Leonardo was in Florence again

What could be more like an illustration to the Trattato than the huge painting of the miracle of St Mark in the Scuola di San Marco, which was almost certainly designed and partly executed by Giorgione? It is true that Leonardo's paintings as they have come down to us show a much less colouristic use of shadow than his writings would lead us to expect: and no doubt he never used the full Venetian range of colour. But we must remember that of the original aspect of Leonardo's pictures we can form practically no conception, and that the traditional technique of the Milanese school, through whose copies so much of his work is known, was an opaque monochrome, to which colour was only added in glazes, now frequently lost. Only the least important of his paintings, the Ambrosiana musician, is in anything like its original condition: and it is remarkable for the luminosity of the shadows. Under deep layers of repaint and varnish the shadows of the Virgin of the Rocks may be equally luminous, and I have pointed out how this quality of the Last Supper is still perceptible in the swags of fruit. The pictures through which Leonardo was known in Venice, therefore, must have shown a treatment of light and shade far closer to Giorgione and the early Titian than we can guess from their present condition or from the replicas of Milanese pupils.

By 24 April 1500, Leonardo was in Florence again. It was almost twenty years since he had left, and during these years the atmosphere had changed. The spirit of Lorenzo was dead; and had been succeeded by a wave of revivalism in religion and republicanism in politics. In art the heroic and the ecstatic were more in demand than the daintiness and spontaneity of the quattrocento. Of this heroic classical style Leonardo was, in some ways, the precursor and Florence was ready to appreciate his art.

When he returned ( Vasari tells us) he found that the Servite brothers had commissioned Filippino to paint the altar-piece of the high altar of the Annunziata; Leonardo said that he would gladly have undertaken such a work and when he heard this Filippino, like the good fellow he was, withdrew The friars, in order that Leonardo might paint it, took him into their house and bore the expense of himself and all his household; and so things went on for some time, and he did not even make a beginning. But at last he made a cartoon wherein were Our Lady and St Anne and a Christ, which not only filled all artists with wonder, but, when it was finished men and women, young and old, continued for two days to crowd into the room where it was exhibited, as if attending a solemn festival: and all were astonished at its excellence.

Such popular enthusiasm would hardly have been possible in Milan, and helps us to understand why the five years Leonardo spent in Florence were more productive than the preceding eighteen years spent in the north of Italy.

Two representations of the Virgin and St Anne by Leonardo have come down to us: the cartoon at Burlington House, and the unfinished painting in the Louvre. It used to be assumed that the cartoon which Vasari describes was either that now at Burlington House, or a cartoon for the Louvre picture. We can be quite sure that it was not the Burlington House cartoon. During March and April of 1501 Isabella d'Este made one of her attempts to procure a picture from Leonardo. She communicated through her agent Fra Pietro da Novellara. This unhappy man was forced to write a series of letters tactfully conveying Leonardo's unwillingness to work for her, and, fortunately for us, he hides his failure under accounts of Leonardo's occupations. In one of these he describes a cartoon which must, from the date, be that mentioned by Vasari, and says that the Child Christ is leaving the arm of His Mother and has seized a lamb which He seems to be pressing to Him. Now there is no lamb in the Burlington House cartoon, and critics have therefore argued that the cartoon made for the Annunziata was the cartoon for the Louvre picture. But in so doing they did not read Fra Pietro's description carefully enough.