood. To create the boards, a section of a tree trunk – in this case of the serviceable white poplar called gattice – is cut vertically. The cut nearest the centre, the radiale, is the best, because the tree rings are symmetrically balanced; the outer cut, or peripherale, is not so good. Del Serra has recently restored the Annunciation, and is familiar also with theBaptism of Christ: in both cases the actual panels are in excellent condition. Those were paintings done within the Verrocchio workshop: quality materials were used. For the Adoration – an independent work, done when he was buying grain and wine on tick from his employers – Leonardo made do with the cheaper cuts. In this, adds del Serra, he was foreshadowed by Cimabue, the maestro of Giotto, who used ‘very thin pieces of wood, of the kind that the carpenter would throw away’ – in short, offcuts.
Del Serra is relaxed and unceremonious with the painting: he does not quite lean his elbow on it as we talk, but one feels that he might. He wets a plug of cotton-wool and briefly polishes a small area of the picture: the faintly sketched heads of an ox and an ass on the right-hand side, so easily missed, suddenly emerge from the gloom.
In the months to come the story of the restoration would become yet more tangled. Late in 2001 the Uffizi decided to commission a technical examination of the painting by the art-diagnostician Maurizio Seracini. After months of painstaking analysis Seracini dropped a bombshell: the reddish-brown over-painting seen on various parts of the Adoration was not done by Leonardo. The clue lay in microscopic analysis of cross-sections of tiny paint samples – that mysterious, micron-thick dimension of the paint surface. In almost every cross-section he took, he found that the top layer of brown paint had penetrated into the lower, earlier, monochrome stratum. By the time the colour was brushed on to it, the surface had cracks and fissures deep enough for the wet brown paint to seep down into them. Seracini says – and this is the crux – that this cracking could have occurred only over a significant period of time, perhaps fifty to a hundred years. The top layer was thus painted after Leonardo’s death, by an unknown artist following the cavalier tenets of his day about how to improve a painting.71
Seracini’s interpretation of the evidence has since been challenged, but in the face of this new dimension of controversy, the restoration project was quietly and wisely shelved, and the Adoration now hangs once more in the Leonardo Room of the Uffizi, its dirt and mystery intact while the arguments continue.
This unfinished masterwork of Leonardo’s Florentine years provides deep but elusive insights into his mentality, his manner of working, his handling of various threads of Christian symbolism and Florentine-heritage imagery, his extraordinary sense of dynamism and vortical flow. But it has something else to tell us, for at the far right-hand edge of the painting stands a tall young man in a long cloak who is almost certainly a self-portrait of Leonardo at the age of about twenty-nine (Plate 1).
The issue of Renaissance self-portraiture is a thorny one, because the visual evidence is often circular, but we know that Italian artists of the Quattrocento often included a self-portrait in group-paintings, and that the convention was to show the artist looking outward from the picture, defining himself as a mediator between the fictive scene he has created and the real world of the spectator. In some cases the self-portrait is certain, as in Gozzoli’s Procession of the Magi, where the artist helpfully identifies the face looking out of the crowd by painting his name on his hat. More often one is making deductions, or attending to contemporary deductions. The woodcut portraits of artists that adorn the second edition of Vasari’s Lives (cut by the German engraver Christopher Coriolano to Vasari’s instructions) are a useful indicator. For instance, it is clear from the woodcut of Masaccio that Vasari considered the dark, rather sullen face in the Tribute Money – one of Masaccio’s frescos in the Brancacci chapel – to be a self-portrait. This is generally accepted, but Vasari is never foolproof: he modelled the portrait of Cimabue on a figure in Andrea da Firenze’s Church Triumphant in Santa Maria Novella, but the figure in question wears the insignia of the Order of the Garter and is almost certainly a visiting Englishman.72
The first habitual self-portraitist was Fra Filippo Lippi, who peers at us from the crowd in the Barbadori altarpiece (formerly in San Spirito and now in the Louvre). Commissioned in 1437, this work shows Lippi in his early thirties; he gets progressively older in the Coronation of the Virgin (Uffizi), completed in 1447, and in the Martyrdom of St Stephen in Prato cathedral, done in the 1450s. In all these he appears as a swarthy, round-faced friar with faintly comic sticking-out ears. These ears become a kind of shorthand, a distinguishing feature. They are prominently displayed on the sculpted head on his tomb in Spoleto cathedral. This was added in about 1490, twenty years after Lippi’s death, but his big ears were remembered.
