Feinberg L.J. The Young Leonardo: Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence
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25. Saint Jerome 167
such like beasts – turning straight from nature to his art,
began to draw on the rocks the movements of the goats
which he was tending, and so began to draw the figures
of all the animals which were to be found in the country,
in such a way that after much study he not only surpassed
the masters of his own time but all those of many pre-
ceding centuries. After him art again declined, because all
were imitating paintings already done; and so for centuries
it continued to decline until such time as Tommaso the
Florentine, nicknamed Masaccio, showed by perfection of
his work how those who took as their standard anything
other than nature, the supreme guide of all the masters,
were wearying themselves in vain. Similarly I would say
about these mathematical subjects [contemporary paint-
ings heavily reliant on mathematical ratios and perspective
constructions] that those who study only the authorities
and not the works of nature are, in art, the grandsons and
not the sons of nature, which is the supreme guide of the
good authorities.
Leonardo’s views appear to have been influential, because the three
watershed periods of art that he defines exactly coincide with those
later identified by Vasari in his Lives of the Artists. There Giotto’s
work replaced the maniera greca of Byzantine-influenced, Italian art;
the painter Masaccio “swept away” the manner of Giotto (Ghiberti is
seen as the pivotal figure in sculpture); and Leonardo is saluted as the
creator of the “modern” style.
Interestingly, the specific touchstone for Leonardo’s Saint Jerome
was not, it seems, a renowned fresco or major altarpiece but, perhaps,
a small, illuminated initial by Francesco d’Antonio del Cherico on a
page in a mid-fifteenth-century manuscript version of Jerome’s Letters
(Epistulae) in the Medici collection. The illuminator presented the
saint, within the letter “D,” in much the same pose and before the
customary, rocky outcropping. Only the position of the right leg and
the hairstyle of the saint have been altered in Leonardo’s painting; he
was given the typical, bald head of Verrocchio’s St. Jerome. Leonardo’s
paraphrase would have flattered Lorenzo, the current owner of the
manuscript (purchased by his father, Piero), in acknowledging the
beauty and authority of the treasured work.
168 The Young Leonardo
Figure 72.
Workshop Assistant,
after Leonardo da
Vinci, Study of a Studio
Model for Saint Jerome,
c. 1480–82?, silverpoint,
heightened with white,
on purple-gray prepared
paper, Windsor Castle,
Royal Library (12571).
The Royal Collection
C
2010 Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth II.
Leonardo’s probing exploration of Jerome’s muscle and bone
structures reveal his growing interest in human anatomy and causes
one to suspect that, by this time, he had had the opportunity to exam-
ine cadavers – perhaps some dissected by the brothers Pollaiuolo. It is
unlikely that he performed the dissection of a corpse, himself, until
two decades later, after he returned to Florence from Milan in the
early sixteenth century, and conducted an autopsy on a gentleman
said to have died a centenarian. Moreover, by imitating another of the
Pollaiuloli’s famed workshop practices, Leonardo was able to achieve
the very volumetric, sculptural quality of his figure of Jerome. That is,
like the brothers, he drew a posed studio model from both front and
back to understand better, one might say “stereometrically,” the struc-
ture of the body and its orientation in space. We know this because
there exists a copy after a lost drawing by Leonardo (fig. 72)that
shows his model for Jerome from behind, in basically the same pose
as the painted saint except for the turn of the head. In Renaissance
studio practice, the model used a pole to help him keep his left arm
raised for long periods. Were it not for the right-handed slant of the
hatching, the study, by an unidentified Leonardo assistant, could easily
25. Saint Jerome 169
be mistaken for the master’s – the drawing, otherwise, so scrupulously
follows the style of original.
Although Jerome’s facial type recalls Verrocchio-school depictions
of the saint, and the Pollaiuoli no doubt provided inspiration and mod-
els, Leonardo’s penitent recalls most strongly, in spirit, the sculptures
of Donatello. Above all, the Jerome finds its ancestry in Donatello’s
cadaverous Saint Mary Magdalene (now in the Museum of the Duomo,
Florence), a wooden sculpture of sublimely simulated decay. Leonardo
similarly portrays spiritual release through denial of the flesh – fasting
and abstinence – and, following Donatello, presents the saint as if he
had been weathered by elemental forces, the same forces responsible
for the ravaged landscape.
