We now have to pass from the mediocre artists who worked in the school
of Domenico Ghirlandaio to that great master, Leonardo da Vinci
(1452-1519), whose work in the oil medium can nowhere be studied so
profitably as in the Louvre. This many-sided genius was the natural
and first-born son of a country notary, and became a pupil of the
sculptor-painter, Andrea del Verrocchio, in whose workshop he met
Botticelli, Lorenzo di Credi, and many less distinguished Florentine
painters. His interests and occupations were so various that a
detailed study of his life-work reveals him as scientist, philosopher,
architect, sculptor, military engineer, mathematician, botanist, and
musician. The _Annunciation_ (catalogued as No. 1602A and labelled
No. 1265), which in the official Catalogue is now only attributed
to him after having long passed under the name of Lorenzo di Credi,
is doubtless an early work of about 1472 by Leonardo. Some ten years
later Leonardo entered the service of Lodovico Sforza, Duke of Milan,
in which city he shortly afterwards painted the _Virgin of the Rocks_
(No. 1599). This fine painting—whose virtues are concealed under a
thick coat of chilled varnish—is reputed to have been in the collection
of François I., although it has no continuous pedigree earlier than
the year 1625, when it was in the royal collection at Fontainebleau.
It is very similar to the painting of the same subject which the
National Gallery (No. 1093) purchased in 1880 for £9000. The points
of difference between the two versions are numerous but trifling. The
nimbi in the National Gallery picture were added much later and are not
found in the Louvre panel, which in the greater perfection of detail,
in the treatment of the foreground and the brushwork, prove it to be an
earlier and more authentic work. A careful examination of the documents
which came to light in the year 1893 shows that a dispute arose as to
the price to be paid by the Brotherhood of the Conception of Milan for
the picture now in the Louvre, and that Ambrogio da Predis and Leonardo
da Vinci petitioned the Duke of Milan to intervene. It would seem that
the National Gallery picture was executed in great part by Ambrogio,
who worked under the supervision of the great Florentine master, in
1494, about twelve years later than the version in this collection.
Leonardo’s greatest contribution to Florentine art consisted in his
practice of the science of _chiaroscuro_, the laws of which he was the
first to fully investigate.
Having begun his celebrated “Treatise on Painting” and recommenced his
work on the colossal equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, which at
the moment of its destruction by the French bowmen in 1500 had earned
him lasting fame as a sculptor, Leonardo undertook his _chef d’œuvre_,
_The Last Supper_, at Milan. Executed in tempera on a badly prepared
stucco ground, the painting unfortunately soon began to perish, and
although it was restored in 1908 with great success by Professor
Cavenaghi, only a faint idea of its pristine beauty remains. The Louvre
possesses a contemporary copy (No. 1603A) of this fresco by Marco
d’Oggiono, which was commissioned by the Constable de Montmorency and
long hung in the Château d’Ecouen. A similar copy of Leonardo’s _Last
Supper_ was purchased from a grocer in Milan in 1793 for £600, and is
now in the Royal Academy, London.