Feinberg L.J. The Young Leonardo: Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence
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17. Leonardo as Portraitist and Master of the Visual Pun 117
Figure 49.
Detail of “Yarnwinder”
rebus at upper left of
fig. 47. (Reversed for
legibility) The Royal
Collection
C
2010
Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth II.
would ever devise, as he challenged the sonnet writers and courtiers
in their own arena of clever word games.
Many of Leonardo’s rebuses are short, comprising only two or
three images. A doodle of a sage plant (in Italian, salvia) next to
the word “me” forms the imploring “salvi a me” or “save me!”; the
sketch of a lion (leone) guarding some flames (signifying “burning” or
“arde”) and two tables (deschi) creates the term “lionardeschi,” the name
Leonardo’s followers were called; and a drawing of a holy or pious cat
(pia gatta) with wings engenders the Italian sentence “pia gatta vola”–
“pious cat flies” – or, when said quickly, the phrase “piang’ a tavola,”
which can mean either “cry at the table” or “painted on panel.” Other
of Leonardo’s rebuses were a little more ambitious and clever, such as
the fishhook (amo, in Italian) he drew beside a musical score, with part
of the vocal musical scale “ut re mi fa so la.” In the Middle Ages and
Renaissance, this scale, or solmization, invented by a Tuscan, Guido da
Arezzo, in the eleventh century, comprised only these six notes, and
“ut” took the place of “do.” The artist’s word-image reads: l’amo re
mi fa sol la [za] re,orl’amore mi fa sollazzare – “love gives me pleasure”
or “love amuses me.” The second, more literal, translation would be
in keeping with Leonardo’s playfully cynical attitude, evident in his
aforementioned slur on romance and procreation.
It seems that Leonardo even managed to integrate a rebus into at
least one of his religious pictures. The eponymous prop of his Madonna
of the Yarnwinder (c. 1501; fig. 48) appears to derive from one of the
visual puns on the Windsor sheet. At the upper left of the page is a
series of thumbnail sketches (fig. 49), with accompanying inscriptions,
that represent from right to left: a pear tree (pero), a saddle (sella), a
woman with a sail (fortuna – a personification of fortune), two notes
on a musical stave (mi and fa), a fern (felce), the letters “tal,” a face (viso),
and a black yarnwinder (aspo nero). When recited together, Leonardo’s
118 The Young Leonardo
word-pictures form the whimsical sentence, “Pero se la fortuna mi fa
felice tal viso asponer
`
o!” – “However, if fortune makes me happy, I will
show such a face!” The words “aspo”and“nero” merge to make the
exclamatory word/phrase “asponer
`
o” – “I will show.”
Placed prominently in Leonardo’s painting, the word-image
“asponer
`
o” has a special resonance. In the picture, the Christ Child not
only eagerly seizes the instrument, but, with his left hand, emphatically
points heavenward – a gesture, often associated with John the Bap-
tist, that indicates “I will show” the way to redemption. Further, the
bold motion of the child’s arm, proximate and parallel to the crosslike
yarnwinder, suggests that this salvation will come through his sacri-
fice. The painting was intended for the esteemed French statesman
and diplomat Florimond Robertet, a polyglot who much appreciated
this sort of wordplay and owned other pictures with imbedded visual
puns. One of his personal heraldic devices featured pruned, flowering
branches or fleurs
´
emondes, an allusion to his Christian name. It must
have occurred to Leonardo that such nominal word combinations
were not so different from the clever, bogus etymologies of saints’
names that he had read as a youth in the Golden Legend.
Although Leonardo’s rebus in the Madonna of the Yarnwinder was
perhaps unprecedented, it would not remain unique in sixteenth-
century European painting. The Lombard artist Lorenzo Lotto
inserted in his Portrait of Lucina Brembati (c. 1518–20) the well-known
rebus of a moon (luna) divided by the letters “ci”; and the German
painter Hans Holbein’s French Ambassadors (1533) includes the famous
anamorphically distorted skull, a momento mori, or reminder of death,
whichisalsoprobablyapunontheartist’sname:hohl Bein, or hol-
low bone. By the third quarter of the sixteenth century, rebuses were
common enough in Italian emblems (devices or coats-of-arms with
mottos) that the writer Giovanni Andrea Palazzi, regarding them as
low-minded and, possibly, as a French import, felt the need to dispar-
age them in his Discorsi sopra l’imprese (Discourses on Devices).
