For warfare, arms and armor must, above all, be practical, affording the utmost protection and functionality without impairing body movement because of excess weight or inflexible material. Even such practical equipment, however, was often decorated, care being taken that the decoration would not impede its function.

Cranach took his name from the town of his birth, Kronach, near Bamberg. He was probably trained by his father, the painter Hans Maler. By 1503 he was working among a circle of humanists at the University of Vienna. His earliest known works, created at this time, were characterized by a religious and spiritual intensity and an emphasis on man’s relationship to nature and constituted the beginning of the stylistic movement known as the Danube School.

In 1504 Cranach was called to Wittenberg by Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony. There he developed the smooth, linear style that became the standard form of expression of his large and productive workshop and that determined the appearance of painting in Saxony throughout the sixteenth century. Until his death Cranach served as court artist to Frederick the Wise and successors John the Steadfast and John Frederick the Magnanimous, decorating the elector’s favorite residences, such as the Veste Coburg and Torgau castles, but no traces of his mural paintings survive. In addition to the many portraits of members of the Saxon nobility, produced as woodcuts or painted on panel, Cranach served their more private tastes with small paintings of a tantalizing, mildly erotic nature, showing nude Venuses or Lucretias. After 1508 he used a winged serpent as a signature on his own work and on the products of his workshop. In Wittenberg he was one of the two wealthiest citizens, the result of earnings not only from the workshop but also from the pharmacy, wine store, bookstore, and printer’s shop he owned.

From 1519 to 1545 he served on the Wittenberg city council and was elected burgomaster on three occasions. After Charles V took John Frederick prisoner at the Battle of Mühlberg in 1547, Cranach followed him into exile at Augsburg and Innsbruck, and after the elector’s release in 1552, he accompanied him to Weimar, where the artist died in 1553.

Villa Farnese stands theatrically above terraces joined by enormous horseshoe staircases. The house has five floors; above the basement separate floors were built for clerics, noblemen, knights, and servants. The apartments are decorated with frescoes by the brothers Federico and Taddeo Zuccaro and Antonio Tempesta.

The decision to retain the pentagonal shape of the original foundations created a difficulty for the design of the garden. By 1578 a walled summer garden had been laid out squarely in front of one face and a walled winter garden squarely in front of its neighbour; this design left an awkward triangle between the two gardens. Each of the two gardens was about 70 metres (80 yards) square, and divided into four parterre squares, and they were linked to the principal rooms on the first floor (piano nobile) of the house by bridges. The winter garden had a grotto and a sheltered walk for inclement weather; the summer garden, which is now lined with camellias (and alive with birdsong), was planted with fruit trees, and contained a fish pond with a gilded fountain.

The best feature of the garden lies through a woodland some 365 metres (400 yards) beyond and above the summer garden. There is an ornamental pavilion (the Casino Villino) of a quality matched only by the pair at villa Lante, and behind it is a giardino segreto (finally completed in 1620) that is commonly judged to be the world’s finest; Vasari memorably declared it to have been born rather than built. The garden is approached by a walled ramp, down the centre of which runs a sculpted cascade (catena d’acqua) similar to the one at Villa Lante; at the top of the ramp two river gods lounge against a large fountain. A curved stairway climbs around the fountain to the parterre adjoining the casino. The garden of the casino is enclosed by stone canephori (female caryatides with baskets on their heads) on a low wall, beyond which stand stately cypresses. The ground level is mostly on the level of the floor of the house, and the sense of interpenetration of house and garden is enhanced by the carpeting of the garden with pebble mosaics. The fountains now in the garden are the survivors of a much larger number of fountains adorned with statues that once stood in this superb garden.

