Feinberg L.J. The Young Leonardo: Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence
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11. Leonardo’s Colleagues in the Workshop 77
Figure 26.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Study of a Female Head,
c. 1474–76,penandink
with washes, Florence,
Uffizi (428E). Scala/Art
Resource, NY.
isolated figures, decorative rather than interactive, seem as immobile
as the stone lectern and background trees. Only the distant mountains,
gloriously evocative in their atmospheric shroud, hint at Leonardo’s
inventiveness and ambitions, scientific as well as artistic.
Although still finding his own way artistically, Leonardo was appar-
ently more than happy to nurture his friend Lorenzo di Credi’s creativ-
ity and career – behavior auspicious of the generous and sure guidance
he would one day provide to the young artists who worked for him. In
addition to offering a drawing to Credi for the Baptist of the Pistoia
Madonna di Piazza, he allowed his colleague to peruse his portfo-
lio of studies when Credi needed to design the predella,thelower
register of scenes, for that altarpiece. With good reason, Credi must
have become particularly enamored with Leonardo’s exotically elegant
Study of a Female Head (now Uffizi – fig. 26). The jeweled brooch and
wing motif of the headband indicate that Leonardo conceived her
78 The Young Leonardo
either as an angel or as some sort of allegorical or mythological being.
Credi, however, decided that the bowed head and demurely downcast
eyes would very well suit the Annunciate Virgin in his predella panel,
now in the Louvre. The transformation was made with only minor
adjustments to the headgear and coiffure. Unashamedly, Credi also
appropriated the profile pose of the angel and organization of his pic-
ture from Leonardo’s recently finished Annunciation. Later, according
to Vasari, Credi replicated a Leonardo Madonna and sent his copy to
the king of Spain.
12. Leonardo’s Madonna of the
Carnation and the Exploration
of Optics
P
ossibly executed not long after his ANNUNCIATION,and
featuring some of the same faux-alpine topography,
Leonardo’s delightfully curious Virgin and Child with a Carnation of
c. 1476–78 (fig. 27), now in Munich, reveals his inclination to move
beyond studio conventions and to probe with a keener eye the work-
ings of human anatomy and the properties of light. In the panoramic
landscape, glimpsed through windows, Leonardo shows that he could
achieve the atmospheric-perspective effects of the finest Flemish paint-
ings, for which Lorenzo the Magnificent had a special enthusiasm;
precious masterpieces by Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus, and other
Northern masters graced his palace. With a general concern for Medici
approval, Leonardo no doubt derived some of his imaginative land-
scape elements, as well as the background window motif, from such
pictures. His rugged landscape would have had an inviting familiarity
for a northern European viewer. To Leonardo’s audience, however,
the mountain ranges must have seemed a forbidding wilderness and, in
the context of his painting, suggestive of a primordial, ancient world
now in recession, with the advent of Christ. Also much intrigued by
Flemish art around that time, but less interested in natural topography,
Sandro Botticelli chose to introduce a more sanguine, northern Euro-
pean townscape into the background of his Shooting of Saint Sebastian
of 1474, painted for the Florentine church of S. Maria Maggiore.
The generally presumed date of the Munich picture coin-
cides with the infancy of Leonardo’s half-brother, the long-awaited
Antonio (born 1476), who may have served as a model. For the unusu-
ally young Christ, Leonardo obviously had studied a baby firsthand,
recording but not fully understanding the visual problems experienced
in the first months of life. In the Munich picture, the Christ Child, eyes
79
80 The Young Leonardo
straying and unfocused, reaches almost blindly for the Virgin’s carna-
tion. Ungraceful though this gesture may be, Leonardo renders it with
a fascinated precision, as he does the baby’s doughy flesh. Although
hindered by his ungainly body and underdeveloped vision, the holy
child instinctively wishes to seize the flower, a traditional symbol of
the Passion, specifically the Crucifixion, because of its nail-like buds.
In portraying the truth of what he observed, Leonardo characteristi-
cally reveled in its complexity. A simple exchange between a mother
and child has become, in his hands, a subtle matrix of physiological
mechanics and religious meaning.
Vision and optical effects can almost be considered subtexts of the
Munich picture. In it, Leonardo demonstrates not only his ability to
reproduce bright, outdoor light and soft, ambient interior illumination
but also shows, in the Flemish-inspired, crystalline vase, the small, glass
balls attached to the cushion, and the Virgin’s conspicuous, emerald
brooch that he can imitate the appearance of rays of light which are
refracted, filtered, and reflected. Since the Middle Ages, the emerald
had been viewed as a badge of purity, as the stone was said to splinter
when a virgin was violated. But placed so near to the baby’s eyes,
in the center of Leonardo’s composition, the prominent green stone
probably had additional significance.
