Feinberg L.J. The Young Leonardo: Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence
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7. The Bust of a Warrior and
Leonardo’s Creative Method
T
he y oung painter’s consuming interest in nat ure and
zoomorphic forms manifested itself in another drawing from
thesameperiodastheView of the Arno, one dependent on Verroc-
chio workshop productions – his fearsome Bust of a Warrior in Profile
(fig. 10), incongruously scratched in the delicate medium of met-
alpoint. This study, preserved in the British Museum, is based on
Verrocchio’s lost, fanciful profile relief of the ancient Persian king,
Darius, crudely reproduced in surviving glazed terracotta facsimiles.
Lorenzo de’ Medici sent the original metal sculpture, along with a
similar portrait of Alexander the Great, to King Matthias Corvinus
of Hungary as a gift – from whose possession it disappeared with-
out a trace (likely destroyed in the second or third decade of the
sixteenth century, during the Turkish invasion and occupation). Ver-
rocchio probably loosely modeled his reliefs on antique cameos in
Lorenzo’s collection, such as the lost profile Bust of Athena (known
from documents and a reproductive illustration of 1483), in which the
Greek goddess wore comparable, fantastic armor. Lorenzo might have
pointed out this pedigree-by-association in an accompanying letter to
Corvinus.
If those contemporary clay copies that have come down to us retain
the basic features of Verrocchio’s lost Darius (fig. 11), then we may
surmise that Leonardo, again, invigorated and elaborated on what
he saw. On the chest of Leonardo’s warrior, a growling lion’s head
has been altered to look up, deferentially, to the fiercer visage of the
soldier. Very different from the aquiline profile of a classical hero (as
seen in the terracottas), the brutish face of the sketch, one suspects,
either pays homage to a tough, local bravo, a soldier of fortune, or
represents some other, thuggish-looking acquaintance of Leonardo.
47
48 The Young Leonardo
Figure 10.
Leonardo da Vinci, Bust
of a Warrior in Profile,
c. 1473–74,metal-
point, London, British
Museum, Department
of Prints and Drawings.
C
The Trustees of the
British Museum/Art
Resource, NY.
Figure 11.
After Andrea del
Verrocchio, Darius,
mid-1470s?, glazed
terracotta, Lisbon,
Museu Nacional de Arte
Antiga. Courtesy of the
Museu Nacional de Arte
Antiga.
7. The Bust of a Warrior and Leonardo’s Creative Method 49
Figure 12.
Leonardo da Vinci, Bust
of a Man,c.1480–82,
red chalk, Windsor
Castle, Royal Library
(12502). The Royal
Collection
C
2010
Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth II.
Sometimes called a “nutcracker man,” in reference to the powerful jaw
and prominent nose and chin that almost meet (strongly caricatured
in certain drawings), the head clearly belonged to a real person.
Indeed, the man appears to me to be the same intimidating model,
subsequently drawn full-face with comparable horizontal furrows
above the bridge of his nose and a similar lion decoration on his shoul-
der, that Leonardo employed frequently in the early 1480sandafterhe
returned to Florence from Milan in 1500 (fig. 12). The artist seems to
have taken perverse pleasure in recording, in a series of strictly frontal
and profile “mug shots,” the effects of aging, particularly the man’s
increasingly sagging features and thinning hair (fig. 13). A drawing in
the Louvre (fig. 14) appears to show him at an advanced age, at least
in his seventies; although his cheeks have sunken and his neck thinned
and fallen in folds, he can still be recognized by his distinctive, cleft
and bulbous nose, downturned mouth, and piercing eyes. Leonardo
50 The Young Leonardo
Figure 13.
Leonardo da Vinci, Bust
of a Man,c.1502,red
chalk, Windsor Castle,
Royal Library (12503).
The Royal Collection
C
2010 Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth II.
perhaps made this last, parting study of the man in 1515, when the
artist, then based in Rome, accompanied his employer Giuliano de’
Medici (son of Lorenzo the Magnificent and brother of Pope Leo X)
to Florence as part of a papal entourage.