The Villa Careggi, in what is now a northern suburb of Florence, is the creation of Cosimo de’Medici the Elder, who in 1457 commissioned Michelozzo di Bartolomeo to convert an old manor house that Cosimo’s brother Giovanni de’Bicci had bought in 1417. In rebuilding the fortified manor house as a contemporary villa, Michelozzo chose to leave much of the original exterior intact, but added a graceful double loggia which overlooked a garden. The garden was intended to revive the ancient Roman villa garden, and so was planted with bay, box, cypress, myrtle, pomegranates, quince, lavender, and scented herbs and flowers; the only post-classical plants were carnations from the Levant and orange and lemon trees from North Africa. One of the fountains added to the garden by Lorenzo de’Medici contained Verrocchio’s bronze Boy with a Dolphin (c.1480), which is now in the court of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.

The Villa Careggi was the home of the loosely constituted Platonic Academy (see academies) over which Marsilio Ficino presided. The foundation of the Academy in the early 1460s was prompted by the admiration for Plato which Cosimo shared with Ficino. Meetings of the Academy, which were a conscious imitation of the meeting in Plato’s Symposium, were patronized by Cosimo and his successors Piero de’Medici) and Lorenzo de’Medici, and were attended by philosophers, scholars, and artists such as Poliziano, Landino, Pico della Mirandola, Brunelleschi, Donatello, and later Michelangelo. Careggi thus became the cradle of humanism.

After Lorenzo’s death and the expulsion of the Medici the villa was vandalized and looted. It was later restored by Bronzino and Pontormo for Alessandro de’Medici and Cosimo I de’Medici. The garden in which the Academy met has since disappeared, and the villa is now part of a hospital complex.

The Medici villa in Fiesole, on a hill overlooking Florence from the north, was constructed by Michelozzo between 1458 and 1461; it was commissioned by Cosimo the Elder for Giovanni, his second son. Massive foundations were dug to secure the house on the steep slope of the hill, and the cellars were used to accommodate stables as well as wine and oil presses and storage rooms. The rooms above included reception rooms, a music room, and a library which were used for entertainment, initially by Giovanni, but more expansively by his nephew Lorenzo de’Medici, who entertained his circle of humanist friends, including Poliziano, who wrote Il rusticus while staying at the villa. The interior decoration of the villa did not survive the ministrations of Lady Walpole, the dowager countess of Oxford, who redecorated it in 1772.

The villa opens out directly onto the upper terrace, which overlooks Florence in the valley below; the original planting on this terrace has been replaced with grass, but the giardino segreto still survives, with its box parterres, subdued fountain, and stone balusters through which can be seen a vista of Florence and the Arno valley. There was originally no access from the upper terrace to the lower terraces, which were reached from the cellars of the house; connecting stairs and ramps were to become a feature of this and other Italian gardens in the sixteenth century. The second terrace is dominated by a pergola flanked on its retaining wall by a raised border; the border and the pergola were part of the original garden, though the original supporting columns of the pergola do not survive. On the lowest terrace an elegant Renaissance garden with a fountain and rectangular parterres surrounded and intersected by box has been reconstructed, but the extent to which this garden replicates the layout of the original is not clear.

The Medici villa in Poggio a Caiano, to the west of Florence, was commissioned in 1480 by Lorenzo de’Medici, who instructed Giuliano da Sangallo to convert the old Villa Ambra (which had previously belonged to the Strozzi and Rucellai families) into a contemporary villa. By 1485 the house had been surrounded by a balustraded loggia which acts as a balcony for the rooms on the first floor (piano nobile). Lorenzo’s son Giovanni (later Pope Leo X) continued to commission additions to the house, notably a six-columned (hexastyle) portico on the first floor, with a frieze and pediment; the structure is modelled on the pedimented temple fronts of classical antiquity, and its use in this building inaugurated the Renaissance revival of the form, which later became the distinguishing feature of Palladio’s buildings. Villas were traditionally built around a court, but at the centre of the Poggio a Caiano villa there is a large two-storey salon with a gilded stucco ceiling (containing the arms of Leo X) and frescoes by Andrea del Sarto and Pontormo which use classical subjects to record and glorify the history of the Medici family.