Any francophobia aside, Palazzi was probably right in assign-
ing a French origin to the heraldic phenomenon. Visual puns and
rebuses had been popular features in the imprese or devises of France
for centuries. Since at least the time of King Louis Le Jeune, who,
in the twelfth century, ordered for his son, Philip Augustus, a blue
dalmatic sewn with gold fleurs-de-lys, a flower whose name – as
Fleur de Loy – played on his own, visual puns were ubiquitous in
17. Leonardo as Portraitist and Master of the Visual Pun 119
French heraldry. Throughout the Middle Ages and early Renaissance,
similar puns appeared on countless French chivalric shields, called
armes parlantes for their phonetic character, including those of Enguer-
rand de Cand
´
av
`
ene, a count of St. Pol in the late twelfth century,
whose escutcheon bore a sheaf of oats (canne d’avoine), and Gui de
Munois, a thirteenth-century monk of St. Germain d’Auxerre, whose
clever seal featured a cowled ape in the sky, rubbing its back with both
hands – a rebus that could be recited as “singe-air-main-dos-serre” (mon-
key [in the] air [with his] hand squeezes [his] back). Two centuries
later, the Renaissance chronicler Jean Juvenal des Ursins reported
that, in 1416, the dauphin Louis emblazoned his standard with a rebus
comprising a golden letter “K,” a swan (le cygne), and a golden “L”
to proclaim his romantic interest in a certain young woman of the
Casinelle family, one of his mother’s ladies in waiting.
Leonardo’s verbal punning and compilation of rebuses were thus
not merely idle amusement but had practical application – and, for
him, career-enhancing potential. He would find the French courtly
pretensions of the Medici chivalric jousts and Florentine literati in
the northern Italian city of Milan as well. There the tyrant Ludovico
Sforza, with a consummate narcissism worthy of royalty, commis-
sioned dizzyingly complex, literary conceits and pictorial allegories
that honored him and his rule. Called Il Moro, or “The Moor,” after
“Maurus,” his baptismal second name and dark complexion, Sforza
elicited from Leonardo the sycophantic, only semiclever sentence: “O
moro, io moro se con tua moralit
`
a non mi amori tanto il vivere m’
´
e amoro”(“O
Moro, I shall die if with your goodness you will not love me, so bitter
will my existence be”) – a literary display that employs five punning
variations on “moro” in sixteen words. The artist also contrived visual
puns for Sforza, featuring a mulberry tree (morus in Latin). Of course,
such talents would have been no less appreciated when Leonardo, at
the end of his life, secured employment in Robertet’s milieu, at the
French court of King Francis I.
18. The Young Sculptor
I
n the period just before or after leona rdo finished his
portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, that is, the late 1470s or early
1480s, he may have turned his attention, for a brief time, to sculpture.
A growing consensus of scholars believes that he was probably respon-
sible for the pensive, terracotta Bust of the Young Christ in an Italian
private collection (fig. 50). Although the attribution to Leonardo must
remain tentative, because no other sculpture by him survives for com-
parison and the piece is completely undocumented, certain aspects of
the work point to his hand. The facial type and handling of the hair
suggest that the sculpture comes from someone trained in the Verroc-
chio shop; comparisons can be made to Verrocchio’s terracotta bust
of Christ in a private collection in London and to the physiognomies
of the master’s David (Bargello Museum), Christ and Saint Thomas,
and, especially, in the pronounced asymmetry of the eyes and queerly
bulging eyelids, his Christ of the Crucifixion (c. 1470–75; fig. 51), also
in the Bargello.
Yet, typical of Leonardo, the Young Christ has been invigorated
in a novel way – the head is turned, breaking the usual symmetry
of such busts (as Verrocchio would do in his terracotta portrait of
Giuliano de’ Medici of c. 1478), and Christ’s expression has been
“humanized,” made momentary and unquiet. With eyebrows raised
and eyes lowered, he seems to be intellectually assimilating something
he has just observed or mulling over a response to something that he
has just heard, as if caught up short in his discussion with the elders in
the temple, recounted in the Gospel of Luke (2:46–50). In his personal
reflection on Christ, Leonardo, as one might expect, imagines him
to be similarly thoughtful and questioning, as much the reasoning
philosopher, the Old Testament teacher as Savior or healer.
121
122 The Young Leonardo
Figure 50.
Leonardo da Vinci
(attributed to), Bust
of the Young Christ,c.
1478–80?, terracotta,
Rome. Reproduced by
kind permission of the
Heirs of Luigi Gallandt
and Sotheby’s.
