Feinberg L.J. The Young Leonardo: Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence
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20. The Adoration of the Magi and Invention of the High Renaissance Style 137
Figure 60.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Adoration of the Magi,
1481,penandink
over leadpoint, Paris,
Louvre (RF 1978). Art
Resource, NY.
passions or amore bestiale; in his dialogue, Phaedrus, Plato likened the
soul to a spirited horse, reined in by horsemen or charioteers. These
figures would become, in the painting, the cavalrymen who seem to
be engaged in mock battle – perhaps Leonardo’s fond recollections of
Lorenzo’s and Giuliano’s lavish jousts of 1469 and 1475, full of pomp
and harmless fury. In portraying pagan antiquity, the artist appears
to have consulted as a model an ancient bronze Head of a Horse in
Lorenzo the Magnificent’s collection. Leonardo’s horses here, and in
subsequent works, have that antique sculpture’s exceptionally thick
neck, unnaturally rounded where it joins the crown of the head, and
138 The Young Leonardo
sometimes the distinctive tuft of hair, tied with a cord, at the front of
the mane.
Interestingly, another preliminary compositional drawing for the
Adoration, now in the Louvre, reveals that, at one point in the design
process, Leonardo considered depicting an ancient, sacrificial proces-
sion in the background (fig. 60). Although difficult to decipher, the
parade of small figures moves toward an altar, where a (bovine?) car-
cass has been deposited and pierced with a lance – a scene possibly
inspired by an antique Roman relief. Correspondingly, the Virgin,
in the drawing as in the painting, serves as a central “altar” at which
Christ is worshipped. Thus, the drawing directly associates the blood
ritual of an ancient society with Christ’s sacrifice. On further consid-
eration, Leonardo elected to revise the background subject, perhaps
feeling that his unprecedented gloss made the theme of sacrifice too
explicit, undermining what should be the generally joyous mood of
an Adoration.
21. The Adoration and
Leonardo’s Military Interests
T
he ultim ate decision to represent sportive combat, rather
than ritual sacrifice, in the Adoration of the Magi (fig. 54) also
may have reflected the artist’s growing military interests. At virtually
the same moment that he conceived the painting, he was devot-
ing much time to the invention of machines of war and defense.
On one page of the Codice Atlantico, he designed a mechanism for
repelling ladders (of attacking soldiers) from a crenellated fortress wall,
not unlike those that surrounded Florence in the Renaissance. On
other sheets, Leonardo contrived huge catapults and colossal crossbows
(fig. 61) – the sprightly, scattered figures that operate those weapons are
similar to the cavalry of the Adoration. For these inventions, he prob-
ably would have studied any designs for war devices left to him by
Martini, reviewed Valturio’s military tracts, and consulted the archi-
tectural treatises of the ancient writer Vitruvius and contemporary
theorist Alberti, which included sections on fortifications and other
defense systems. There is no evidence that any of these ideas ever left
Leonardo’s drawing board. Further, in many instances, what appear to
be plausible machines, conscientiously planned down to the specifica-
tion of bolts and hinges, could not possibly have worked, due to the
intrinsic properties – such as tensile strength and flexibility – of wood
and the other materials involved.
No doubt, Leonardo’s military drawings and research responded to
the unease of Florence’s political situation at the end of the 1470sand
early 1480s. Following the Pazzi conspiracy, the city and surround-
ing areas of Tuscany came to be threatened by the Duke of Calabria,
who commanded the royal armies of Naples. Excommunicated by
Pope Sixtus IV, a Medici foe, Lorenzo the Magnificent found that
his allies, including the dukes of Ferrara and Milan, were reluctant to
139
140 The Young Leonardo
come to his aid. The condemnation had followed an earlier punish-
ment: in 1476, when the Medici contract to control the papal alum
monopoly expired, management of the mines in the town of Tolfa
was turned over to a Roman company. Also in this period, England
had begun to produce its own cloth and was sending less wool to
Florence for processing. Consequently, the Florentine economy had
weakened considerably. Lorenzo may have doubted that he had suf-
ficient resources to field an effective army. An onslaught of plague
further undermined manpower and productivity. When, in the win-
ter of 1479–80, the Duke of Calabria’s soldiers advanced as far as Siena,
where they hunkered down because of inclement weather, Lorenzo
realized drastic action was required. He set off on a dangerous voyage
to negotiate directly with King Ferrante of Naples, arriving in the
southern Italian city around Christmas in 1479.