26. First Thoughts for the Virgin of
the Rocks and the Invention of
the Mary Magdalene-Courtesan Genre
A
lthough the painting was never fully realized, saint
Jerome’s densely compact pose attained an important status
in Leonardo’s mind. The artist continued to improvise on the gesture
in several future works, particularly his two versions of the Virgin of
the Rocks, where it evolved (as can be easily traced in his drawings;
see figs. 65 and 73) into the inclusive, sheltering pose of Mary and
where Leonardo’s mysterious, geological formations reappeared as well
(fig. 74). Infrared-light examination of the second Virgin of the Rocks
(now in the National Gallery, London) reveals some relevant chalk or
charcoal drawing on the panel, beneath the paint layers; these outlines
indicate that, before picking up his brush, Leonardo briefly considered
a pose for Mary that was very close to Jerome’s.
Recycled from the Saint Jerome, the tall, cavernous stone formations
in the Virgin of the Rocks would have taken on new meanings in their
new context – metaphorical allusions, traditionally associated with
Mary, from the biblical Song of Songs (2:14):
My dove in the cleft of the rock, in the cavities of walls,
reveal your countenance to me.
One suspects that the painting may also reflect, in its crepuscular
moment, seemingly haunted by the vestiges of rain clouds, other lines
from that passage:
for lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The
flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come –
until the day break and the shadows flee away, turn my
beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the
mountains –. (2:11–12 and 17)
171
172 The Young Leonardo
Figure 73.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Detail of Sheet of Sketches
with a Nativity,c.1481–
82, metalpoint with pen
and ink on pale blue
prepared paper, Windsor
Castle, Royal Library
(12560). The Royal
Collection
C
2010
Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth II.
In the spirit of these verses, Leonardo’s holy figures miraculously
materialize in quiet isolation, as if the first life on earth, with the
secret, sudden existence of lilies and deer. This is the time of day and
climate that the artist recommended in his Treatise on Painting,saying
in one place that “it is better to make [landscapes] when the sun is
covered by clouds, for then the trees are lighted up by the general light
of the sky and the general shadows of the earth”; and in another “you
should make your portrait at the hour of the fall of the evening when
it is cloudy or misty, for the light is then perfect.” In the Mona Lisa,
this worked to sympathetic effect. In its muted twilight, the brooding
26. First Thoughts for the Virgin of the Rocks 173
Figure 74.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Virgin of the Rocks,
1483–c. 1486,oilon
panel, Paris, Louvre.
R
´
eunion des Mus
´
ees
Nationaux/Art
Resource, NY.
Virgin of the Rocks harks back, beyond the Saint Jerome, to Filippo
Lippi’s strange and obscure Adoration for the old Cosimo (fig. 2).
Not long before leaving Florence for Milan, Leonardo seems to
have begun to plan a painting of yet another single saint, a half-length
174 The Young Leonardo
portrayal of Mary Magdalene. Given his difficulties with complet-
ing time-bound, contractual commissions, one wonders whether he
began to consider producing such small pictures on speculation. This
was not a common practice in Florence at that time, but he was con-
cerned about an income: as we previously noted, Ser Piero had cut
off Leonardo’s “allowance” by 1480. He would not receive an inheri-
tance for some twenty-seven years – only after the death of his uncle
Francesco in 1507 and the resolution of an acrimonious lawsuit against
his seven half-brothers over the estate. A notary half-brother managed
to prevent Leonardo from receiving anything from his father, who died
intestate in 1504, but failed to keep the artist from inheriting a farm
and money from his uncle. That a possibly cash-strapped Leonardo
would consider such a speculative sales strategy is corroborated by
remarks he made later in a manuscript:
But see now the foolish folk! They have not the sense
to keep by them some specimens of their good work so
that they may say, “this is at a high price, and that is at a
moderate price and that is quite cheap,” and so show that
they have work at all prices.
