Painting of Ginevra Benci

In spite of mutilation the Ginevra Benci is the best preserved of all Leonardo's early pictures, and shows most clearly his intentions at this period. Areas of light and dark are strongly contrasted, but within the light oval of the face there is very little shadow, and the modelling is suggested by delicate gradations of tone, especially in the reflected lights. We see a similar treatment of form in Desiderio's low reliefs, controlled by the same sensibility to minute variations of surface. There are passages, such as the modelling of the eyelids, which Leonardo never surpassed in delicacy, and here for once he seems to have had none of that distaste for the medium which we can deduce from his later paintings, no less than from contemporary descriptions of his practice. Most ingenious is the way in which all the light areas except the face are given broken irregular contours by the juniper leaves, or the shimmering water, so that the outline of the lady's cheek and brow dominate the design. We might point to another contrast in texture between the beautiful curves of her ringlets and the stiff, spiky character of the juniper. But all these technical devices are subservient to the feeling of individual character with which Leonardo has been able to charge his portrait, so that this pale young woman has become one of the unforgettable personalities of the Renaissance.

Assuming that the Ginevra was painted in 1474, how did Leonardo spend the next four years? We have no documents bearing on his work till 1478, no drawings and only one picture which seems to belong to the period. At twenty-five years of age, he cannot have been obscurely devilling for Verrocchio, although we know that he lived with Verrocchio till 1476; and he had not yet begun the scientific studies which, in his later life, account for intervals in the sequence of his paintings. We must assume that Leonardo, like other young men with great gifts, spent a large part of his youth in what is known as doing nothing--dressing-up, talking, taming horses, learning the lute, learning the flute, enjoying the hors d'œuvres of life, till his genius should find its true direction.

In this period, the one picture which can be dated is the Virgin with the vase of flowers in the Munich Gallery, which is connected in many ways with the studio of Verrocchio. Credi did a drawing and picture of the same model in the same costume, and an almost identical pose was used in a composite production of Verrocchio's shop, the altar-piece in Pistoja Cathedral. Perhaps the fact that the Munich Madonna was little more than a workshop commission accounts for the absence of most of those qualities which we value in Leonardo's other work. The picture is in very bad condition. The Virgin's head has been entirely repainted in a medium containing too large a quantity of oil, resulting in a craquelure so unlike that of any Italian technique that Morelli believed the whole picture to be a Flemish copy. The same medium was used to re-work the shadows, especially round the baby's head, of which a different outline is faintly perceptible. There are many other damages, and it may well be asked on what grounds the picture can be ascribed to Leonardo. The answer is that all the surviving parts are wholly characteristic. The Virgin's plaited hair, and her left hand, large parts of her drapery and in particular the flowers in the vase at her side, all these are painted in exactly the same style as the Uffizi Annunciation, and they combine to give the picture as a whole a quality of form and colour which is unlike anything else of the period. For further confirmation there is the panorama of mountains seen through the arched windows of the background, which is closer to his mature type of landscape than the background of the Annunciation. It is interesting to see how early Leonardo felt the necessity of turning the horizontal line of the background into a series of verticals by rows of precipitous mountains. Like the flowers in the Annunciation these gothic pinnacles are a negation of repose, a refusal to allow that anything in nature should be devoid of movement.

Can the Munich Madonna ever have been beautiful? Her head, to judge from a drawing in the Louvre, may have had considerable charm, and the Child was evidently not so bald as he is to-day. But he must always have been too big, and his whole pose is uninteresting. Moreover, the picture must have lacked the freshness of the Annunciation owing to the black shadows in the drapery. Even during this early period Leonardo seems to have been experimenting with dark shadows in order to obtain greater relief, and in the Munich Madonna we are aware of all the drawbacks of the method, but not of its compensations. It is, and may always have been, his least successful picture.