In Naples, Lorenzo reverted to his usual tactic of spreading
money around liberally – demonstrating his generosity by contributing
dowries for numerous poor girls and buying the freedom of a hun-
dred gallery slaves. He bought Florence’s continued liberty as well,
paying an “indemnity” to the Duke of Calabria and ceding to Naples
some valuable territories in southern Tuscany. During his two and a
half months at the Neapolitan court, the articulate and witty Lorenzo
seems thoroughly to have charmed the king. Although greeted as a
hero upon his return to Florence in 1480, the relief of the populace
was both premature and short-lived; before the year was over, a large
contingent of the Turkish army would threaten the Italian peninsula –
only the first of many threats that would come in waves. In the short
term, the attack of the infidels was a boon to Florence, drawing the
attention and armies of the Duke of Calabria and of the pope away
from Tuscany. However, as many Florentines feared, Lorenzo’s open-
purse diplomacy was not, in the long term, a sound policy, particularly
with respect to much wealthier foreign powers, such as France, which
was always able to enlist a formidable army. Within a dozen years, these
concerns proved to be well founded. Lorenzo’s successor, his politi-
cally inept son Piero, would relinquish the valuable port of Pisa and
other Florentine strongholds to the invading French forces of Charles
VIII in 1494, and an enraged local populace consequently expelled
the Medici.
Perhaps already contemplating his own departure from Florence, in
1481 Leonardo put aside any trepidation he had and focused intensely,
21. The Adoration and Leonardo’s Military Interests 141
Figure 61.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Design for a Colossal
Crossbow,c.1481,
pen and ink, Milan,
Biblioteca Ambrosiana,
Codice Atlantico (149r).
Art Resource, NY.
for a time, on the Adoration of the Magi. Ingeniously, he was able to
unify the epic range of activities – military as well as devotional –
through the geometries he imposed on the dense composition as
well as the comprehensive way in which he patterned it in light and
dark. This was a decisive break from the traditional Florentine method
of painting, which involved adding, coloring, and modeling in light
and shadow each figure or element, one at a time. Leonardo’s novel
142 The Young Leonardo
approach here was to conceive the entire work as he would a large
study in pen, brush, and wash, broadly determining the placement of
the strongest lights and darks, and a few of the medium tones. By this
means, indicative of the comprehensive manner in which his mind
grasped the matter before it, he achieved an unprecedented coherence
in Renaissance painting, in terms of both design and idea, emphasizing
certain figures and symbols, suppressing others – an internal dialogue
in black and white. In this working method, color became almost an
afterthought, an embellishment on a rigorously intellectual scheme.
Only after countless revisions to his composition would Leonardo
introduce, as final touches, “superficially” attractive elements of color
and dashes of spontaneity – just as, only after careful preparations and
contributions by others, had he placed the finishing glint or sparkle
on a Verrocchio-shop picture. This form-over-color approach was
in accord with notions espoused by the Neoplatonists, particularly
Ficino, who wrote in his treatise, “On the Immortality of the Soul,”
that “sight cannot perceive colors unless it assumes [first] the forms
of these colors.” That is, color has no reality independent of a solid
object.
Powerful as the Adoration of the Magi was in its unfinished state,
Leonardo’s failure to consummate it must have displeased not only the
patrons but also his supportive father. Eventually, the S. Donato monks
were able to hire the painter Filippino Lippi, illegitimate son of Fra
Filippo by the nun, Lucrezia Buti, to take over the commission, and
he wisely availed himself of Leonardo’s drawings in creating his own
altarpiece, completed in 1496. No doubt glad to be relieved of the
long moribund project, Leonardo, then living in Milan, would have
gratefully instructed his father to donate his designs to Lippi, who had
earlier executed the altarpiece for the Palazzo della Signoria, when
Leonardo did not follow through on that work.
How Ser Piero, probably mortified, handled the S. Donato situa-
tion is not known. Leonardo, too, must have felt some embarrassment
along with regret, for by that time his rival and former colleague, an
artist of more limited talents, Perugino, had attained a sterling reputa-
tion and important patronage in Rome. He had executed a fresco for
Pope Sixtus IV in Old Saint Peter’s basilica around 1479, and he was at
work, at the pontiff ’s behest, on his monumental fresco, Christ Giving
the Keys to Saint Peter (c. 1480–82), in the Sistine Chapel. Impressive in
its spatial grandeur and narrative clarity, the work was, in truth, hardly
21. The Adoration and Leonardo’s Military Interests 143
more advanced than Leonardo’s juvenile Annunciation with respect to
the individual figures, the bland, facial expressions and stilted poses of
which were all too characteristic of Perugino’s conservative manner.
