More on the stooped figure of Leonardo da Vinci…

The above illustration is part of a series of preparation drawings made by Leonardo da Vinci for his unfinished painting depicting the Adoration of the Magi. He started the work in 1481 but it was never completed before he left Florence and moved to Milan. It has recently been restored and is housed at the Uffizi in Florence.

It is this work that Botticeli has utilised for his version of the Adoration of the Magi, also kept at the Uffizi. While many art historians date Botticelli’s version before Leonardo’s, it is likely that Botticelli did not complete his painting until after his return from Rome in 1482 where he was commissioned with a group of other Florentine artists to fresco the walls of the Sistine Chapel.

There are two figures from Leonardo’s sketch that Botticelli has adapted for his painting which connect to my previous post, the stooped man, and the man with his arm across his chest and hand resting on his shoulder. In the same post I pointed out that the stooped figure represnts Leonardo and connects to an early memory in his childhood.

In Leonardo’s unfinished painting, not the sketch, historians generally agree that the figure standing on the extreme right with his head turned is the artist himself. This figure is also replicated in the Botticelli version as the third standing figure from the left, wearing a red hat. Like many of the figures in Botticelli’s painting, it has two identities: the first was revealed in an earlier post as Bernardo Baroncelli, one of the assassins who took part in the Pazzi conspiracy and cleaved the head of Giuliano de’ Medici, hence his hat depicted as soaked in blood. His own head is also shown hanging from a rope above the figure and is a reference to Leonardo’ drawing of the hanging man..

Also mentioned in a previous post was the two groups either side of the painting are mirrored, and perhaps a pointer to Leonardo’s style of mirror-writing.

So when taking the faceless, stooped figure of Leonardo and his account about the fork-tailed red kite, and mirroring it to the standing Baroncelli, a second identity is revealed – Leonardo da Vinci. Confirmation is provided by features pointing to the kite story and the charge of sodomy with the young goldsmith apprentice.

The brim of the hat is wing-shaped, the underside a lghter red than the crown, representing the light underside of the fork-tailed red kite. A small, white ‘tickling’ feather is attached to the hat-band, the band itself representing a child’s baubles strung across the crib. A bird’s head with a pronounced beak forms one of the hair curls extending into the brim. Below the collar is a fork-shaped fold.

The shoulder insignia is a gold leaf, a reference to Leonardo’s early training as an apprentice goldsmith and to the young goldsmith he was accused with of sodomy. There is gold braid on Leonardo’s shoulder, and the hem of his green gown (right) is threaded with a gold knot pattern, another of Leonardo’s devices.

Leonardo’s left hand grip of his gown at waist level is a sexual signal directed to and observed by the young man at his side who has his arms wrapped around Giuliano de’ Medici. He is likely to represent Jacopo Saltarelli, the apprentice goldsmith and a recorded prostitute in Florentine court records. The waist level signal is intended to match the underbelly feature seen in the stooping figure opposite.

• You can follow this thread and earlier posts on Botticelli’s Uffizi Adoration of the Magi by clicking on the category link below, or at my website.

More on Sandro Botticelli’s Uffizi Adoration of the Magi…

Behind the kneeling Lorenzo de’ Medici and his his brother Giuliano, are three figures which the artist Botticelli has grouped to relate to each other in five distinct ways.

Firstly, each figure has two identities; secondly, each experienced judgement and condemnation; thirdly, all three reached celestial heights.

Previously mentioned was that Botticelli’s Uffizi Adoration of the Magi is laden with references to Leonardo da Vinci and his works. This is a fourth connection that binds the group. The fifth connection is they represent a secondary group of Magi and their gifts: gold, myrrh and frankincense.

The standing bearded man represents two people mentioned in the Book of Zechariah, Zerubabbel, the governor of the Persian Province of Judah who laid the foundation of Jerusalem’s Second Temple, helped by the high priest Joshua. Zechariah’s account of the Jews returning from Babylonian captivity and a return to peace is described by the prophet in a series of eight visions. These are also referred to in part in Botticelli’s painting.

The stooping figure next in line represents the musician and companion to Leonardo, Atalante Migliorotti, and also the man who commissioned the painting, Guasparre dal Lama.

The faceless third figure – the winged man – is Leonardo da Vinci. In this scenario the second identity probably refers to Jacopo Saltarelli, an apprentice goldsmith charged with prostitution and engaging in sodomy with Leonardo and three other men. The accusation was made annonymously on April 9, 1476, but charges against all the men were later dismissed on the condition that no accusations were made against them in the future.

Leonardo never clarified his sexual orientation in any of his writings, although he did write in one of his notebooks that “the act of procreation and anything that has any relation to it is so disgusting that human beings would soon die out if there were no pretty faces and sensuous dispositions”.

