Feinberg L.J. The Young Leonardo: Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence
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13. The Benois Madonna and Continued Meditations on the Theme of Sight 87
Figure 31.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies of Machines (verso
of fig. 32), 1478,pen
and ink, Florence, Uffizi
(446E). Polo Museale.
Renaissance art. Unconventionally, she seems to be speaking or laugh-
ing, playfully engaged with her child, her radiant vitality accentuated
through Leonardo’s deliberate complications of posture and drap-
ery. Able to observe on a regular basis the interactions between his
half-siblings Antonio and Giuliomo (born in 1479) and stepmother,
Leonardo made a number of sketches that capture the awkward and
unpredictable actions of an infant: wrestling with a cat, snatching a
piece of fruit from a bowl, poking his fingers into his mother’s face.
Drawings executed for the Benois Madonna and for a related work,
depicting the Virgin and Child with a Cat (figs. 38 and 39), indicate
the artist’s desire to make the compositions as dynamic and intri-
cate as possible – a major advance from the more staid, frontal stance
of the Munich Madonna, which, as we have seen, was based on a
Verrocchio prototype. Leonardo had attempted, tactfully and mini-
mally, to distinguish his Virgin and Child with the Carnation from the
standard Verrocchio shop piece by including beautiful, if improbable,
flourishes – the impossibly complex silhouette of the Virgin’s veil, the
watery and convoluted cascades of her dress and shawl. In the Benois
88 The Young Leonardo
Figure 32.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies of Heads and
Machines, 1478,penand
ink, Florence, Uffizi
(446E). Polo Museale.
Madonna, this sort of virtuoso demonstration of twisting form in space
is more credibly and profoundly integrated, with a helix serving as the
core and organizing armature of the entire composition.
One may fairly associate this interest in structures unfolding in
space with Leonardo’s concurrent fascination with gyrating machin-
ery and the use of sprockets, gears, and conveyor belts to transfer
motion from one plane to another. On both sides of a fragmentary
sheet of sketches, dated to 1478 and now in the Uffizi, are various
mechanisms in which Leonardo explored how forces and tensions
could be conducted and controlled in three dimensions (figs. 31 and
32). He conceived the Benois Madonna, with its curving, stepped pro-
jections of arms and legs, its stacked arrangement of revolving forces
and counterforces, as a similarly contained system – a small engine or
clockwork universe of energies in equilibrium.
14. The Madonna of the Cat
S
ketched beside some of the machines on the r agged but
important Uffizi sheet of 1478 is another kind of counterbal-
ance, a contrast between two typologies that would become a fixation
for Leonardo: the wizened, contemplative face of an old man and
the fresh, inquisitive visage of a youth – an embodiment of Aristotle’s
decree that “each thing may be better known through its opposite”
(fig. 32). Eventually, as we shall see, this juxtaposition would carry
religious and spiritual connotations in certain of Leonardo’s works,
notably his representations of the Adoration of the Magi and Last
Supper. However, we might rather assume that, at this relatively early
stage of his career, his musings had something to do with his fam-
ily situation. The grandfather, Antonio, would have been a constant,
possibly doting, presence in the young Leonardo’s life until the old
man passed away in 1464 at age 92. With a father who was mainly
absent, engaged in business in Florence, an estranged mother (who
had moved with her husband to another village), and a stepmother
who died prematurely, Leonardo likely felt a special closeness to his
grandparents, with whom he lived for nearly a dozen years. In the
countless drawings of the aged that he made over the course of his
career, one often senses a certain reverence and intimacy.
Aside from any personal meaning they may have had, Leonardo’s
ubiquitous pairs of contrasting heads, as noted earlier, also reflect his
belief, based on Aristotelian principle, of the elucidating power of
opposition – through which, in some cases, a better understanding of
each of the antipodes may be gained and, in others, a “just mean”
or balance achieved. The skeptical artist continually sought to present
or expose contradictions, and he loved irony. Ultimately, though, as
a Christian philosopher who believed in the profound interrelation
89
90 The Young Leonardo
Figure 33.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Sketches of a Child
Holding and Playing
with a Cat,c.1478–
80,penandink,
London, British
Museum (1857-1-10-1).
C
The Trustees of the
British Museum/Art
Resource, NY.
of phenomena in a divinely designed world, he desired a Renaissance
version of the modern, unified-field concept, a reconciliation of all
contrasting ideas and forces.
Near the pair of heads on the Uffizi sheet, Leonardo left the enig-
matic inscription: “ – 1478, I began the two Virgin Marys.” One of
these was presumably the Benois Madonna, the other, perhaps, a Virgin
and Child with Cat, for which, as previously mentioned, numerous
preparatory studies survive, some closely related in composition to the
former work (figs. 33, 35–40). This series of stream of consciousness
drawings is instructive for what it reveals of Leonardo’s rather manic
14. The Madonna of the Cat 91
Figure 34.
