Leonardo as Verrocchio's Coworker

Abstract

While Raphael quite frequently signed his works, and Michelangelo jealously guarded his artistic property against other artists, it was not in keeping with Leonardo's nature to trouble himself to preserve the authorship of the wealth of ideas which poured out from him. Not only was he amiable by nature, communicative and ready to be of help: the formative arts were but a part of his all-embracing knowledge, perhaps not even, in his own mind, assuming the first importance, to judge from the well-known letter to the duke of Milan where, in enumerating his talents, he names his ability as a painter and sculptor only at the end of the long list. More than with other masters was his artistic work a play—this is shown above all in his drawings—a recreative play in the intervals between fatiguing application to technical or philosophical problems or tasks in the field of natural science. But when he turned to the greater themes of painting or sculpture, he was interested above everything else in the solution of a fundamental problem; when he had succeeded in solving it to his own satisfaction, perhaps only theoretically, he liked to leave the execution of it to others; and what happened further with the work of art, seems to have troubled him but little, much less did it occur to him to sign it. He was so independent and had so little vanity that in the execution of his work the identity of the patron had not the slightest influence with him. He might let princes or popes wait for their commissions, while perhaps the order of a poor friend of art so absorbed him that he worked over it tirelessly day and night. We are reminded of the anecdote of Vasari, which is not without an inner probability: A peasant on the estate of Leonardo's father brought a shield to him one day with the request to have it painted by an artist. Ser Piero da Vinci gave it to his son Leonardo, who took unbelievable pains with it. He planed the shield down, covered it over with stucco, and then gathered together all kinds of beasts and insects, which he used as models. When the shield was finished and his father saw it, he was startled and amazed at the astonishing realism of the representation; he gave the owner of the shield a cheap substitute and kept Leonardo's shield, which he sold later for one hundred ducats to a dealer, who in turn sold it to the duke of Milan for three hundred ducats. On the other hand, Isabella d'Este exerted herself in vain again and again to secure a work by Leonardo, and when he was in Rome, it was not long before he angered the pope by making him wait too long for the execution of an order which it seems did not happen to appeal to him at the moment.