On one early, informal, portrait drawing of the same man (fig. 15)
by a Verrocchio assistant (mixed in with Leonardo head studies at
Windsor Castle), there is an inscription identifying him as an oth-
erwise obscure Spaniard – Tom
´
as Vald
´
ez or Vald
´
es from Salamanca
(scrawled, Tomaso vald
´
ez/ s.[ign]or salaman[ca]). He may have been
chosen as a military model not only for his fierce looks, but also
because, in late-fifteenth-century Europe, the prowess of the unde-
feated Spanish infantry and artillery was legendary, partly because of
their sheer numbers. By 1475, the kingdom of Castile-Aragon had
an army twice as large as that of any other region or country. Given
the close correspondence of his features to those of Verrocchio’s sit-
ter for his equestrian monument to the deceased, mercenary general
7. The Bust of a Warrior and Leonardo’s Creative Method 51
Figure 14.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Head of an Old Man,
c. 1515?, red chalk,
Paris, Louvre (2249).
R
´
eunion des Mus
´
ees
Nationaux/Art
Resource, NY.
Bartolomeo Colleoni (designed c. 1480–88), whose own face was not
used for that idealized sculpture, one wonders if the older master hired
the same rugged model.
In addition to reworking (or replacing) the face of Verrocchio’s
Darius, Leonardo has transformed the bird’s wing on the original hel-
met into that of a dragon – the dragon’s wing, like the lion’s head,
deriving from similar features on the Rossellino/Verrocchio lavamano.
He has also given the ornate acanthus and tendrils a quality of writhing,
tenacious growth. Leonardo would come to make a habit of rethink-
ing traditional types and symbols – looking at the people who sur-
rounded him, finding those who best represented a particular charac-
teristic, and then, in his art, reinforcing that telling physiognomy or
52 The Young Leonardo
Figure 15.
Workshop of Verroc-
chio, Portrait of Tom
´
as
Va l d
´
ez,c.1473–75,
pen and ink, Windsor
Castle, Royal Library
(12484). The Royal
Collection
C
2010
Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth II.
personality with inventive attributes or props. Vasari tells of how the
artist would sometimes stalk a person with an interesting face for an
entire day, just to make good sketches of their features from differ-
ent angles. Florence, in the fifteenth century, was not the international
commercial center that Venice was, and so Leonardo had to hunt assid-
uously among the homogeneity of facial types he found there. Given
his own origins, the coarse visages of country folk in town, captured
in the paintings of Andrea Castagno, would not have intrigued him.
However, he must have regarded as interesting models those from
foreign lands – not just Spain, but North Africa, the Middle East,
and Eastern Europe, from which many of the local slaves came. He
could quickly study the exotic faces of those non-Christian Algerians,
Circassians, Russians, Tartars, and Turks when they emerged occa-
sionally and briefly from patrician households.
Leonardo suggested an aide-m
´
emoire for times when unwitting
models had escaped: “when you [have to] draw a face from memory
take with you a little book wherein you have [already] noted down
similar features, and when you have glanced at the face of a person
you wish to portray, look then at the [facial] parts [in the book], which
nose or mouth is like his, and make a little mark to recognize it, and
then later, at home, put it together.” Despite this typological approach,
Leonardo seems not to have adhered to the strict orthodoxy of the
Renaissance physiognomists, who believed that each individual has
7. The Bust of a Warrior and Leonardo’s Creative Method 53
facial traits associated with one of the four temperaments or personality
types – sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic – supposedly
determined by the relative proportions of the four humors or fluids
(blood, phlegm, white bile, and black bile) in the body. According
to that classification system, a choleric person, for example, would
normally have a round face, prominent forehead and eyebrows, and
deep-set eyes, among other attributes. Eschewing such generalities,
Leonardo preferred to examine a face more carefully, watching the
changing features and expressions for the individual temperament and
for a hint of the discreet soul. In this approach, he aligned himself
with Alberti, who, in Della famiglia, had expressed doubts about the
four-humor theory, suggesting that a person’s disposition is largely a
product of environment – highly responsive to parental teaching and
conditioned by experience and habit.
