Feinberg L.J. The Young Leonardo: Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence
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22. Leonardo and Allegorical Conceits for the Medici Court 147
Figure 63.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies of Figures of
Fortune and Fame, Shields
around a Flaming Tree
Stump,c.1481,penand
ink with wash, London,
British Museum (1895-
9-15-482).
C
The
Trustees of the British
Museum/Art Resource,
NY.
of a highly intellectual and philosophical nature, such as the Primavera,
layered with classical allusions and oblique marital references that the
Neoplatonists of the court had provided. The general perception in
Florence may have been that Botticelli was the best painter for erudite,
classical subjects and Leonardo for scenes and details of natural beauty.
As we previously noted, Verrocchio and his shop hardly ever tackled
or developed much of a reputation for rendering antique subjects.
Writing around 1488, one proud citizen of Florence, Ugolino Verino,
compares Botticelli to the ancient Greek painter Apelles, known for
his complex allegories, and Leonardo to the antique master Zeuxis,
remembered for painting on a wall a bunch of grapes so lifelike that
birds pecked at them. If this was the common view of the two artists,
then Leonardo must have been further demoralized when he saw the
148 The Young Leonardo
finished Primavera, in which Botticelli showcased his skills in landscape
and still-life, painting no fewer than thirty distinct species of plants
and flowers.
Botticelli’s influence again proved inescapable when, around the
same time, Leonardo struggled to devise another allegory, perhaps
related to his Fortune and Death sheet. On a drawing in the British
Museum (fig. 63), marked by fits and starts, he developed a scenario
featuring Fame and Fortune. As always, his “thinking on paper” spilled
from right to left and from bottom to top. He began at lower right
with the figure of Fortune, precariously balanced on toe-point, an
unpredictable, shifting wind blowing her long hair forward and the
gown from her chest. With what appears to be a round buckler,
she extinguishes a fire that blazed through a pile of shields, war tro-
phies assembled around a tree stump. Inspecting what he had drawn,
Leonardo must have realized that the viewer would not easily grasp the
meaning of the flaming shields – they probably stood for military fame
– and that the conceit of the dropped dress was less than inspiring.
Commencing again at top right, he quickly sketched Fortune in
stylus and then started to retrace his lines in pen and ink. He advanced
only as far as the head and shoulders when he suddenly had a minor
inspiration (or misgiving) and decided to represent a personification
of Fame, at left. Fame, he wisely concluded, albeit unoriginal, would
be a more elegant surrogate for a smoking mound of battle souvenirs.
Once committed to the figure of Fame, he let his pen and brush fly
with abandon, realizing her in a painterly flourish of ink washes. In
the process, Leonardo cannibalized the toe-point pose of (the lower)
Fortune. Thus, if he wished to avoid monotony, he would have needed
to find a different way to complete the figure he had begun at upper
right. For whatever reason, he did not address the issue, and his ideas
seem to have progressed no further. Unfortunately, he appears never
to have translated into paint his glorious figure of Fame, which recalls
certain Verrocchio angels and, more strongly, in pose and propulsion,
those of Botticelli – a grudging tribute on Leonardo’s part. In their
sweeping movements, the Fame and Fortune of the drawing also
recollect the mingling women who enliven the background of his
Adoration of the Magi.
If Leonardo’s first allegory of Fortune referred to Lorenzo, then
one logically may wonder whether the British Museum drawing was
intended to honor his brother, Giuliano, because the only measure of
22. Leonardo and Allegorical Conceits for the Medici Court 149
fame the young man had achieved, before Fortune snuffed out his life,
was based on his military prowess or, better to say, “aptitude.” His coat-
of-arms (impresa)wasabroncone, a tree stump, with flames shooting
out from where the branches had been cut off. Vasari describes it,
in one place, as a troncon tagliato, or severed trunk. Discernable on
Leonardo’s crested, trophy shields are a rampant-lion device and what
might be a fleur-de-lys. Neither motif was specifically associated with
Giuliano, but both were symbols of Florence – the lion a variation
on the marzocco, the heraldic, leonine emblem of the city. Although
Leonardo would later invent his own, imaginative allegorical language,
at this point in his career, he was in no position to improvise extensively
on established Medici imagery.