Charles V was entertained at Poggio a Caiano in 1536, which subsequently became the home of Bianca Capello and her lover (later husband) Francesco, son of Cosimo I de’Medici; they were visited in 1581 by Montaigne. The gardens were uprooted in the nineteenth century to make way for an English garden with a mock-Gothic ruin, and much of the interior was ruthlessly modernized at the same time; Bianca Capello’s beautiful bedroom, however, survives in its original form. The house is now a museum.

The Medici villa at Castello, to the north of Florence, had been in the family for a century when Cosimo I de’Medici commissioned the gardens. The garden was begun c.1540 by Niccolò Tribolo, and completed after his death by Bartolomeo Ammanati and Bernardo Buontalenti. Its design is in some respects anachronistic, in that the garden is shaped as a square enclosed by a wall and planted as a series of rectangular beds with a statue at the centre; this was the layout characteristic of Italian gardens a century earlier. There are, however, distinctive sixteenth-century features: there is a central axis rising to a magnificent grotto (1546–69), and there are many statues (and there were many more, both free-standing and in relief) and fountains. The grotto, which is built into the enclosing wall, is decorated with shell mosaics and fountains in the form of animal statues from whose beaks, ears, noses, and wings water pours. In the Fountain of Hercules and Antaeus, water spews from the mouth of Antaeus as Hercules strangles him; this was the first time that water had been incorporated into the narrative of a sculpture rather than merely issuing from a convenient orifice. A second fountain, Giambologna’s Fountain of Venus squeezing the water from her hair, was removed in the eighteenth century to the nearby Villa Medici in Petraia, and the Fountain of Hercules, which originally stood near the house, was put in its place. The Fountain of Venus had been surrounded by a bosco in the form of a maze of bay, cypress, and myrtle, which meant that the statue emerged from a crown of evergreen; the Fountain of Hercules now in its place stands nakedly above flat geometrical parterres.

The garden still contains some elements of its original layout, but a lunette by Utens and the account given by Montaigne of his visit in 1580 record additional features that have since disappeared. The Utens lunette shows the house standing on a terrace used for riding and jousting, and Montaigne describes a cabinet de verdure (see bosco) with a spring rising from a marble table and also describes giochi d’acqua that could be triggered by remote control at a distance of 200 paces. In Utens’s picture, and in Vasari’s description of the garden, there was a wall decorated with fountains at the back of the main garden, beyond which was a lemon garden. There were giardini segreti on either side of the main garden: the one on the left, according to Montaigne, contained a tree house approached by a stair decorated with ivy that concealed giochi d’acqua that played tunes and squirted visitors; the one on the right, according to Vasari, contained a herb garden. Vasari said that the gardens, had they been completed, would have been the finest in Europe, and singled out the central fountain for particular praise: ‘la più bella fonte e la più ricca, proporzionata e vaga, che sia stata fatta mai’ (‘the most beautiful fountain, the richest, the best proportioned, the most charming that has ever been made’).

The Villa Medici in Rome was built c.1544 on the site of an ancient villa of Lucullus; it was designed by Annibale Ricci for Cardinal Ricci. The villa was subsequently acquired by the Medici family, and has since the early nineteenth century been the home of the Académie de France, which had been founded in Rome in 1666. The most remarkable feature of the villa is its garden, which has preserved its sixteenth-century layout and includes statues (both classical fragments and contemporary stucchi), a mount crowned with cypresses and two ilex boschi (see bosco). In the seventeenth century, Galileo Galilei lived in the villa and John Evelyn visited the gardens, which were painted by Velázquez and Poussin.

