Leonardo's imagination entering the world of conventional Florentine art
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 By grouping together Leonardo's early pictures of the Virgin and Child, I have been forced out of strict chronology. I must now return to a period in the late 1470's to find the roots of Leonardo's first great composition, the Adoration of the Kings, now in the Uffizi. As is the case with most great artists, Leonardo's energies were throughout life devoted to the exploration of a limited number of subjects, each one taken up, sketched, attempted, abandoned, reconsidered and not brought to a final shape till all its expressive possibilities were exhausted. It is in following such transformations, or perhaps I should call them excavations --for with each change a deeper layer of Leonardo's spirit is brought to light--that we learn most of his art. The sources of the Uffizi Adoration are to be found in sketches for a very different composition, the most important of which are three pen and ink drawings in the Musé'e Bonnat, the Venice Academy and the Hamburg Kunsthalle. These drawings, by their short firm shading, are datable about 1478. The number of studies which can be related to them show that this was an important commission. Perhaps it was for the altarpiece in the Chapel of St Bernard in the Signoria, commissioned in 1478, but never finished. The subject of these sketches was the Nativity, and the Bonnat drawing shows the adoring shepherds forming two sides of a square in the centre of which the Virgin kneels behind the holy children. It is the type of formal composition which Leonardo would have learnt in Verrocchio's shop, and in fact it became a favourite with his fellow pupils.
Perugino used it with variations and Credi, in a picture at Berlin, imitated exactly the central figures. Closely connected by style with these drawings of the whole composition is a series of studies at Windsor of raw-boned horses, some cropping the grass with outstretched necks, and a sketch of the ox and the ass. All these studies suggest that the scene was conceived in a traditional spirit, rustic, homely, realistic. In some of the shepherds we recognise motives which reappear in the Uffizi Adoration--young men with similar gestures of wonder, and an old man in meditation. The Virgin with the children gives, as we shall see, a first hint of the composition of the Virgin of the Rocks. Yet, as a whole, the lost Adoration, in contrast to the Uffizi picture, must have come from the surface of Leonardo's imagination.
Externally this contrast is expressed in a change of subject. The fable of the Adoring Shepherds is abandoned in favour of the allegory of the Adoring Kings. I doubt if this change was dictated by Leonardo's patrons, for artists at that date took great liberties with the subjects commissioned; more probably it signified a change in Leonardo himself. During his apprenticeship he had learnt the current forms of Florentine art, and his first instinct was to reproduce them, with uncommon delicacy and a certain overtone of poetry, but no striking deviation. But as Leonardo penetrated beneath the surface of professional skill, he discovered a strange visionary world, demanding expression in very different forms. This change was gradual and seems to have antedated the commission for the San Donato altar-piece, for we find in certain drawings connected with the earlier composition a hint of the rhythms which were to dominate the later. Beside prosaic horses, with angular necks stretched down to feed, are wild ethereal horses, with nervous heads thrown back on twisted necks. They are the spies and outriders of Leonardo's imagination entering the world of conventional Florentine art, soon to be followed by the mysterious company which fills the Uffizi Adoration.
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