shading of the second phase of Leonardo’s work, beginning in the sixteenth century. The walnut wood used for the panel points to a date after 1506, when Leonardo returned to Milan. Walnut was a relatively unusual choice in Renaissance Florence, but was widely used by Milanese painters. It is difficult to be more precise, because Leonardo worked on many of his pictures for a long time, painting them slowly, sometimes on and off over a decade or more, occasionally returning to them after an intermission, often never finishing them. The scientific means of dating a panel painting by analysing the rings in the wood, dendrochronology, cannot be used with walnut, because the rings are too widely spaced to give more than the vaguest indication of epoch.
Whatever the day was when the first brushstrokes were applied to the Salvator Mundi, Leonardo had by then become one of the most celebrated living artists of the Italian Renaissance, alongside Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, Raphael, Michelangelo, Giovanni Bellini, Andrea Mantegna and a dozen others. He had progressed from artistic child prodigy to gifted studio assistant, then a master painter with his own practice in Florence, and later official court artist, the grandest position a Renaissance artist could rise to in Milan, where he also worked as a sculptor, engineer, set designer and architect. But his career had also had challenging periods when work and money were in short supply.
Born in 1452 in Vinci, a village on the outskirts of Florence, Leonardo was the illegitimate son of a notary, Ser Piero, and a local farmer’s daughter, Caterina di Meo Lippi. His early life was both privileged and disadvantaged. Ser Piero was well-to-do, with a number of properties including a farm in Vinci. By the time Leonardo was in his late teens his father also had offices in the Bargello in Florence, where he offered his legal services to clients from important monasteries and Florentine businesses. But having been born out of wedlock, Leonardo seems not to have received the classical education that a family of Piero’s standing would normally have given their son. He grew up not having learned Latin or Greek, and occasionally referred to that lack in his notebooks. He called himself an ‘unlettered man’, and once signed himself ‘Leonardo da Vinci, disciple of sperentia’, which means both experience and experiment, Renaissance Italian for the ‘school of life’. For the introduction of his planned treatise on painting, which he never published himself, he drafted this opening paragraph:
I am fully aware that my not being a man of letters may cause certain presumptuous people to think that they may with reason blame me, alleging that I am a man without learning. Foolish folk! … They strut about puffed up and pompous, decked out and adorned not with their own labours, but by those of others … They will say that because I have no book learning I cannot properly express what I desire to describe – but they do not know that my subjects require experience rather than the word of others.
Leonardo had the Renaissance version of a chip on his shoulder. He turned this weakness into a strength by approaching his subjects without preconceptions or precepts, making the blank page the starting point for enquiry and creativity.
Fifty kilometres east of Vinci lay the ochre and red assemblage of roofs, domes, towers and crenellations of Florence, where the Renaissance was under construction. The dome of Florence cathedral, designed by Brunelleschi, built without scaffolding out of four million bricks, still the largest masonry dome in the world, was nearing completion; Leonardo was to be involved in its finishing touch, a gleaming bronze ball placed atop the lantern in 1472. Luca della Robbia was filling lunettes and decorating sarcophagi with his ceramic reliefs of pretty Madonnas and characterful saints, smoothly glazed in bright green, blue, white and yellow. In the evenings the low sunlight caught Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, a door with ten scenes from the Old Testament, cast in bronze but looking like burnished gold, completed in 1424 and given its popular name by an admiring Michelangelo. It was a beacon to the future of art, with its energetic crowd scenes full of billowing robes and flailing limbs, set within the arches and atria of monumental classical backdrops.
The basic laws of perspective, the representation of three-dimensional space on two dimensions, mostly forgotten since Antiquity, had been revived in frescos decorating chapels by artists Masolino and Masaccio, and in diagrams and text by the architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti. All these developments were so remarkable that, a century later, they prompted the first ever art history book, Vasari’s Lives of the most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, to give it its full title. This account of Italian art from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century distinguished between three phases in Renaissance art – early, middle and high – categories which are still widely accepted today. Vasari placed Leonardo at the start of ‘the third manner which we will agree to call the modern’.* Today this period is known as the High Renaissance.
Leonardo’s father was a friend of one of the busiest artists in Florence, Andrea Verrocchio. He ran a large workshop in premises previously occupied by the greatest Florentine Renaissance sculptor from the preceding generation, Donatello, showing how the baton of the Renaissance was handed down from one leading artist to the next. A team of assistants helped Verrocchio execute a mixture of large-scale commissions, statues, jewellery and small workshop paintings, which could be bought by customers coming in off the street. Leonardo had shown early ability with drawing, and his father took him into Florence to see Verrocchio. He was taken on as an apprentice in his mid-teens, around 1469.
Already by his early twenties, Leonardo’s style was so distinctive that art historians argue over which parts of Verrocchio’s paintings might be by the master and which by his precocious pupil. There is a deliciously shiny fish and an alert, fluffy dog in Verrocchio’s Tobias and the Angel (1470–75) which are sometimes attributed to Leonardo. The angel on the far left of Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ, with his demure and elliptical expression, that tiny knowing smile and hint of gender fluidity, is said to be by Leonardo. In the background, a vast panorama of rolling hills, lakes and steep mountains unfolds, strikingly different from Verrocchio’s well-tended lawns, gentle slopes and neatly pruned trees. Another tell-tale sign is that this background is painted in oil. Leonardo liked to use the new medium of oil paint, which had arrived recently from the Netherlands, while Verrocchio used the old medium of tempera, based on egg yolk, so parts of his paintings finely executed in oils are generally thought to be by Leonardo.
In 1478 Leonardo left Verrocchio’s workshop and set up his own practice in Florence. His first major commission, from an order of Augustinian monks, the Adoration of the Magi, now hangs in the Uffizi. It was a breathtakingly inventive work for its time in how it set aside the conventional, flat depiction of this scene and instead offered a sweeping arabesque of a procession, which curves from the distance to the foreground, suggesting the passage of time and a distance travelled. The wise kings and their entourage gather in a semi-circle around the Madonna and child, evoking a deep foreground space. The recently restored Adoration shows the artist’s underdrawing, a dense web of constantly altered figures, gestures and details, which point to yet another distinctive characteristic of Leonardo: a striving imagination which altered his compositions with a freedom unknown to his contemporaries. The painting was never finished.
In Florence, Leonardo painted a dynamic and beautifully proportioned Annunciation, in which one finds his obsession with naturalistic detail in the flowery lawn and marble table. Close-up photographic study of the painting has also revealed the artist’s fingerprints, another distinguishing feature of his work. Leonardo had, it seems, an idiosyncratic way of occasionally using his fingers and palms to work the paint. At this time he also painted his first known portrait, of Ginevra de’ Benci. The painting’s realism, its glossy oil-painted sheen and austere atmosphere of introspection, show the huge impact on Leonardo of northern European Renaissance painters, whose fame had spread to Italy. In the St Jerome, which never went beyond the design stage, Leonardo conveys the suffering of the saint in the wilderness by his meticulous depiction of an undernourished anatomy. Leonardo’s drawings were as epoch-making as his paintings. On 5 August 1473 he drew in pen and ink what Martin Kemp has described as ‘simply the first dated landscape study in the history of Western art’1 – a view of the Arno valley showing Montelupo Castle, just outside Florence.