Fêtes and Triumphs

Court festivals comprised many entertainments for several days: tournaments, banquets—often enlivened by masquerades, some of which presented the challenge for the joust; plays, with or without interludes; and the social dancing with which each evening ended—often introduced by a masquerade (or morisco, disguising, maskers—all terms for essentially the same type of entertainment). Many of the entertainments had common characteristics: the joust and the masquerade shared a processional element, a romantic framework, and a contest with knights battling in dance or with weapons for their ladies’ favors or to overcome the vile wretches who held their ladies prisoners. Participants in both were brought into the playing area, often on stages, disguised as mountains, elephants, castles, or globes, or on triumphal carts. Developments in one form, therefore, might spread quickly to another and from country to country, since princes were feted in foreign, often conquered, territories (e.g., Spaniards in the Low Countries and Italy, the French in Italy, Henry VIII of England in France).

Some types of festivity were more popular in one place than another; France developed a dance genre, ballet (though it was not the only entertainment favored), while Italy developed a fascination for singing and spectacular stage effects, which when combined resulted in the rise of opera. The evolution of these forms was gradual and related as ballet became a feature of opera for many years. In England, masking faded away around 1530 only to reappear in the reign of Elizabeth I, when it was referred to as masque. Spectacle replaced military prowess in tourneys, transforming them into horse ballets in Italy and France, where water spectacles were also popular. The steadiest development was in the visual arts.

As the easily constructed wood-and-canvas Roman triumphal arches replaced Gothic architecture for royal entries, medieval allegories gave way to classical figures in the entertainments. Festival halls and temporary theaters (stages on wheeled platforms) were transformed into Roman interiors, castles, and mountains that brought maskers into the hall, and these became the triumphal carts of Venus and other deities, suitably costumed. In Italy, these characters were made to descend from the skies amid swirling clouds onto temporary stages graced with mechanically movable scenery—a sight to astonish spectators. These multimedia events developed along with the other arts, as princes called upon architects, poets, musicians, singers, and choreographers to collaborate in making their festivals truly magnificent.

For these events, and in contrast to other forms of art and literature, no rules yet existed; there was extreme flexibility; the entertainment might be performed indoors or out and in any order. The presence of a river might suggest marine gods or naval warfare, as in Rouen in 1550. That city’s trade with the New World also inspired the construction of a Brazilian village complete with fifty South American Indians who went about their daily lives and even conducted a tribal war while Henri II of France watched. In Italy, dramatic interludes (literally, “between the games” or “the play”) rarely had any connection with one another or with the play and could even be performed with several different plays, as was the set performed in Florence in 1589. They could be, and usually were, however, related to the occasion being celebrated.

Most festivals celebrated coronations, weddings, or the visits of other rulers, and the flexibility of the entertainments made them ideal for the expression of political views: praises were sung for the ruler or the bridal pair, while their illustrious ancestors were compared with the glorious heroes or divinities of antiquity. One ruler who used eulogy for specific political aims was Catherine de Médicis. She encouraged the warring Catholic and Protestant nobility to dance out their differences in the presence of a king—as depicted in the famous Balet Comique de la Royne—who was determined to drive discord from his realm. She used the 1565 festival at Bayonne for her daughter, the queen of Spain, to express similar goals. As guests journeyed to a banquet on an island in the river they were entertained by Triton, Neptune in his chariot, Arion on his dolphin, and three Sirens, all of whose songs were of peace and of praise for the two royal families. Charles IX of France headed the champions of Virtue as they fought those of Love in one tournament. In another, he was the courageous knight, as fortunate in peace as in war, who would fulfill Merlin’s prophecy by overcoming innumerable enemies and storming the castle of Bellona, thus rescuing the prisoner, Peace, and restoring the Golden Age. As it happened, the king’s brother was the first to conquer the final defender of the castle, a giant, but the organizers were prepared—a huge cloud descended and deftly whisked him away. The growing elaboration of such entertainments and their evolution into new forms (ballet de cour, opera, masque), coupled with the political aspect, would also be characteristic of baroque fêtes.