Andrea Mantegna is another mid-century painter whose work was full of self-portraits. His puffy, worried-looking face in monochrome is seen in one of the trompe l’œil pilasters of the Camera degli Sposi (Wedding Bedroom) in the Gonzaga castle in Mantua. It conveys a witty sense of the artist imprisoned in his own fantasia. The young man peering out of the darkness in his Presentation at the Temple (Berlin) is also a self-portrait. The painting is connected to his marriage in 1454 to Nicolosia Bellini, sister of the Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini. (Bellini’s own version of the Presentation is almost identical in composition, except that there are now two figures looking on from the right, one of whom is Mantegna again and the other Bellini. The model for the Madonna in both paintings is probably Nicolosia herself.) Again these images have a particular unifying feature – the downward curve of the mouth – and again this is echoed in the woodcut portrait of Mantegna in Vasari’s Lives.73
By the early 1480s, when Leonardo was working on the Adoration, this self-portraiture had become a convention. The unlovely features of Perugino look from a row of faces in his fresco St Peter Receiving the Keys, identifiable by comparison with the certain self-portrait of c. 1500 in the Collegio di Cambio in Perugia. And it is surely the handsome, dark-eyed face of Domenico Ghirlandaio looking out from so many of his frescos.
This inclusion of the artist is in part a confident statement of personal identity, and indeed status: he includes himself just as he includes the features of the ‘donor’ or commissioner of the painting. In his ‘mediating’, outward-looking position the artist fulfils the role of what Leon Battista Alberti called the commentatore or commentator. Alberti describes this figure as an essential component of the kind of painting he calls a storia – a history or story – which essentially means a painting of a scene or episode with a number of figures in it. ‘In the storia there should be one who alerts and informs us as to what is happening, or who beckons us with his hand to look.’74 The highly populated depictions of the Adoration are a classic example of the painting as storia, a rendition of an archetypically dramatic scene or story. The young man on the edge of the crowd in Leonardo’s Adoration fulfils exactly the role of the commentatore as laid down by Alberti, and he occupies exactly the same position as the young man turning outward in Botticelli’sAdoration (p. 86), who is also believed to be a self-portrait. Leonardo would certainly have known this work, completed a couple of years previously for the church of Santa Maria Novella.
Images of the young Leonardo? Upper left: detail from Verrocchio’s David, c. 1466. Upper right: doodle from the ‘Fioravanti folio’, 1478. Lower left: study for the commentatore of the Adoration, c. 1481. Lower right: artist using a perspectograph, c. 1478–80.
Visual comparisons seem to confirm that this is Leonardo on the edge of the painting. The face has similarities with the face of Verrocchio’s David, and with the face of the young man on the Fioravanti folio, and with the face of the young artist who looks through a perspectograph. Also, among the pen-and-ink studies for the Adoration at the Louvre there is a tall, long-haired young man who does not correspond to any figure in the actual painting, but whose turning gesture suggests he may be an early study for thecommentatore; this can also be thought of as a self-portrait.
A dab of wet cotton-wool in the Uffizi restoration labs, and the handsome, broad-faced young man glowers briefly. What is his mood? He turns away from the central figures of the mother and child, though his right arm seems to extend back, inviting us to look at them. He is the commentator: detached, cool, marginal, quizzical, perhaps even sceptical. He brings us this momentous scene, but is not part of it.