From ancient times through the Renaissance, emeralds were
believed to aid eyesight. Aristotle’s successor, the fourth-century b.c.
philosopher Theophrastus, confidently asserted that emeralds were
good for the eyes, pointing out that some people carried emerald
seals with them for intermittent, salutary viewing. Pliny’s first-century
Natural History, the basic encyclopedia of animals, vegetables, and min-
erals in the Renaissance, reported that strained eyes could be restored
to their “normal state by looking at a ‘smaragdus’ (emerald).” Ficino,
at the Medici court, declared that not just emeralds but all smooth,
green materials held therapeutic value for the eyes. This belief persisted
well into the seventeenth century. In his poem “A Lover’s Complaint”
(1609), Shakespeare noted: “the deepe greene Emrald in whose fresh
regard, weak sights their sickly radiance do amend.” Precious and
semiprecious stones and jewels were a frequent topic of conversa-
tion in Lorenzo the Magnificent’s circle, for he owned a significant
number of gems, cameos, and various objects, such as vases and tazze
(cups), carved from carnelians, chalcedony, jasper, and sardonyx-agate.
Leonardo’s later manuscripts indicate that, like Lorenzo, he came to
12. Leonardo’s Madonna of the Carnation and the Exploration of Optics 81
Figure 27.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Virgin and Child with a
Carnation,c.1476–78,
oil on panel, Munich,
Alte Pinakothek.
Bildarchiv Preussis-
cher Kulturbesitz/Art
Resource, NY.
possess Pliny’s opus and specialized books or treatises on precious
stones (lapidari), perhaps by Theophrastus and the German theologian
Albertus Magnus.
In Leonardo’s time, interest in precious and semiprecious stones was
far more pervasive and topical than it is today. This had partly to do
with the fact that, as with the emerald, many precious stones and metals
were valued almost as much for their supposed medicinal (or magically
curative) properties as for their aesthetic qualities. The diamond was
thought to be an antidote for poison and to protect against plague,
the ruby a remedy for flatulence, and the sapphire effective against eye
82 The Young Leonardo
disease. The sparkling, violet amethyst was considered to be a cure for
drunkenness and purportedly made the wearer more nimble-minded
and shrewd in business matters. Ficino and members of the Medici
court and family, notably Francesco I in the later sixteenth century,
consumed significant amounts of powdered lapis lazuli, an expensive
stone used as an artist’s pigment, as well as the “elixir of life,” a form
of potable gold. Properly and regularly ingested, these materials were
believed to counteract excess black bile in the body and consequently
alleviate melancholy.
Despite the original observations and considerable thought that
Leonardo invested in the Virgin and Child with a Carnation,hemade
certain that it would still be recognized as a Verrocchio workshop
product. The Virgin’s features conform closely to the master’s facial
types, widely admired, then as now, for the gentle affection they
exude. Very similar faces and capricious hairstyles are found in several
Verrocchio and Verrocchio-shop drawings, notably two well-known
studies of female heads (one possibly for the lady in the joust-standard
design) in the collections of the British Museum and Louvre. The need
for “branding” aside, Leonardo also emulated his mentor’s idealized
countenances and intricate coiffures because, as Vasari noted, he clearly
much appreciated their inventiveness. It is interesting to note, however,
that when the impressionable and loyal Credi painted his tiny Madonna
of the Pomegranate in these years (c. 1476–78), his primary model was
Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with the Carnation, and only secondarily
did he look to Verrocchio’s works.
13. The Benois Madonna and
Continued Meditations on the
Theme of Sight
M
any of the same themes and inquiries concerning
vision continued to preoccupy Leonardo when he exe-
cuted another, better-known painting of the Virgin and Child not
long afterward, the so-called Benois Madonna (c. 1478–80), named for
its last private owner (Leon Benois), and now in the State Hermitage
Museum in St. Petersburg (fig. 28). In what can be regarded almost as
a further elaboration on the actions of the Munich infant, Leonardo
portrayed the older, and rather immense, child in the Benois Madonna
as gamely trying to focus his eyes on a sprig of cruciform-shaped
flowers. The painter would have had a largely erroneous idea about
the nature of the child’s struggle, because he did not know of the
existence of lenses in the eyes.