Little outdoor dancing occurred at these festivals. In one of the tableaux vivants for the entry of Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire into Bruges in 1515, Pan may have danced a few measures of a branle with his nymphs and satyrs, but this is not certain. During the outdoor banquet at Bayonne, however, the dance of the peasants from various provinces and the ballet that followed it were performed outside.

Most of the dancing at fêtes and triumphs occurred indoors and was based on social dancing. Unfortunately, although there are plot descriptions for the dances, there is no mention of steps or figures. We know that social dances of the time were of two types: (1) the basic dances (including the branle, canarie, courante, galliard, pavan, and volta) and (2) those invented by dancing masters for one or several couples, consisting of some ten figures with several changes of step and rhythm for variety. These masquerades probably consisted of a mixture of dance forms and figures, with unity provided by the plot. For a solemn entrance of ladies or downcast lovers, the processional pavane could be used; for the more lively characters, various branles or even galliards might be used. The semidramatic element usually comprised a love theme and a battle, with knights wooing their ladies and being scorned, fighting their rivals for the ladies’ favors, or rescuing their ladies from giants. The love theme was present in embryo in the various dances for one woman and two men (and vice versa), expressed by the continual turning away from the one toward the other. Thoinot Arbeau mentioned a courante for three couples in which the men cajole their partners. This basic material could be expanded and developed for a masquerade. Fighting could be represented by a battle moresca (a dance originally symbolizing battling Moors and Christians, not the masquerade-like entertainment), by a Morris, or by sword dances such as buffins. In Fabritio Caroso’s “Battaglia,” the dancers’ steps and postures symbolize attacks with various weapons.

“Battaglia” introduces the genre of mime dancing. The moves in the battle dances are highly stylized and strictly choreographed; even the Maltese branle, which according to Arbeau was invented for a masquerade, had stylized mime gestures, as did a 1576 French ballet. Yet to judge by later ballet de cour entries, the theme would be conveyed more by the costumes and the livret than by the way of dancing. It may be that mime played a part in some sections of an entertainment but not in most. It would be absent from the final dances of rejoicing, which would be figured, sometimes including geometric forms. These might lead to spelling out the prince’s name as a fitting conclusion to the festivities.

If Luther’s remark displays an element of defensiveness, subsequent events demonstrate why. Arguments over post-Reformation cultural decline became a standard theme in Protestant-Catholic polemics, one that endured down to the twentieth century. Fortunately a number of factors have combined over the past several decades to render the topic of the Reformation and art much less controversial. The improved relations between churches, resulting from the modern ecumenical movement, left their mark upon the writing of history. Perhaps even more of a moderating influence resulted from a greater participation in the discussion by two groups of secular scholars. Academic specialists in early modern European history gradually have overcome some inhibitions against systematic use of visual evidence. Art historians, for their part, appear in many instances to have laid aside earlier reservations regarding serious study of the often didactic or polemical and sometimes aesthetically mediocre artistic creations of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Researchers from both disciplines have begun to make more systematic use of methodological insights derived from the social sciences. All of this bodes well for the future, which should witness a continued expansion of our knowledge.

The question of religious art represents an important area of disagreement among early Protestants. Luther developed his views on images largely in reaction to the attacks made on them by more radical reformers, particularly the iconoclastic teachings published from the early 1520s by his Wittenberg faculty colleague Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt. Unlike Karlstadt, Luther did not regard actual image idolatry as a widespread problem. Nor did Luther share the notion that the image prohibition of the Old Testament remained strictly in force for Christians, preferring to think that it formed part of the Jewish ceremonial law abrogated by the coming of Christ. Furthermore, Luther repudiated any body-spirit dualism that might seem to invalidate reliance upon physical aids in worship. Ultimately for the reformer the use or nonuse of religious images fell in the realm of Christian liberty.

