The Adoration is an overture to all Leonardo's work
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 The Adoration is an overture to all Leonardo's work, full of themes which will recur. Joseph has the emphatic grimace of St Andrew in the Last Supper; the bearded King who raises his hand to his head anticipates St Peter; the beautiful profile of a young man standing one away from him is very close to St Philip, as we know him in the Windsor drawing. Between them an old man with sunken eyes bears an obvious resemblance to the Vatican St Jerome; and amongst the angels is one who raises his hand to point upward his outstretched finger, a gesture which so obsessed Leonardo that his imitators made it into a sort of trade-mark. Most remarkable of all is the skirmish of horsemen in the background, which derives from an earlier project of mounted men fighting a dragon and was used again twenty-five years later as the central motive of the Battle of Anghiari. This recurrence of relatively few forms, noticeable in the work of all great draughtsmen, does not of course spring from a poverty of invention, but serves, rather, to distinguish art from imitation. Out of the wealth of nature only a few shapes can be made to fit the artist's inner vision, and so become recreated forms; and the development of such an artist as Leonardo is not marked by the discovery of new forms but by the rendering of inherent forms more finally expressive.It is one of the ironies of art history that the Adoration, the most revolutionary and anti-classical picture of the fifteenth century, should have helped to furnish that temple of academic orthodoxy, Raphael Stanza della Signatura. When in 1509 Raphael embarked on his first great compositions, Leonardo's Adoration was already twenty-eight years old; yet it remained the most dramatic and most highly organised composition of its kind, and Vasari tells us how Raphael stood before it speechless, wondering at the expressiveness of the heads and the grace and movement of the figures. This quality of vital grace he strove to imitate by borrowing directly poses and expressions from the Adoration: and as with the Madonna groups he was able to assimilate them to his own pure style, so that at first we are hardly conscious that the figures bending and kneeling to the left of the Disputà owe anything to Leonardo. But the School of Athens shows us that this process of assimilation was gradual. In the great cartoon for this composition in the Ambrosiana the Leonardesque borrowings are very obvious. Two figures in particular, an elderly pythagorean and an oriental, are not only Leonardo's types, but have retained some of his peculiar intensity, which strikes a disturbing note in the general calm of the composition. Raphael has not been able to shake off what Blake would have called the outrageous demon of Leonardo. In the final fresco, by subtle modifications of emphasis, order is restored, and the disturbed shades of Leonardo are transformed into Raphael's noble, confident humanity.
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