8. Early Participation in
the Medici Court
I
n the winter of 1474–75, probably betwee n december and
January, Leonardo assisted Verrocchio with the design of a
standard for a magnificent joust sponsored by Giuliano de’ Medici,
Lorenzo’s tall and athletic younger brother (fig. 16). Ostensibly, the
event celebrated a defensive treaty negotiated between Florence,
Venice, and Milan – reconfirming their nonaggression pact of 1454–
55. However, such jousts (mock duels on horseback), not to be con-
fused with tournaments (mock wars on horseback), took place annu-
ally in Florence, as a regular part of carnival and as a rite of passage
for aristocratic and prominent young men, whose participation sig-
naled that they had reached the qualifying age for public office. Held
on 29 January 1475, Giuliano’s joust, meant to rival one alla franciosa
organized by Lorenzo in 1469, had all the pageantry and chivalric
splendor of a medieval French romance – part of a long, anachronistic
tradition of “knight errantry” in Florence. Having designed a standard
for Lorenzo’s contest, Verrocchio knew exactly what was required for
Giulio’s.
Now preserved in the Uffizi, the standard drawing was apparently
begun by Verrocchio, who established the positions of the figures in
black chalk, and finished by Leonardo, who reinforced the master’s
lines with pen and ink and then added plants at left, shading them
with his distinctive left-handed, backward-slanting, hatching. Fitted
into the long, triangular format of a standard, the two figures represent
the winged, love god Cupid (or Amor), and a young woman, either
a terrestrial Venus or a maiden nymph, in an untenable, recumbent
posture; when Leonardo took over the execution of the drawing, he
seems to have misinterpreted the placement of the large rock, which
55
56 The Young Leonardo
likely was intended to support her (proper) right arm. Verrocchio
appears to have reused the pose he had invented for a terracotta Sleeping
Youth (now in Berlin).
The mythological subject was almost certainly prescribed by one
of the Florentine Neoplatonists, possibly Marsilio Ficino, the self-
appointed leader of the group, who advanced the notion of an Earthly
Venus or Aphrodite (as she was called by the Greeks) – a mundane
goddess of love. In his arcane Commentary on Plato’s Symposium of
1469, the celibate Ficino expanded on the ancient Greek philosopher’s
distinctions between divine love and earthly love, for which he had
posited two Venuses, a nude goddess, who rules over matters pertaining
to the divine and heaven, and a clothed, earthly or “natural” deity,
who represents both the beauty found in the material world and the
procreative principle. Human love and desire, subthemes of Giuliano’s
joust, fall within the realm of visible, terrestrial beauty and, therefore,
the domain of the Natural Venus (amor vulgaris).
On the other hand, the glamorous lady in the standard drawing
could be a Sleeping Nymph, a leitmotif for many contemporary writ-
ers, such as the Medici courtier Luca Pulci. His epic, pastoral poem,
Il driadeo d’amore (The Wood Nymph of Love), written between 1464
and 1465, is laden with both dozing and frolicking ninfe. Among those
verses (XXXVIII–L), Pulci describes at length a romantic encounter
between Cupid and a sleeping nymph named Pietra, or “Rock,” who
“loved with a perfect [that is, chaste Platonic] love.” Thus, the stone
in the Verrocchio drawing, more prominent before Leonardo’s alter-
ations, may have been intended as an identifying attribute. Leonardo,
at some point, came to own a copy of Pulci’s poem.
Whoever she is, the comely woman in the drawing appears to
be lightly daydreaming, after having gathered a bouquet of flowers,
which she cradles with left hand in the folds of her dress – significantly,
close to her abdomen. Cupid does not prepare to pierce her with one
of his arrows, as is his habit, but gently tries to wake her from her
reverie, touching her heart, so that he may lead her, with a prominent
spear (cum jousting lance, an uncharacteristic weapon for him), into
romantic adventure, suggested by the lush and fertile vegetation at left.
The artists have thus combined and cast themes of medieval chivalry –
knightly and amorous quest – in ancient Greek terms: the armed,
antique god of love stirs the desires of an unsuspecting maiden nymph
or Earthly Venus, dressed in a classically inspired gown.