Leonardo: The Works

Leonardo grew up outside Florence, in the countryside,

in a little village, Vinci.

His mother was a peasant woman. He himself was illegitimate.

But his father was a very respectable notary

who married and had a legitimate family

into which Leonardo was, to some extent, absorbed.

So there was no question of him being disowned.

And his career was supported,

even if it wasn't necessarily going to be a reiteration of his father's career.

And what we've seen quite often in Italian Renaissance history

is that illegitimate sons

have a kind of ambition that takes them to the fore.

Renaissance Italy is very extraordinary.

There is this intellectual driving force because, more than any other country,

they felt the weight, or the tradition of classical antiquity.

Rome was around them and you combined that

with early capitalist economies, on a small scale, but very dynamic.

You had the city states, like Venice, and so on, which had major artists,

but Florence was extraordinary.

In the early 1500s, you had this astonishing flowering

of Brunelleschi, the architect,

Donatello, the sculptor,

Masaccio, the painter, and a host of others.

Art was becoming, in Florence, an intellectual pursuit.

Florence was an intensely mercantile city.

It was a city of transactions.

And even the great Medici had banking interests that spread across Europe.

But they also wanted to show that they were culturally sophisticated

and that they were using their wealth

for the benefit of the city,

for the benefit of their own souls,

when they were commissioning religious works of art.

So what you've got is this lovely melting pot

of factions and families in competition,

and painters who might serve one or other of them

and who were also themselves looking over their shoulder

all the time for what the latest innovation was.

"Leonardo's father one day took some of his son's drawings

to the artist Andrea del Verrocchio, who was a good friend of his,

and directly asked him what he thought.

Andrea was astonished by what he saw

and arranged that Leonardo should enter his workshop."

Giorgio Vasari, painter and historian.

This is the Tobias and the Angel from the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio,

a painting from the early to mid-1470s.

It's an apocryphal story in which the Archangel Raphael comes to young Tobias

and instructs him to take parts of the fish,

the gall, and the liver, and the heart, I believe,

as a remedy to cure the blindness of his father.

It raises some very interesting questions about how workshops work

and, indeed, how Leonardo functioned within the Verrocchio workshop.

Verrocchio was one of the pre-eminent workshops.

Many very important painters passed through the Verrocchio studio

in the 1460s and '70s.

I think one of the appeals of working with Andrea del Verrocchio

for someone like Leonardo

was the fact that this was, like many of these Florentine workshops,

a production centre for all manner of objects,

both two-dimensional, three-dimensional.

There was drawing, there was painting, there was casting, there was carving.

And, of course, the multiplicity of interests that Leonardo demonstrated

in his subsequent career

certainly had some resonance with what went on in the Verrocchio studio.

Where this painting in particular is involved, I think,

it's raised some very interesting ideas about collaboration and delegation,

suggesting that some of the details of this picture

might have been by the young Leonardo as an apprentice.

We know that he had some sort of formal training in the Verrocchio workshop

between 1469 and 1472.

It's been suggested that certain elements

that are more naturally observed,

more realistically observed,

have a higher degree of skill in execution,

like the movement of the dog and the fur,

or the fish and the way it hangs from the string so convincingly,

might be ascribed to the young Leonardo himself.

The traditional painting medium in the Renaissance,

certainly at the beginning of the 15th century,

was egg... egg used, mixed with water and pigments,

and applied in a fine, hatched way.

The introduction of oil painting is something that happened

during the latter part of the 15th century.

There were instances of pictures appearing from Northern Europe

and I think it had a tremendous impact on the way Italian artists worked,

both a need, or an interest rather, in learning how to paint this way,

but also it opened up different ideas about what you could depict

and what effects you could make.

We can point to certain moments.

For example, the arrival of the van der Goes Portinari altarpiece

in Florence from Bruges

was a revelation, I think, to Florentine artists working in that time.

With Leonardo, it's certainly true that oil painting

was a relatively new technique that was available.

It certainly allowed him to explore and to depict things

that were interesting to him anyway:

the optics of vision and the way that things go in and out of focus,

or the way that shadows lose their colour in lower light.

