Leonardo's part in the Baptism

Far from accusing Vasari of invention, I believe that he did not go far enough. Leonardo's part in the Baptism did not end with the angel; he was also responsible for the landscape, and here again has drawn from his imagination a foretaste of his future style. Verrocchio, unlike his rival, Antonio Pollajuolo, had no personal or original conception of landscape. He followed the current fashion, introduced through Flemish pictures and illuminated manuscripts, of round trees dotted about on a plain, with a horizon of rounded hills. Everything is tidily arranged and sharply defined: his rocks are conventionally picturesque. Verrocchio could not have painted the background of the Baptism with its wide, romantic stretch of hills, lakes, shining mists and pools, anticipating the backgrounds of the Mona Lisa and the Louvre St Anne. Some of the distant hills have been damaged by overpainting, but the nearer part is intact and at once reminds us of Leonardo's famous drawing of a landscape in the Uffizi inscribed didi Sta Maria della neve addi 5 d'aghossto 1473. As usual in Leonardo's work the drawing is more naturalistic than the picture, but both have the same motive of shining rocks and trees framing a distant plane. We are aware of landscape as something full of movement, light moving over the hills, wind stirring the leaves of trees, water flowing and falling in cascades; all of which is rendered in brilliant broken touches, with scurries and flutters of the pen, or flicks of golden paint from the brush. The drawing is in fact one of the most important documents for our study of Leonardo's early work. It shows him already master of an original and developed technique in which effects of light are achieved with a directness quite at variance with the formal style of the period. There is a kind of genial recklessness about the touch which does not suggest the painstaking goldsmith's apprentice.

Next in date to the Baptism comes the Annunciation now in the Uffizi. It is the sort of large composite picture which artists keep in their studios for many years, and work at intermittently; and it lacks the unity of a work carried out under a single impulse. Perhaps for this reason scholars were long unwilling to accept it as being from the hand of Leonardo, but it is perfectly in character with his other early works both in the general twilit tone, and in the drawing of the details. Moreover, there exists a drawing for the angel's sleeve which is unquestionably his. The Annunciation is earlier than is commonly supposed. The draperies with their thin straight folds are so like those of the angel's robe in the Baptism that it must have been begun at the same time, and it is interesting to notice that the over-prominent lectern must belong to exactly the period, c. 1472, in which Verrocchio's workshop was occupied with the similar sarcophagus of the Medici in San Lorenzo. The composition is so awkward that scholars have accused the painter of errors in perspective, but the perspective of the architecture is correct--painstakingly and amateurishly correct. The vanishing point is exactly in the middle of the picture horizontally and two-thirds the way up vertically. But this insistence on the linear perspective of the architecture, irrespective of the position of the figures or the composition as a whole, is the sign of a very young painter. He has learnt the trick of perspective without understanding its true intention, that is to say, the placing of objects in the picture space in a clear and harmonious relation to one another; and Leonardo has, in fact, made what appears to be a mistake of spatial relationships in making the Virgin place her farther hand on the near side of her lectern which, as we can see from its base, is a few feet nearer the spectator than she is.

The general effect of the Uffizi Annunciation is obscured by its condition. The whole surface is extremely dirty and the draperies are discoloured by old retouches and congealed varnish. But even allowing for this, the execution must have been rather uneven and in places relatively coarse; and the red of the angel's robe can never have borne much relation to the pink of the Virgin's skirt. Incidentally, we must notice that the angel's wing has been lengthened to canonical proportions by a very crude overpainting and hangs like a brown smear above the enchanting landscape to the left. The original short wings are directly painted from the wings of a bird, and fit the angel's shoulders with convincing naturalism. The angel's head is nearer to the traditional quattrocento type than anything else in Leonardo's work, and at first sight has some of the tameness of a Ghirlandaio. Steadier contemplation will disclose a subtlety of outline and modelling, especially round the nose and eye, which is an advance on the angel in the Baptism. The Madonna's head, on the other hand, is very like the earlier angel. The features are not felt as part of the structure of the face, but are drawn on it, and we have only to compare it with the Mona Lisa to realise the immense labour which Leonardo devoted to studying the science of his art.