The passage in Luke is the only biblical account of Jesus’ matura-
tion, reporting that, in just three days, the twelve-year-old had remark-
ably increased in “wisdom and stature.” In this respect, Leonardo’s
bust would have served as an appropriate coming-of-age present for a
young man who had reached adulthood (like Renaissance paintings of
Hercules at the Crossroads and the Dream of Scipio, which were intended
to invoke an adolescent’s choice between a life of virtue versus vice,
or duty over pleasure). The work may have had a special meaning for
the artist. Around the time of its execution, he was probably about
to separate from the Verrocchio shop and launch his independent
career.
The portrayal of Christ as an adolescent in a freestanding, sculp-
tural bust is also unusual, but it would not be entirely unexpected for
Leonardo, who pondered over religious subjects incessantly, often rein-
terpreting them, and who earlier, unconventionally, portrayed Saint
John the Baptist at that stage of life. It has not been sufficiently noted
that, despite occasional fits of irreverence, Leonardo was extremely
devout – both God-fearing and God-admiring – as his writings,
throughout his life, make abundantly clear:
I obey thee, O Lord, first because of the love that I ought
reasonably to bear thee; secondly, because thou knowest
how to shorten or prolong the lives of men.
18. The Young Sculptor 123
Figure 51.
Andrea del Verrocchio,
Detail of Head of Christ
in Crucifixion,c.1470–
75, bronze, Florence,
Museo Nazionale del
Bargello. Polo Museale.
Fortune is powerless to help one who does not exert him-
self. That man becomes happy who follows Christ.
Falsehood is so utterly vile that, though it might praise the
great works of God, it offends against his Trinity.
The Lord is the Light of all things –.
The Creator does not make anything superfluous or defec-
tive.
Rejoice that the Creator has ordained the intellect to such
excellence of perception.
These thoughts, most of which he wrote only for himself, are at
odds with Vasari’s assertion that Leonardo’s “heretical frame of mind –
caused him not to adhere to any kind of religion, considering that it
124 The Young Leonardo
was perhaps better to be a philosopher than a Christian.” The only
“heresy” of which we know is the artist’s deep skepticism with regard
to the biblical Deluge, because of his knowledge of the behavior of
natural bodies of water; “how,” he asked, “did the waters of so great
a Flood depart if it is proved they had no power of motion?”
19. The Madonna Litta
F
rom leon a rdo’s p a ssing mention abo ut beginning “the tw o
Virgin Marys” and his copious drawings that often include
sketches for several projects on one sheet, one can fairly presume that
he liked to work on several things at once. This may have been partly
owed to his obsessive nature and been partly a habit he picked up from
Verocchio, who, we know, enjoyed moving back and forth between
concurrent projects. Along with the Benois Madonna, Virgin and Child
with the Cat, Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci,and,possibly,theBust of
Christ, Leonardo probably devoted some time in the very late 1470s,
and more focused attention in the early 1480s, to the conception of a
nursing Madonna in profile, known from a quick sketch on a sheet at
Windsor (c. 1478–79), which shows Mary both full-face and in three-
quarter view (fig. 3); an exquisite, metalpoint study for the Virgin’s
head (c. 1481; fig. 52); and a workshop picture, often attributed to his
follower Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (fig. 53).
The painting, referred to as the Madonna Litta (after the Milanese
collector, Count Antonio Litta, from whom it passed to the State Her-
mitage Museum, St. Petersburg), may have been started by Leonardo
in 1481 and then put aside when he became too involved with the
important commission for anAdoration of the Magi from the monks of S.
Donato a Scopeto. Boltraffio or another shop assistant painted most of
the work, all that is now visible, probably soon after Leonardo arrived
in Milan in 1482. He mentions in the brief “inventory” he made in
that year a “Madonna finished” (probably the Benois Madonna)and
“another, almost finished (maybe an exaggeration or self-deception),
whichisinprofile,”likelytheMadonna Litta. Leonardo habitually
carried paintings, often incomplete, on his travels. In some cases, he
probably hoped to find spare time to finish them. In other cases, such
125
126 The Young Leonardo
Figure 52.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Study for the Head of
the Virgin,c.1481,
metalpoint heightened
with white on pale blue
prepared paper, Paris,
Louvre (2376). Erich
Lessing/Art Resource,
NY.
Figure 53.
Giovanni Antonio
Boltraffio (with
Leonardo da Vinci),
Nursing Virgin with
Goldfinch (Madonna
Litta), c. 1481–84,oil
on panel, St. Peters-
burg, State Hermitage
Museum. Scala/Art
Resource, NY.