Like Leonardo, Sandro Botticelli was once accused of sodomy, though never prosecuted. Accusations of this kind were common at the time, often as a way of harming reputations. Many of Botticelli’s paintings contain sexual imagery and he was not adverse to injecting his own brand of irreverant humour in some scenes. The Uffizi Adoration is no exception, the target being Leonardo. Whereas Leonardo dissected human corpses, animals and birds in his quest for knowledge, Botticelli dissected reputations with his cutting remarks and piercing parodies for comic effect, even to the extent of self-parody. His placement behind the winged man is akin to the assassin in the opposite corner closing in and pretending to befriend Giuliano de’ Medici before inflicting 19 wounds on his body.

In his later years Leonardo wrote about his first memory as a child in his cradle. He was making notes at the time about the flight pattern of birds and the fork-tailed red kite (milvus vulgaris) in particular. His brief note read: “Writing like this so particularly about the kite seems to be my destiny, since the first memory of my childhood is that it seemed to me, when I was in my cradle, that a kite came to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips.”

Although the notebook entry is thought to be have been made around 1505, it is possible that the incident was related orally to others at earlier stages of his life. Certainly, Botticelli appears to have referenced the incident in at least two places. It may even be that Botticelli doubted Leonardo’s account and in his irreverent way put it down to fantasy or a dream sequence his contemporary may have experienced at some time.

As Leonardo held a lifelong interest in birds and their flight, even designing and constructing vehicles for men to take to the skies, it is not surprising that Botticell depicted Leonardo as a bird with wings and a cape covering a self-propelled wind source. Botticelli took the jest a step further, intimating that Leonardo’s weakness, or even strength, could be observed on the underside of his belly, an obvious reference to the sodomy charge against Leonardo and a 15th century slang defintion of ‘kite’ as a person who preys on others.

The second reference to the fork-tailed kite and Leonardo’s earliest memory is the long-tailed peacock perched above the group of men on the right side of the painting. The overhang above the peacock is meant to depict the wingspan of another bird, perhaps the kite and the shadow hanging over Leonardo if ever a charge of sodomy was brought against him in the future. A fork is formed when the shadow is combined with the peacock, a bird that not only symbolised Leonardo’s perceived vanity and desire for attention with his dimorphic style of attire, but may have also pointed to the new life Leonardo was seeking which led to his move to Milan.

• More on this in my next post.

• You can follow the thread and earlier posts on Botticelli’s Uffizi Adoration of the Magi by clicking on the category link below, or at my website.

The Portrait of a Musician is another unfinished painting attributed in part to Leonardo da Vinci. It is thought to have been painted in 1485, which would place it in the period after the artist moved to Milan sometime between 1482 and 1483.

Various identities have been given to the sitter but a more recent suggestion is that of Atalante Migliorotti, a musician said to have been taught by Leonardo and who accompanied his tutor when he left Florence for Milan to work for the Sforza family.

Migliorotti is mentioned in a list of works noted by Leonardo: “a portrait of Atalante raising his face”. The painting is presumambly a lost work and is not the the particular portrait above, which would suggest that Leonardo made two paintings of Atalante.

However, evidence of the lost portrait of “Atalante looking up” appears in Botticelli’s Uffizi Adoration of the Magi. The painting also points to the surviving Portrait of a Musician which would suggest it was completed before 1485 while Leonardo and Atalante were still in Florence.

As mentioned in an earlier post Botticelli’s Uffizi Adoration could not have been completed before 1480 as it includes elements related to the Pazzi conspiracy and assassination of Giuliano de’ Medici. Completion may even have been after the death in April 1481 of its patron Guasparre dal Lama.

My next post will deal with the iconography that points to Leonardo’s two paintings of Atalante Migliorotti.

Compare the similarity between Botticelli’s group of figures and Leonardo’s composition, both taken from a corner section of their respective paintings of the Adoration of the Magi. So which version was started first?

I mentioned in a previous post that Botticelli’s Uffizi Adoration of the Magi is inspired by two unfinished paintings attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, his own version of the recently restored Adoration theme (also in the Uffizi) and Jerome in the Wilderness.

As well as this Botticelli added other devices associated with Leonardo – the hanging Baroncelli figure based on a sketch from one of Leonardo’s notebooks is an example. Another is the head of the white horse resting on the arms of Giuliano de’ Medici and the assassin Francesco de’ Pazzi.

Leonardo was an accomplished musician. He is noted for having made a silver lyre in the shape of a horse’s head which he brought with him as a gift for Ludovico Sforza when he moved to Milan . The instrument was known as a “lira da braccio”, literally an “arm lyre”, and a forerunner of the violin – hence the horse-head resting on the arms of the two men.