Nevertheless, although he was one of the younger artists participating
in the decoration, Perugino seems to have been authorized to devise,
with Botticelli, the overall scheme of the room, the most prestigious
project in Christendom at that time.
Meanwhile, Leonardo’s abandoned Adoration languished in the
house of his friend, Giovanni de’ Benci, the brother of Ginevra, and
later passed to Giovanni’s son, Amerigo. The contract for the altar-
piece had stated that the work was to be completed in twenty-four
months, thirty at most – a stipulation that, in hindsight, Leonardo
must have found infinitely amusing, both in light of his work habits
and the S. Donato monks’ resources. Very tight with funds, the monks
had asked Leonardo, contrary to custom, to spend his own money on
materials, rather than giving him an advance, and their last payments
to the artist had been in wine rather than cash.
22. Leonardo and Allegorical Conceits
for the Medici Court
O
n the reverse of a sheet of “old seer” studies for the
Adoration, Leonardo furiously sketched an allegory that
deserves careful attention for what it may disclose about his rela-
tionship with Lorenzo de’ Medici in the early 1480s. The design
and theme, involving personifications of Fortune, Death, Envy, and
Ingratitude – all clearly labeled – would seem to be the artist’s own
inventions (fig. 62). As in most of Leonardo’s “left-handed” narra-
tives, the electric action flows from right to left. At far right, Fortune
(Fortuna), depicted as a woman with long, flowing hair, holds a child,
who blows a trumpet to extinguish the torch of Death (Morte), intent
on setting the branches of a tree on fire. Supporting Death on their
shoulders are the surprised figures of Envy (Invidia) and Ingratitude
(Ingratitudine). Roughly indicated at left, Ignorance (Ignoranza)and
Pride (Superbia), apparently complicit in the attempted arson, watch
in dismay as their plot is foiled.
A recent suggestion that the allegory alludes to the failed assas-
sination attempt on Lorenzo de’ Medici is intriguing. The drawing,
related in style to the highly charged background of the Adoration,
probably dates to the period of 1481–82, some time after Lorenzo
had returned to Florence from his successful diplomatic meeting in
Naples and after almost all of the prime conspirators in the Pazzi
scheme, including Baroncelli, had been caught and executed. The ink
sketch also may have followed the shocking revelation of yet another
plot to murder Lorenzo in 1481. The tree, according to this line of
speculation, would be a laurel, the hardy plant that Lorenzo took as his
personal emblem and that subsequently became a symbol of Medici
endurance and dynasty. When not writing about laurels and other
natural elements in his poetry, Lorenzo often featured Fortuna as a
145
146 The Young Leonardo
Figure 62.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Allegory with Fortune and
Death,c.1481,metal-
point, pen and ink with
wash on pink prepared
paper, London, British
Museum (1886-6-9-42).
C
The Trustees of the
British Museum/Art
Resource, NY.
principal theme. Therefore, Leonardo may have created the drawing
to demonstrate his loyalty and to curry favor with the beleaguered
Lorenzo, for whom he would have provided the captions (although
written in reverse, easily read), a most atypical concession on the artist’s
part.
It is perhaps of some significance that the extinguished-flame motif
recollects and transforms the theme that Sandro Botticelli employed
six years earlier in his standard for Giuliano’s joust. In contriving the
allegory, Leonardo may have felt that he was competing for attention
with Botticelli, who, by that time, had probably already begun to con-
sult with Medici court literati about the content of his mythological
paintings of Primavera (Spring) and Pallas and the Centaur, commis-
sioned by Lorenzo’s second cousin, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco (both
pictures now in the Uffizi). In Leonardo’s mind, the award to Botti-
celli of the contracts for those major works may have signaled that his
colleague was solidifying his position as the Medici family’s painter of
choice. The allegories were to serve as decorative centerpieces for the
household the patron would soon establish with a new wife.
More disconcerting still for Leonardo would have been the real-
ization that Botticelli, a tanner’s son, was the favored artist for pictures