Feinberg L.J. The Young Leonardo: Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence
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19. The Madonna Litta 127
as the Mona Lisa, which he lugged to France and, probably, to Rome,
he apparently used the works as “display samples,” to demonstrate his
abilities to prospective clients.
Over the years, Leonardo scholars have fiercely debated whether
the Madonna Litta should be assigned to the master or his pupil. How-
ever, the uninspired essays in landscape and costume, as well as the
evenly “licked” finish of the picture, surely betray an inferior hand.
Whereas Leonardo’s shadows always appear to be gently wafted over
the surfaces of flesh and fabric, here they are regularized and have the
aspect of a stain. Despite this extensive intervention of an assistant, the
general design of the picture and, especially, the complicated, twisting
pose of the Christ Child must be attributed to the master. Leonardo
also would have stipulated the inclusion of the symbolic goldfinch,
cozily and ominously tucked into the breach between mother and
child.
20. The Adoration of the Magi
and Invention of the
High Renaissance Style
P
roba bly tha nks to his father once ag ain , leonardo
obtained a commission in 1481 to paint an Adoration of the
Magi for the monastic church of S. Donato a Scopeto, outside of
Florence (fig. 54). Certainly, the odd financial circumstances of the
project point to Ser Piero’s notarial involvement; a saddle manufac-
turer bequeathed to S. Donato an endowment for a painting for the
high altar and at the same time left a dowry for his granddaugh-
ter. The scrupulous Ser Piero would have foolishly staked his good
name and standing, as the official notary of the patrons, in rec-
ommending his brilliant but unreliable son for the job. Ser Piero’s
tax records may be relevant. These indicate that he had moved
with a new (fourth) wife to a house on the via Ghibellina and
had stopped supporting Leonardo financially by 1480 – a reason-
able decision in light of Leonardo’s age (twenty-seven or twenty-
eight) and the fact that Ser Piero had two other legitimate children
to look after. Almost predictably, Leonardo’s work on the monu-
mental panel was left incomplete; he never progressed beyond the
underpaint stage. Nevertheless, even in its unfinished state, the pic-
ture must be considered a conceptual masterpiece, and the many
extant studies for the work reveal the enormous amount of energy –
in concentrated and original thought – that Leonardo devoted to the
composition.
Representing both the beginning and epitome of the High Renais-
sance style in Florence, the picture is painstakingly composed so that
every element – every figure, every gesture, and every symbol – con-
tributes dynamically to the meaning of the work. Leonardo believed
that, as in nature, form must perfectly follow function: style should
be exactly appropriate to content, no actor and no action unnecessary
129
130 The Young Leonardo
or redundant, each gesture the most compelling manifestation of an
emotion. He once wrote:
Every smallest detail has a function and must be rigor-
ously explained in functional terms that are in accord with
nature as opposed to the postulates of the ancients. Human
ingenuity – will never discover any inventions more
beautiful, more appropriate or more direct than nature,
because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is
superfluous.
Just as the Munich and Benois Madonnas concerned the themes
of sight and insight, his carefully conceived Adoration of the Magi is
spatially organized according to the perceptions of the actors and their
degree of enlightenment. The three Magi, who recognize the infant
as the Savior, form a compact triangle with the Virgin and Child
on the surface, or picture plane, of the painting. Meanwhile, those
actors that have an instinctive but unspecified awareness of the child’s
divinity create a semicircle, excavating a shallow space, around the
triangle. Some appear disoriented; others seem blindly to gaze, eyes
shielded, into a bright light. The heroic figures at each corner of the
composition search for answers to explain this mysterious spiritual
presence: the older man or seer at far left, in deep contemplation,
looks within – as those around him seek his wisdom; his counterpart,
the young man at right, possessing less knowledge of the world, looks
without – beyond even the universe of the picture.
