The da Vinci Legacy. Jean-Pierre Isbouts
Leonardo’s First Milanese Studio
Leonardo was never able to establish a full-fledged studio of his own in Florence, but that changed after he decided to move to Milan in 1482. As he began to receive his first commissions beginning around 1486, Leonardo was finally in a position to assemble his own bottega, which eventually grew to at least six apprentices (or “dependents,” as Leonardo described them). These included a painter named Tommaso Masini or Zoroastro; a German artist known simply as Giulio; and a clutch of other pupils, variously identified as Gianmaria, Galeazzo, Bartolomeo, Benedetto, and others.
This group was joined by a rather loutish ten-year-old boy named Giacomo Caprotti, later known as Salaì. Little Salaì became an artist of some talent, as well as Leonardo’s close friend and “companion.” That the young man was also a rascal and a thief is attested by Leonardo’s famous note, in which he wrote:
On September 7, he stole a silverpoint valued at 22 soldi, from Marco [d’Oggiono] who was living with me, and he took it from his studio, and when the said Marco had searched high and low for it, he found it hidden in Giacomo’s box.”11
But Leonardo’s workshop did not consist only of young pupils and assistants. Remarkably, it also included Lombard painters who were already accomplished artists in their own right and, in some cases, had completed commissions for the Duke of Milan. This category included Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis, with whom Leonardo had worked on the Virgin of the Rocks; the Milanese artists Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Andrea Solario; the painter Marco d’Oggiono, who hailed from the nearby town of Oggiono; and Bernardino de’ Conti, who was born in Pavia. This group, particularly Boltraffio, Solario, and d’Oggiono, became the core of Leonardo’s following—the Leonardeschi, as we call them—in the decades to come. Over the next few years, other assistants and collaborators moved in and out of the studio, including Bernardino Luini; Cesare da Sesto; an artist named Ferrando Spagnolo or Ferrando the Spaniard, commonly believed to be Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina; and a Spanish compatriot known as Fernando de los Llanos.
The essential difference between apprentices and collaborators was that Leonardo was paid for taking pupils under his wing, because he would also be responsible for their food and clothing, whereas fellow maestri would conceivably share in the proceeds of whatever work they sold together. In this, Leonardo showed his willingness to adopt the Milanese model, rather than the Florentine way of doing business. In Milan, the idea of several painters working together on a large painting or mural, without any single artist necessarily being recognized as the principal author, was accepted operating procedure. Throughout the quattrocento—the 15th century—and beyond, art circles in Milan adhered to that medieval model. In contrast, Florence fostered the idea of the artist as an individual virtuoso, to be known and credited by name. That, in essence, is how Leonardo won his first contract in Milan to begin with—by working collaboratively on a large panel of a Madonna, the Virgin of the Rocks, which had been commissioned from the de Predis brothers.
This first period in Milan, under the patronage of the Duke of Sforza, was the high point for Leonardo’s studio, even if the artist’s relationship with Ludovico Sforza was tempestuous, and the ducal patronage unpredictable. Most of the duke’s art budget went to projects at three major religious institutions: the large monastery of Certosa di Pavia, the Santa Maria delle Grazie, and the Milanese cathedral. Large funds were lavished on Lombard artists who were far less talented but certainly more reliable than Leonardo when it came to delivering on time and on budget. Nevertheless, these years represented what was perhaps the most stable period in Leonardo’s career. With his associates and pupils he worked on his great cavallo in clay for the Sforza equestrian monument, wildly praised by his contemporaries; a portrait of Ludovico’s official mistress, the fourteen-year-old Cecilia Gallerani, which became the revolutionary Lady with an Ermine; an equally astonishing portrait, now called La Belle Ferronnière, of another of the duke’s paramours, Lucrezia Crivelli; and designs for what became the transformative work of his Milanese career, the fresco of the Last Supper.
As Leonardo’s notebooks show, between 1490 and 1494 there were at least six assistants working with him, including maestri like d’Oggiono, Boltraffio, and de Predis. This naturally strained the studio’s overhead. When the duke fell seriously in arrears with his payments, Leonardo drafted an indignant letter, complaining that “if your lordship thought I had money, your Lordship was deceived, because I had to feed six men for thirty-six months, and I have had only fifty ducats.”12
The Primacy of Drawing
Like his teacher Verrocchio, Leonardo always emphasized the art of drawing as a principal teaching method in his workshop. A painting requires a long and laborious effort with an uneven outcome. A drawing could be sketched quickly, and then modified or improved upon with just a few strokes.
Virtually everything Leonardo did was informed by drawings: his observations of nature, his engineering designs, his anatomical studies, his ideas about composition, and lastly, his preparatory studies for paintings, including cartoons for alfresco murals. In short, drawings were the principal medium by which Leonardo communicated his artistic ideas to his followers. As we will see, they made good use of them. According to biographer and Medici physician Paolo Giovio, Leonardo went so far as to forbid his pupils, until twenty years of age, to “use a paintbrush or paints.” Instead, he made them “work with lead point to choose and reproduce diligently the excellent models of earlier works, to imitate with simple line drawings the force of nature, and outlines of bodies that present themselves to our eyes with a great variety of movement.” Thus, Giovio believed, Leonardo prevented his students from being “seduced by the brush and colors” before they learned to represent “the exact proportions of things.”13
Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of an Infant for the Saint Anne, ca. 1503–1507
In his Trattato della pittura or Treatise on Painting, which no doubt reflected the lessons taught in his workshop, Leonardo explained why drawing was so important. “First,” he instructs the reader, “copy the drawings of accomplished masters made directly from nature, and not practice drawings; follow this through with drawings of relief works alongside drawings taken from the same relief; then move on to drawing from life.”14
It is not always easy to determine the educational purpose of some of the drawings that Leonardo executed in the years when he ran his first Milanese studio. In many, he appears to be preoccupied with themes that appealed to him personally, rather than those that could be used to teach drawing to a beginning artist. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern some ideas that interested him throughout his career.
Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child with a Cat, ca.1478
One of these is his constant desire to inject life and spontaneity into the motif of the Madonna, which was highly popular in quattrocento Italy.
The clergy, led by the Dominican order, had begun to encourage families to create an area for private prayer in the home. Madonna portraits could serve as a natural focus of such devotional shrines. But the iconography of the Madonna had become rather stale and repetitive. It was dominated by the tradition of the Madonna Enthroned, which showed Mary as an austere heavenly figure, barely aware of the child Jesus on her lap.
From the very beginning of his career as an artist, starting in the workshop of Verrocchio, Leonardo looked for ways in which Mary and her child could be depicted in a more natural, more affecting way, eliciting empathy and love in the beholder. Starting around 1478, he produced a series of drawings portraying the theme of the infant Jesus and a cat. Having the child play with a cat, for example, could introduce the sense of playfulness and spontaneity that Leonardo was looking for. This, we should remember, was entirely without precedent. Neither in the New Testament nor in the rich literature of Christian Apocrypha—which