Andrea del Verrocchio,
Boy with Dolphin,late
1470s, bronze, for the
Medici villa at Carreggi,
now Florence, Palazzo
Vecchio. Scala/Art
Resource, NY.
and circuitous, creative process. He took full advantage of the quick,
weightless movement of the quill pen, which, as many a draftsman
has noted, can seem almost to move of its own accord. Among the
first of these studies may have been the frantic, exuberant sketches
on both sides of a sheet preserved in the British Museum (fig. 33),
where Leonardo captures, in blurred, stop-action frames, a young
child’s good-natured abuse of a cat. He had an uncanny ability to
illustrate swift and minute movements, such as nuances of feline reflex
and exceedingly intricate and fleeting currents in water (the latter
confirmed by modern high-speed photography). Either his eyesight
was extraordinarily quick – and quasi-microscopic in power – or, after
countless hours spent studying animals and bodies of water, he was
just extremely good at speculating about those rapid movements and
patterns in nature that are difficult to observe. Whichever the case, his
loose, fluid penmanship owed much to the example of Verrocchio,
92 The Young Leonardo
Figure 35.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Study for a Virgin and
Child with a Cat,c.
1478–80,penandink
with wash, Florence,
Uffizi (421E). Art
Resource, NY.
whose manner of sketching was unprecedented in its spontaneity and
vitality.
In these vigorous child-and-cat drawings, the artist was also likely
responding to Verrocchio’s recently completed bronze, Boy with a
Dolphin (late 1470s; fig. 34), which Il Magnifico had just obtained
for his villa at Carreggi, the seat of the Platonic academy of philoso-
phers and so a prestigious and prominent venue. Verrocchio’s giddy,
wriggling statue, with its ambitious spiraling effect, would have posed
something of a challenge to Leonardo. The sketch at bottom left of
the British Museum sheet (fig. 33)appearstobeafirst,directreaction
14. The Madonna of the Cat 93
Figure 36.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies for a Virgin
and Child with a Cat,
c. 1478–80,penand
ink, London, British
Museum (1860-6-16-
98). Polo Museale.
to the sculpture; Leonardo has the child grasp the animal in much
the same manner, and some rough lines suggest that he even consid-
ered extending the boy’s proper right leg, like that of the Verrocchio
bambino. Often regarded as a solitary genius who received ideas from
on high, Leonardo, in reality and in almost every instance, responded
in his art to the recent work of others, particularly to those objects
that were novel in some way. In large part, his brilliance consisted in
his ability to make instant and optimal use of the contributions of oth-
ers – the isolated individual, who feels compelled to invent everything
completely de novo, cannot himself become an innovator.
So goaded, Leonardo continued to explore the subject of a boy
with a cat, usually lashed together in a hopeless tangle and including
a woman (the Virgin) as well, in at least five other sheets. At an early
point in the design process, he considered placing the child, clutching
the cat, on a cushion or platform beside the Virgin (figs. 35 and 36).
94 The Young Leonardo
Figure 37.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies for a Virgin
and Child with a Cat,
c. 1478–80,pen
and ink, Bayonne,
Mus
´
ee Bonnat (152).
Later, the composition evolved, momentarily, to one very similar to
that of the Benois Madonna, with the three figures in a taut knot
(figs. 37 and 38). He subsequently changed his mind again, tracing the
design right through the sheet with a sharp stylus, reversing and then
altering the poses in pen and wash (figs. 38 and 39). The study closest
to the (planned) painting may be the smallest surviving sketch – the
tender, tiny design now in a private collection, in which the heads of
the three figures seem gently to touch (fig. 40).
Although Leonardo would have found a squirming cat a more
challenging prop than a dolphin, it is difficult to say exactly why he
chose to place that particular animal in the baby’s arms. Of course, as
14. The Madonna of the Cat 95
Figure 38.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Study for a Virgin and
Child with a Cat,c.
1478–80,penand
ink, London, British
Museum (1856-6-21-1).
C
The Trustees of the
British Museum/Art
Resource, NY.
a common household member (perhaps in Ser Piero’s abode), the cat
conveyed domesticity, as did, despite its foreboding symbolism, the
goldfinch, a favorite pet of children in the Renaissance. One should
recall that these small and intimate Madonnas were intended for the
home, usually a bedroom.
It is also possible that Leonardo’s choice of animal-actor was
intended to perpetuate a charming, popular legend that a cat gave birth
to a litter of kittens at the moment of Christ’s Nativity. Other than
that, the cat has no Judeo-Christian significance (curiously, although
worshipped in Egypt for millennia, cats are never mentioned in the
canonical books of the Bible). In ancient Greek mythological texts,
96 The Young Leonardo
Figure 39.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Study for a Virgin and
Child with a Cat (verso
of fig.38), c. 1478–80,
pen and ink, London,
British Museum (1856-
6-21-1). Alinari/Art
Resource, NY.
however, the feline is said to be a proxy of Hecate, goddess of the
dead and the underworld. Perhaps because of this tradition and, cer-
tainly, due to medieval stories of necromancy, the cat was some-
times regarded, like the goldfinch, as an omen of death. In Leonardo’s
Tuscany, there was an old, folk superstition that the sudden appearance
of a cat could portend someone’s passing. A black cat has ominous
associations even today.
Leonardo’s painting of the Virgin and Child with the Cat was either
somehow lost or, in light of the fact that no replicas or variants survive,
was, more likely, never fully realized, the fate of so many of his projects.