All these things you can achieve much more convincingly with the oil medium.

That certainly was his interest,

and it lies deep at the heart of many of the things

he tried to do and paint later in his career.

Leonardo thought that paintings should be able

to show everything that was visible

and everything that was invisible in our universe.

He started that way of thinking

by looking very, very closely at the world around him.

For example, one of his very earliest drawings shows, apparently,

a view of the Arno Valley.

It's dated, it feels like an observation and yet there are aspects to it

which I think most of us would now agree are almost impossible.

So the point of his landscapes,

the point of his observation of the human figure,

is that he's always wanting to move from the specific to the ideal

and from the observed to the imagined.

Probably his earliest independent painting was The Annunciation,

which is a long, rectangular panel,

with the standard subject of the angel and the Virgin Mary,

but with enormous amount of effort going into it.

Leonardo spends a lot of time on the perspective of the Virgin's house,

and we know from scientific examination,

the walls, initially, are rather different

with the window in a different place.

So, he's saying, "Look, I can do perspective."

The draperies are done taking a lay figure with linen,

which is then soaked in clay and draped over the figures,

giving a very sculptural impression.

And, above all, he is saying, "Look what I can do with nature."

The carpets of flowers in the enclosed garden, which is symbolic of the Virgin,

are absolutely wriggling with life and vitality.

And then the angel's wing is based on a bird.

You've got this observation of the feathers.

The primaries at the end of the wing have deteriorated a lot.

So, there's a rather offsetting brown smudge,

but you look at the rest of the wing,

the secondaries, all the other feathers,

are painted with this enormous sense of observation.

So, this young man is saying,

"Look what I can do. I can master all the key things in art."

The Annunciation that Leonardo made very early in his career

can be seen as the culmination of his apprenticeship

in Verrocchio's workshop.

We have continued to study and make new investigations.

Not only looking at the finished painting

but also understanding all the stages

Leonardo went through to arrive at the final composition.

Looking at the changes he made

he clearly did not arrive immediately

at a complete and definitive conclusion.

There is undoubtedly on Leonardo's part

a kind of internal challenge.

So this is not so much a problem of wanting

immediately to prove himself as an innovative artist

but really the need to challenge himself

and therefore to progress.

One has the sense he's never satisfied by whatever he's doing.

Therefore it's more a dialogue of Leonardo with himself

than with the rest of artistic society.

"Verrocchio was making a picture

in which St. John was baptising Christ,

and Leonardo worked on an angel who was holding some garments.

Even though he was so young he accomplished it in such a manner

that it was much better than Verrocchio's own figures

that were located beside the angel of Leonardo.

This was the reason why Andrea never again wanted to touch colours,

dismayed that a young man understood painting better than he."

Giorgio Vasari.

"He's a poor pupil who does not surpass his master."

Leonardo.

I think that we see Leonardo in contrast to Verrocchio most clearly

in the Baptism of Christ in the Uffizi,

where a fairly orthodox landscape

is changed to a remarkable degree

as Leonardo's imagination literally floods the plain

to bring water and movement and light into a picture

that otherwise might have been somewhat static.

What Leonardo does is provide a unity,

a unifying factor that turns a good picture into a remarkable one.

Generally speaking, and we certainly see this with Raphael later,

the young artists tend to get commissioned

to do smaller scale paintings.

The less expensive ones, as it were.

Which is Madonnas and portraits,

and in Leonardo's case, portraits of women in particular.

He's already getting the narrative Madonna,

which was one of his great contributions

to reforming "Madonna and Child" painting.

So he's already, in these little pictures

which are, on the whole, conventional subjects,

he's already stretching his wings, as it were.

"Leonardo then made a picture of Our Lady

which was in the possession of Pope Clement VII,

and which is very excellent.

Amongst other things that were in it,

he reproduced a carafe full of water containing some flowers.

In addition to the marvellous lifelikeness of the flowers,

he had imitated the dewdrops of the water on them,

so that they seemed more alive than life itself."

Giorgio Vasari.

"Little babies are thin at all their joints,

and the intervals located between the joints are fat,