Instead, following the eminent Florentine theorist Leon Battista
Alberti, Leonardo, at least into the 1490s, ascribed to the fallacious,
Platonic “theory of emission” in the operations of sight – that is,
the belief that the eyes emit rays that extend to the object seen. In
his widely read treatise On Painting of 1435, Alberti had applied the
geometric elaboration of Euclid’s Optics (c. 300 b.c.) to the visual
rays (opseis) that Plato described in his fourth-century dialogue, the
Timaeus. There, Plato spoke of such fictive rays as an ocular “fire”
mixing in sympathy with external light. With great authority, Alberti
explained how an infinite number of these rays issued from the eyes,
the most powerful being the central one or “centric ray,” which, he
believed, played “the largest part in the determination of sight.”
Exactly contrary to the true nature of vision, which involves intro-
mission, the reception of light from an object into the eyes, Leonardo
nevertheless wrote about and drew diagrams of this imaginary phe-
nomenon. In fact, along the margins of one of his preliminary studies
83
84 The Young Leonardo
Figure 28.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Virgin and Child
with Flowers (Benois
Madonna), c. 1478–80,
oil on wood panel,
transferred to canvas,
St. Petersburg, State
Hermitage Museum.
Scala/Art Resource,
NY.
for the Benois Madonna, he made three tiny “technical” sketches that
show, from right to left, parallel centric rays emitted from a pair of eyes
looking forward, intersecting rays from eyes turned slightly inward,
and, last, rays intersecting from eyes turned markedly inward (figs. 29
and 30). The final diagram is in keeping with the eyes of the Christ
Child in the Benois Madonna, who assertively guides the hand of his
mother, so that the flowers will be brought into the crossing of his
ocular rays.
Leonardo would go on to devote much of his life to investigations
of optics, binocular vision, and perception and eventually would come
to an uneasy reconciliation of the theories of emission and intromis-
sion. Thus, although he made some subtle and astute observations,
13. The Benois Madonna and Continued Meditations on the Theme of Sight 85
Figure 29.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Virgin and Child, Profile
Studies, Technical Sketches,
and Schematic Studies
of Eyes with Visual
Rays,c.1478–80,
silverpoint, leadpoint,
pen and ink, London,
British Museum (1860-
6-16-100r).
C
The
Trustees of the British
Museum/Art Resource,
NY.
he did not get very far. A full knowledge of the function of the eyes’
lenses would only be attained in the mid-nineteenth century, and only
in the late twentieth would a fundamental understanding be realized
of the neurology of visual perception, which, in the case of an infant,
depends not only on the operation of the lenses but on the progressive
chemical sheathing (called “myelination”) of nerve tracks between the
retina and vision-related areas of the cerebral cortex.
As in the Munich Virgin and Child with the Carnation, Leonardo’s
attention to the mechanics of vision in the Hermitage picture has
interesting implications. Leonardo’s artistic contemporaries, such as
Botticelli and Raphael, often treated the theme of divine foreknowl-
edge of the Passion in their Madonnas. The Christ Child is typically
86 The Young Leonardo
Figure 30.
Detail of Schematic
Studies of Eyes with
Visual Rays in fig. 29.
Art Resource, NY.
shown recoiling from, or willingly embracing, a goldfinch or some
other traditional symbol of Christ’s Passion (according to medieval
lore, a goldfinch plucked a thorn from Christ’s crown when he was on
the way to Calvary and was splashed with a drop of his blood – hence,
the characteristic red mark on the bird’s neck). In his two Madonnas,
Leonardo, the empiricist, sought to break down and analyze the phys-
iology of vision and perception, the mysterious connections between
sight and insight. The Munich child is virtually blind, yet seems aware
of the symbolic carnation. The child of the Benois Madonna has still
not responded to the distinctly cruciform shape of the flower (proba-
bly an artistically modified jasmine or wallflower), because he cannot
see it clearly. Once that happens, the child’s hazy curiosity could, pre-
sumably, lead to foresight of his sacrifice. By adding explicit reference
to the act of seeing, Leonardo has protracted and compounded the
tension inherent in portrayals of the Christ Child apprehending his
death. Attuned to Leonardo’s works and interests, Lorenzo di Credi,
in imitation, similarly portrayed babies with underdeveloped vision in
several of his own paintings and drawings.
In contrast to its serious subtext, the Hermitage picture presents
what may be the most joyous and youthful depiction of Mary in