23. Early Ideas for the Last Supper
W
hile conceiving the ill-fated ADORATION OF THE MAGI,
Leonardo, who always played out myriad variations on
an idea or theme, also created numerous, vibrant drawings for an
Adoration of the Shepherds, Nativity,andVirgin of Humility (a northern
European convention in which Mary and the Infant Christ are shown
seated on the ground) – that is, the whole range of traditional, artistic
subjects that dealt with the first days after the Incarnation (fig. 64).
The fluidity of his mind was such that the subjects probably evolved
with the movement of his pen. This free flow of thought extended
as well to the disposition of Saint Joseph, who in some studies has
lost the sweet-natured puzzlement one usually sees in Renaissance
portrayals, appearing, instead, severe and admonitory. In contrast, on
other sheets, Leonardo joyfully imagined the attendant angels as the
most nimble and daring of aerial acts and the Christ Child and Saint
John as almost acrobatically inclined.
Very comparable squirming babies, no doubt rendered at approx-
imately the same time, appear in a remarkable series of studies by
Leonardo representing the Virgin and Christ Child with St. John the
Baptist, on a sheet now preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York (fig. 65). Touchingly, he has carefully observed and recorded
the movements of an infant who wishes to get off his back – struggling
mightily with hands and feet flailing, or else reaching up to his mother
in the hope that she will lift him. Although Leonardo appears never to
have translated into paint any of these lively figural groups, he would
revisit them years later when devising his majestic altarpiece known as
the Virgin of the Rocks (Louvre) and a long-lost picture of the mythical
Leda and the Swan, a mortal woman with the lascivious god Jupiter, in
avian disguise, surrounded by their newly hatched brood.
151
152 The Young Leonardo
Figure 64.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Study for an Adoration of
the Christ Child,c.1481,
pen and ink, Venice,
Gallerie dell’ Accademia
(256). Cameraphoto
Arte, Venice/Art
Resource, NY.
The seeds of another major painting were also sown among
Leonardo’s studies for the Adoration of the Magi – two spirited, pen-
and-ink sketches (c. 1481)foraLast Supper accompany Adoration draw-
ings on a sheet preserved in the Louvre (fig. 66). Presumably made
without a commission for a painting in hand or in mind, these Last
Supper studies, together with those for the Adoration, can be regarded
almost as a pictorial catalogue of various responses to divine reve-
lation or pronouncement. Imprints of a brief and spontaneous, cre-
ative ferment, the drawings would nevertheless endure in use, serving
Leonardo as stimuli or models for decades. At bottom left, he por-
trays an uncharacteristically agitated Christ, finger pointing and hand
on heart, announcing at the Last Supper that one of the apostles will
betray him. Just above, the apostle John, devastated by the news, buries
his face in his hands. At right, a lively group of discussants sits around a
table, prefiguring the dynamic interaction of the apostles in Leonardo’s
subsequent Last Supper designs and painting.
The artist’s decision to represent this most dramatic moment was
not, contrary to much that has been written, an innovation on his part.
23. Early Ideas for the Last Supper 153
Figure 65.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Designs for an Adoration
of the Christ Child,c.
1481–82,metalpoint
with pen and ink on
pink prepared paper,
New York, Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art
(17.142.1). Image copy-
right
C
Metropolitan
Museum of Art/Art
Resource, NY.
Again, Leonardo followed Florentine precedent, notably the Last Sup-
pers of Andrea del Castagno (1445–50) and Domenico Ghirlandaio
(1480), created for the refectories of Sant’ Apollonio and Ognissanti,
respectively. Indeed, Ghirlandaio’s recently completed picture may
have been the catalyst for Leonardo’s flickering thoughts on the sub-
ject. However, he chose to make the actors’ gestures more emphatic
and obvious than those of Ghirlandaio: as Leonardo would later advise,
“figures must be done in such a way that the spectators are able with
ease to recognize through their attitudes the thoughts of their minds.”