Probably around 1481–82, Leonardo made two rapid, pen-and-ink
sketches (on a sheet now preserved in the Courtauld Institute Gallery,
London) of the Magdalene holding or opening a jar of unguent –
her traditional attribute, given that the Bible relates that she, among
Christ’s closest Galilean followers, anointed his feet with oil (fig. 75).
Although half-length pictures of her would become common
throughout Italy in the sixteenth century, in the Quattrocento such
representations were rare, confined almost exclusively to multipaneled
triptychs or polyptychs in which she is only one of several holy figures.
In fact, Leonardo’s idea, to present her in an independent, half-length,
“portrait” format, may be without precedent.
Although his studies are summary, one can discern that he wished
to show the Magdalene not as a haggard penitent, as Donatello had
done, but as the wealthy, promiscuous young woman turned prosti-
tute, described in the Golden Legend. His Mary wears sumptuous layers
of clothes, her hair is tousled, locks straying, and she grasps what looks
to be an elaborate and expensive jar. Her kind expression, barely indi-
cated, is that of the dulcis amica dei, the “sweet friend of God,” as the
amorously inclined Petrarch described her. Undoubtedly, the affluent
26. First Thoughts for the Virgin of the Rocks 175
Figure 75.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Studies of Saint Mary
Magdalene,c.1481–82,
pen and ink, London,
Courtauld Institute
Gallery. The Samuel
Courtauld Trust, The
Courtauld Gallery,
London.
classes that purchased pictures, almost continuously expanding in
Florence throughout the Renaissance, would have more easily iden-
tified with this cordial, splendidly garbed Magdalene type.
The metamorphosis of Mary Magdalene from wretched hag to
beautiful companion of the Lord could only have occurred in the
time and place that it did. From the high-minded deliberations of the
Florentine Neoplatonists over the concepts of love and ideal pulchri-
tude emerged a veritable celebration of female beauty – vanquishing
centuries of medieval misogyny, during which a lady’s attractiveness
was suspiciously regarded as a lustful trap, an instrument of the devil.
176 The Young Leonardo
Ficino’s elevated notions of amore platonico and of corporeal beauty as
a reflection of divinity filtered down into popular culture and, by the
beginning of the next century, engendered a publishing efflorescence
of love poems and sonnets. The nostalgia for chivalry, particularly
strong in the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent, also helped this cult
of feminine beauty to thrive.
Consequently, there came to be a change of emphasis in the
Magdalene’s story; where once she had been seen primarily as a victim
of sin, visibly stigmatized, now her spiritual journey and awakening
were regarded as life affirming and her inner beauty made mani-
fest. In 1528, the new, positive view and treatment of women was
authoritatively codified in Baldessare Castiglione’s famous manual of
court manners and decorum, The Book of the Courtier, an imaginary
conversation between Lorenzo de’ Medici’s youngest son, Giuliano,
and other magnanimous gentlemen. Castiglione portrays Giuliano as
a passionate champion of women, putting words into his mouth that
have a curiously modern ring:
– tell me, why has it not been established that a dissolute
life is quite as disgraceful in men as it is in women? – if you
will acknowledge the truth, you surely know that of our
own authority we men have arrogated ourselves a license,
whereby we insist that in us the same sins are most trivial
and sometimes deserve praise which in women cannot be
sufficiently punished, unless by a shameful death, or at least
perpetual infamy.
It must remain an open question as to whether Leonardo was respond-
ing in his seemly conception of the Magdalene only to such larger
cultural influences or whether the sin and sexual disgrace of his mother
also affected his views.
Leonardo appears to have waited until he returned to Florence
from Milan in 1500 before developing his “lovely Magdalene” con-
cept further. That year was a Jubilee or Holy Year (Anno Santo), which
meant the Church offered special opportunity for penance: the con-
trite could receive exceptional indulgence, fully cleansing them of sin.
In this atmosphere of atonement, there were external, often very pub-
lic displays of remorse, and famous penitents, such as the Magdalene,
were particularly recalled and revered. During this period, Leonardo
may well have shared his designs (some much more advanced than the