To the right of center, a man recoils, hand raised, as a young
tree miraculously springs from age-old stone, a double allusion to the
wooden cross on Golgotha and the new spiritual life on earth under
Christ, rooted in the Old Testament bedrock of the Jews. Removed
from the sacred knowledge and geometry of the lower half of the
composition, the small, combative, background figures coexist within
a discrete and mathematically generated, perspective space, unobser-
vant and wholly ignorant of the historical event before them. The
themes to which Leonardo alluded in his early Madonnas now serve,
in a brilliant summation, to integrate the entire structure and narrative
of the work.
When such a lucid articulation and equilibrium are attained in a
pictorial scheme, a painting is sometimes said to be “classical.” That is,
the work recalls, in a general sense, the consummately calm sculptures
of fifth-century (b.c.) Athens, such as Myron’s Discus Thrower or the
20. The Adoration of the Magi and Invention of the High Renaissance Style 131
Figure 54.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Adoration of the Magi,
1481, oil on panel, for
S. Donato a Scopeto,
now Florence, Uffizi.
Alinari/Art Resource,
NY.
metope reliefs of the Parthenon, in which difficult poses effortlessly
find balance and opposing forces are resolved or suavely contained
within a rational, geometric framework. However, Leonardo’s classi-
cism is not a recollection but a parallel development – the result of
similar intentions rather than imitation. For during his early years in
Florence, his access to the vocabulary of antique art, like his access
to Greek and Latin, was extremely limited. Whereas Lorenzo the
Magnificent possessed a respectable collection of ancient coins and
carved gems, he apparently had only about half a dozen significant
antique sculptures. These works – the mythological figures of Marsyas
and Priapus,aBoy with a Bird, marble busts of the Roman emper-
ors Agrippa and Augustus, and a bronze Head of a Horse –werefar
different in spirit from “classical” fifth-century Greek sculpture and
132 The Young Leonardo
Figure 55.
Detail of Figures
to the Right of the
Virgin and Child in
Adoration of the Magi,
fig. 54. Erich Lessing/
Art Resource, NY.
provided, at any rate, only sparse and fragmentary examples for study.
The serene poise and restrained energy of the ancient Greek master-
pieces of Myron, Phidias, or Polykleitos, which Leonardo’s art evokes,
were completely unknown to him.
Although not obvious on first inspection, Leonardo’s point of
departure for the Adoration was once again the Pollaiuoli Shooting of
Saint Sebastian (fig. 23). From that picture, he derived the notion of
dividing the painting into two realms of action: a triangle of figures in
the foreground bounded by a dark semicircle and a distant panorama
of horsemen linked, in their linear dispersal, to the horizon. Following
the Pollaiuoli, Leonardo placed a tree at center, surrounded by figures
that mirror one another’s poses (a much-renowned feature of the
brothers’ picture), with grand classical ruins in the left distance, and a
rocky outcropping in the background at right. However, as we have
seen, he elaborated extensively on this framework, infusing each figure
with an individual personality and motivation and creating an entirely
new, compositional and symbolic cohesiveness.
20. The Adoration of the Magi and Invention of the High Renaissance Style 133
Figure 56.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies for the Adoration
of the Magi, 1481,pen
and ink, Paris, Bib-
lioth
`
eque de l’Ecole
Nationale Sup
´
erieure
desBeaux-Arts(424).
Photo: Jean-Michel
Lapelezie.
The profound thought that Leonardo devoted to each actor is evi-
dent not only in the two standing “prophets,” as they are sometimes
called, on either side of the composition, but even in the more sum-
marily realized figures of the inner circle. To the immediate right of
the Christ Child, a trio of heads sensitively conveys a spectrum of emo-
tions: quizzical irritation, fearfulness, and hesitant curiosity (fig. 55).