Ultimately, when he painted his famous Last Supper (c. 1495–97)for
the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, he chose not to
show Christ in the act of speaking but in the immediate aftermath,
just as Castagno and Ghirlandaio had done in their frescoes. Further-
more, like his predecessors, Leonardo portrayed Saint John in his early
154 The Young Leonardo
Figure 66.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies of Four Male
Figures, Half-Length
Studies of Christ and St.
John, Studies of Figures in
Conversation at a Table,c.
1481, pen and ink over
leadpoint, Paris, Louvre
(2258). R
´
eunion des
Mus
´
ees Nationaux/Art
Resource, NY.
Louvre drawing and in later, preliminary studies for the mural, as over-
come by emotion and collapsed on the table (but not in the painting
itself, where John swoons to the left). John’s presence in the mural,
never questioned until recently (in popular literature), was required
not only by scripture but also by Leonardo’s need for dramatic, pic-
torial contrast, for the telling foil the wilting saint makes to the figure
of Christ, a calm axis of resolve.
By the time he worked on the Milan painting, Leonardo, through
experience and better-honed powers of observation, had learned a
good deal more about human anatomy, psychology, and physiological
reactions. Now almost invisible in the poorly preserved mural, but
23. Early Ideas for the Last Supper 155
Figure 67.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Head of Judas,
c. 1493–95,red
chalk on red-ochre
prepared paper, Windsor
Castle, Royal Library
(12547). The Royal
Collection
C
2010
Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth II.
seen clearly in his preparatory drawings (figs. 67 and 68), is the subtle
range of emotions he could capture, including his observations of vol-
untary and involuntary responses: the bulge of an artery in the neck
or vein in the forehead of the traitor Judas, trying unsuccessfully to
conceal his anxiety; the prominent Adam’s apple of James the Greater,
conspicuously rising with his emotion; the faces of vulnerability and
of denial, both conscious and unconscious. In shock, Matthew absent-
mindedly and pathetically busies himself with a fish on a plate; the
hands of some apostles pointlessly clutch their garments or hang in
desperation. Barely legible in the painting (more so in early repro-
ductive prints) is the network of nervously crossed feet beneath the
table.
Leonardo’s perceptive and keen focus on veins and arteries in the
preliminary drawings for the Last Supper is likely owed in part to his
familiarity with the writings of Aristotle, who was one of the first
to advance a psychophysical theory of emotions, connecting them
to cardiovascular manifestations. For the Greek philosopher, unaware
of the functions of the central nervous system, the brain had no
156 The Young Leonardo
Figure 68.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies for the Last
Supper,c.1493–95,red
chalk, Venice, Gallerie
dell’Accademia (254).
Alinari/Art Resource,
NY.
psychological significance; he believed that the heart was the center of
the soul and of feelings, engendered by the warm blood that collected
there. He and his cardio-centric followers thought that blood, literally,
simmered in that organ when a person became angry. This became
a commonly held notion in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; even
the folksy little Fior di virt
`
u quoted Aristotle in reporting that anger
“is a disturbance of the soul caused by a vengeful afflux of blood to
the heart.” According to similar reasoning, when an individual was
afraid or surprised, the warm fluid would “flee” from the brain and
the cooler, upper parts of the body to the heart, where it could induce
palpitations.
Although Leonardo knew of the nervous system and preferred to
locate the soul in the brain, he nevertheless concurred with Aristotle’s
estimation of the heart as the center for the blood and its “vital spirits.”
Thus, in rendering the engorged veins in the heads of the upset
apostles, Leonardo astutely noted the sudden movement of blood –
he simply had its direction incorrect. Such misconceptions would also
undermine the validity of his work when he attempted to “map out”
the vascular system in his anatomical drawings of that period. He
regarded it as an inverted branching tree, with sanguinary flow mainly