But Botticelli has implied a further interpretation which connects to a participant in the Pazzi consiracy itself, the Arcbishop of Pisa, Francesco Salviati. For his part he shared the fate of four other conspirators when ropes were tied around their necks and they was left hanging from the windows of the Palazzo della Signoria.

The poet Poliziano afterwards wrote of what had happened, stating that when the Archbishop was hung from the window he sank his teeth into the body alongside him and wouldn’t let go. It happened to be Francesco de’ Pazzi, which is the reason why Botticelli shows the horse with its mouth open ready to bite the arm of Giuliano’s assassin. The horse’s dripping ‘saliva’ is a pun on the name Salviati.

There are claims that Poliziano’s story was an exaggeration on his part, Botticelli may also have been referring to the poet’s ‘silver tongue’ when he depicted the ‘tongue-in-cheek’ swelling on Francesco de’ Pazzi’s face!

Further Leonardo connections in the next post.

Two years ago the Uffizi Gallery in Florence unveiled a restored work by Leonardo da Vinci, painted between 1481 and 1482. Commissioned in March 1481 by the Augustinians of San Donato a Scopeto, the painting remained unfinished when Leonardo left Florence to go and work for the duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza.

The Adoration of the Magi was not the only unfinished painting Leonardo left behind. An earlier work also remained in the making – St Jerome in the Wilderness, which is now displayed in the Vatican Museum. Both these paintings are referenced by Sandro Botticelli in one of the many paintings he made depicting the Adoration of the Magi – the version housed with the Leonardo interpretation in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

That 600 years later both Magi paintings are kept under the same roof can only be fortuitous, as they are inextricably linked in a way that has remained unrecorded until now.

Perhaps because of its sketchy state, the confusing compilation of figures and background scenes of conflict, the Leonardo version has proved to be enigmatic to modern age viewers. There isn’t a heavenly angel in sight amongst “the great throng” of people to proclaim the message of peace. The world, it seems, remains in turmoil.

But for Florentines, at the time when Leonardo began to paint the Adoration scene, the world was indeed chaotic. One particular event that shook not only Florence but the whole of Italy, even reverberating through Europe, was the assassination attempt on the Medici brothers, Lorenzo (the Magnificent) and his younger sibling Giuliano. The attack took place on April 26, 1478, during High Mass at the Duomo in Florence. Giuliano was mortally wounded but Lorenzo escaped with only a slight neck wound.

Retribution was swift. Anyone perceived to be connected to what became known as the Pazzi conspiracy was slaughtered in the bloodbath that followed, hence the warring backdrop and sea of confused faces surrounding the Adoration scene in which the Infant Jesus is raised and presented to the kneeling Magi.

The presentation of Jesus, surrounded by mayhem and uncertainty, mirrors the timing of the assassination attempt in the Santa Maria del Fiore. The conspirators had agreed to strike when the bell rung at the time of consecration and raising of the Host during Mass, and when the congregation closed their eyes and bowed their heads in adoration of the True Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Observe the figure at the Virgin’s right shoulder, leaning forward and ringing a small bell. Another figure to note is the man behind the Virgin. He appears to hold a knife in his right hand.

Most historians agree that the standing figure on the extreme right, looking out of the frame, represents Leonardo. The figure standing in the opposite corner, described by historian Joseph Manca as “the unseen scholar” and a philosopher “in the broadest sense” is there to represent Julius Caesar, like his namesake Giuliano, assassinated by multiple stab wounds – 23 in total. Nineteen knife wounds were inflicted on Giuliano and a sword also cleaved his head.

It’s at this stage that we can begin to see the association between Leonardo’s Magi painting and the version featuring the Medici family produced by Botticelli. Which came first? On the basis that Botticelli has picked up on Leonardo’s unfinished painting of St Jerome and also included other elements associated with his contemporary, I would judge that Leonardo’s version came first and Botticelli adapted some of its features in way of a tribute to his departing colleague, echoing the homage and tribute the Magi gave to the Infant King.

Similar to Leonardo, Botticelli has placed his own image in the right corner of his painting, looking away from the Adoration scene. In the facing corner Giuliano de’ Medici strikes a similar pose to Julius Caesar, his thoughts seemingly elsewhere. It is this part of the painting that Botticelli refers to the assassination attempt on the Medici brothers, and also brings to light features which identify with Leonardo.

If it is accepted that both Magi scenes refer to the assassination of Giulio de’ Medici, then the current date attribution of 1475 or 1476 given to the Botticelli version has to be moved back to take into account the date of the murder which took place on April 26, 1478. The painting presents other evidence to point to a date of at least 1480 before it was finished; and if it is also accepted that Botticelli has utilised features from Leonardo’s version, then that would push the date back even further, to at least the latter part of 1481, as Leonardo was not given his commission until March of the same year.

• More on this in my next post.