Opposite them, a befuddled Saint Joseph cautiously peers from behind
a rock over Mary’s (proper) right shoulder. He holds the lid to the
jar given to Christ by the elder magus, Melchior, who kneels directly
below, touching his face to the ground, as if weighted down, humbled,
by his full knowledge of the child’s identity. Behind Joseph, two beau-
tiful, vacuous youths who have just ridden in from the background
(sitting, indecorously, in intimate tandem on their horse) inquire cav-
alierly about the foreground gathering; the man whom they consult
points to the miraculous, robust tree that grows from solid rock. The
three young men closest to the tree appear celebratory: the youth
on the right indicates, with finger raised heavenward, that the newly
sprouted tree is the work of God; beside him, another man places his
cupped hands before the tree in a gesture denoting worship as much
as surprise; the youth farthest to the left, stationed behind the Virgin
134 The Young Leonardo
Figure 57.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Figure Studies for the
Adoration of the Magi,
1481,penandink,
Cologne, Wallraf-
Richartz Museum,
Graphische Sammlung,
no. Z 2003. Collection
of Wallraf-Richartz
Museum, Rheinisches
Bildarchiv K
¨
oln.
and Child and directly in front of the distant palm, an ancient symbol
of victory over death or of resurrection, looks knowingly toward the
viewer.
Leonardo’s many preliminary studies in pen and ink reveal how
much he fretted over the expressions and gestures of all these figures.
In sheets preserved in Paris and London, one can see how carefully he
considered the attitude of the old “prophet” at left. On the Paris sheet
(fig. 56), he drew the brooding figure, first as a young man both with
and without a staff. He tried both possibilities again in his series of
studies in London, arriving at a figure that approximates the old seer
of the painting in gravity of stature and thought. Interspersed among
20. The Adoration of the Magi and Invention of the High Renaissance Style 135
Figure 58.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies of Hands for the
Adoration of the Magi,
1481,metalpoint,
Windsor Castle, Royal
Library (12616). The
Royal Collection
C
2010 Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth II.
these sketches are his ideas for numerous other witnesses, generally
more animated and upright than those he would choose to populate
the foreground of the Uffizi picture – presumably deciding in the end
that if the ancillary figures were too busy and prominent, they might
distract from the principal drama. For those figures in the painting
that bow and genuflect in wonder before the Holy Family, Leonardo
looked to the varied studies he had made on two sheets now preserved
in Cologne and the Louvre (fig. 57). The extensive repertoire of
poses on these pages affords us a tantalizing glimpse of the obsequious
choreography of Renaissance court manners. Leonardo also created
a number of studies of elegantly expressive hands for the Adoration
on a double-sided sheet at Windsor Castle (fig. 58). He would review
these and make many more “talking-hand” drawings when, more than
a dozen years later, he composed his Last Supper for Santa Maria delle
Grazie in Milan. His fluency in the language of hands was, perhaps,
136 The Young Leonardo
Figure 59.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Perspective Study for Back-
ground of the Adoration of
the Magi, 1481,metal-
point, pen and ink with
wash, Florence, Uffizi
(436E). Alinari/Art
Resource, NY.
due in part to his scrutiny of the gestures of the deaf, a practice he
recommended to other artists in his Treatise on Painting.
As we have observed, Leonardo conceived the distant background
figures of the Adoration of the Magi as inhabitants of an independent
realm, with its own internal perspective or spatial logic and velocity
of activity. To this end, he actually created a large, independent, com-
positional study for the background scene, rendered with a fastidious
linear grid, which is still extant and in the Uffizi’s collection (fig. 59).
Untouched by Christ’s grace and subject to mundane, physical laws,
the figures of this separate, ancient world move about impulsively and
frantically, compelled by their bestial nature – running, clashing, nois-
ily blowing horns of alarm. As in the painting, they embody centuries
past of spasmodic, pointless conflict. The stairs of their temple lead
nowhere. Leonardo here seems to have improvised and expanded on
the traditional ruins motif in Italian paintings of the Adoration and
Nativity, in which the remnants of ancient buildings allude to the Old
Dispensation of the Jews, on which Christ will build his church. This
architectural symbolism was probably inspired by the biblical refer-
ence, in Isaiah (9:10), to the coming of the messiah: “the bricks have
fallen, but we will build with dressed stones.”
A few of the actors in Leonardo’s drawing try, unsuccessfully, to
control frightened horses, a Platonic metaphor for restraint of the