For many years Leonardo ventured little on his own account, following with docility the directions of his master. The single painting which we may with certainty ascribe to Verrocchio, the Baptism of Christ, Figure [146a], in the Uffizi, already bears traces of Leonardo’s hand. The general composition is borrowed from an insignificant panel of Baldovinetti’s. The stalwart ugly forms derive from Pollaiuolo. Delightful features added in oils by Leonardo are the exquisite angel at the left, Figure [146], and the vaporous distance and mountain skyline. We may surmise that these improvements were added about 1470 to a picture started several years earlier. One other picture was designed by Verrocchio and finished after his death in 1488 by his assistant, Lorenzo di Credi. This Madonna, in the cathedral of Pistoia, affords an excellent contrast between the puffy forms of Lorenzo and the firm and living contours of Leonardo. The famous Annunciation in the Uffizi, Figure [147], seems a kind of joint product, the actual painting being by Leonardo, the badly balanced composition and intrusive heavy lectern, as well as the rather cheap attitude of surprise of the Virgin, representing a perfunctory mood of Verrocchio. The vista of remote mountains hanging pale in the blue sky is such as only Leonardo could have created. The delightful Gabriel also seems wholly his invention. The composition again rests on one of Baldovinetti’s, at S. Miniato, and the date of the picture may be about 1475. Of about the same date is a Madonna with an Angel in the National Gallery, which may well be a composition of Verrocchio interpreted by Leonardo. The note of sweetness is a little forced, as in most work of this kind. We meet Leonardo in his own right a little earlier, in a pen sketch of a broad landscape dated in midsummer summer of 1473, Figure [148]. Its spaciousness and schematic handling of horizontals ally it to the landscape backgrounds we have been considering. The last work of this Verrocchian character is the Portrait of a Girl, in the Liechtenstein Gallery, Vienna. Here we are in a field where Leonardo and his master are almost indistinguishable, but the picturesquely broken background, the bit of landscape, and the ease of the contours, speak for the younger man. As late as 1476, his twenty-fifth year, Leonardo was still with Verrocchio. He probably set up his own bottega a year or so afterwards.
Fig. 148. Leonardo da Vinci. Landscape. Pen Drawing.—Uffizi.
Fig. 149. Leonardo da Vinci. Annunciation.—Louvre.
There followed four or five years of eager experiment, much being planned and rather little carried to completion. Relieved from the pressure of a master, actual painting seems to have become irksome. He loves to sketch, to turn his designs over until they reach perfection, leaving them in the condition of the swiftest and most accurate notations. Lack of system and paralysis of will are already apparent. For about two years of this joyous and irresponsible creation he remained a primitive. Such he is in the idyllic little Annunciation of the Louvre,[[51]] Figure [149], which should be for its fluent technic no earlier than 1476. He takes the motive which he had previously done under restrictions, reduces it to a symmetrical order, rejects distracting details, floods it with warm light breaking through ragged apertures of the trees, and invests it with a penetrating humility and grace. The little picture, which many critics set too early, is really Leonardo’s declaration of independence. It shows features which anticipate his mature style—a combination of a severe geometrical symmetry in figure composition with a romantically strange setting and lighting.
Of less import is the unpretentious little Madonna of the Flower, recently discovered, and in the Hermitage, at Petrograd. It is authenticated by numerous composition sketches. Its vivacity and youthful lightness of effect are entirely in Verrocchio’s manner, nothing is new but heavier shadows and more emphatic modelling.
Fig. 150. Leonardo da Vinci. Pen Sketches for the Madonna of the Cat.—British Museum.
On a sheet of drawings in the Uffizi, which characteristically combines with sketches of men’s heads studies of machinery, we read “This day I began the two Virgin Marys.” The day is effaced, but it is a month in 1478, ending in -bre—September, October or November. One of these Madonnas is, no doubt, the Madonna of the Flower.[[52]] As to the other we have no certainty, but the sketches of this time show at least five madonnas in process of invention. A Madonna holding a mischievous Child who hugs a writhing cat, a Madonna with a Dish of Fruit, a Madonna kneeling before the Child, a theme later developed into the Madonna of the Rocks; a Madonna seated on the Ground, and a Madonna seated in the open with the Christchild and St. John. Dr. Jens Thys thinks the last composition may be the one actually begun as a picture, since such early Raphaels as the Belle Jardinière seem to imply such a picture as their model. We do well to turn from such speculations to the marvelous sketches for these Madonnas, Figure [150]. Nothing firmer, lighter or more charming can be imagined. Of the line, thinned to a hair or widened to a blot, there is the completest control. These little figures, a couple of inches high at the most and often of thumb-nail minuteness, may be enlarged to life size without losing in structure or character. Nothing shows better the sheer fecund genius of Leonardo than these sheets, crowded with figures, scribbled with his right-to-left handwriting, and slantingly shaded from upper left downwards, after the fashion of a lefthanded draughtsman. They show how Leonardo worked in spurts of inspiration, creating a dozen lovely compositions and contented with none. They represent so many tensely joyous half-hours, with doubtless long intervals of other activities and withal of sheer brooding and unrecorded observation. They help one grasp the spasmodic and discontinuous quality of Leonardo’s genius—why the actual execution of pictures was ever a matter of pain and drudgery to him. Up to his twenty-ninth year he apparently made no prolonged effort of any sort, but spent himself furiously in separate investigations. Then he pulled himself together for a great picture, and though it too never got beyond the underpainting, it broke the new path to the Golden Age.