Luther, in fact, viewed mental image making as a natural part of the human psyche, a necessity for humans to visualize that about which they think. Religious art follows as a natural extension of people’s inherent tendency to form mental images, and the creations of the painter’s and sculptor’s craft possessed definite value for the evangelizing mission of the church. Luther endorsed the medieval conception of visual illustrations as forming a layperson’s Bible. In his view children and simple folk are “more apt to retain the divine stories when taught by picture and parable than merely by words or instruction.” The Wittenberg reformer ultimately acquired a high regard for the pedagogical potential of pictorial compositions, emphasizing their usefulness for enlivening the understanding and for refreshing the memory.

Luther’s moderately positive views on religious imagery gained lasting acceptance only in those lands where his theology provided the doctrinal basis for the emerging established churches. Meanwhile, the iconoclastic ideas of Karlstadt had reached Switzerland, where, mediated through the work of another radical author, Ludwig Hätzer, they influenced the developing thought of the Zurich reformer Huldrych Zwingli.

Zwingli denied that the question of images in churches belonged to the realm of religious liberty, thus refuting the notion that Christians were free to choose whether to have them. For him the image prohibition in the Old Testament remained fully binding. This was necessary owing to the fact that, because of people’s natural inclination to false worship, virtually all images placed in churches inevitably ended up becoming idols. This proved particularly true of images of Christ.

Zwingli did not totally reject the possibility of an art with religious subject matter. Pictures of Jesus and other biblical themes might be allowed—outside of churches—so long as they were regarded merely as historical representations, were not employed as devotional aids, and did not give rise to feelings of reverence.

John Calvin also made a fundamental contribution to the emerging Reformed doctrine of images. The Genevan theologian assigned to the Old Testament image prohibition the status of an independent (second) commandment within the Decalogue, allowing him to emphasize to an unprecedented degree the scriptural ban on idolatry. According to some scholars, however, of greater importance than any biblical legalism for Calvin was his concern with restoring a properly spiritual form of worship. The utter transcendence of God ruled out any attempt to bring him down to man’s level through the medium of visual portraiture. Efforts directed to this end, the reformer believed, seek to domesticate God and deprive him of his glory. In place of the image he emphasized the centrality of the divine word. As a consequence, wall inscriptions from the Bible were the only embellishments allowed to adorn churches. Calvin did permit, however, the representation of narrative biblical scenes—except those with pictures of God—as long as their use was restricted to the sphere of private homes. He also recognized historical themes and landscapes as proper subjects for secular art, which was viewed as a gift from the divine creator. Because of this, some have credited him with providing one source of inspiration for the realistic Dutch painting of the following century.

From an early stage in the Reformation, German Protestants, especially those influenced by Luther, began to employ the representational arts for the advancement of their polemical and pedagogical goals. Images printed from wood blocks offered an especially serviceable medium owing to their low cost and capacity for large-scale reproduction. Enormous numbers of these inexpensive woodcuts circulated throughout Europe. Since their use and enjoyment did not require literacy, it may be safely assumed that these visual materials appealed to an audience covering a much wider social spectrum than was the case with written texts.

Independent woodcut pictures of Luther by an assortment of artists began to appear in great quantities almost from the beginning of the Reformation movement. Most of these likenesses patterned themselves on a few basic prototypes drawn from life by Lucas Cranach the Elder, who served as court artist for Luther’s prince, Frederick III of Saxony. Protestant portraits of Luther during this early period typically depicted their subject in one of the following religious roles: pious monk, doctor of theology, man of the Bible, evangelical prophet, or saint. Their intent included investing the reformer with a special spiritual authority, thereby justifying his break with Rome, as well as inducing others to follow his lead.

Many of the Reformation-era Luther portraits inevitably came to be regarded as a form of visual polemics. Indeed, polemical art constitutes the rubric under which a great number of the most effective woodcuts of the period must be grouped. In fashioning these works, Protestant propagandists freely borrowed themes from the popular beliefs and popular culture of the time, a practice that lent their creations the advantage of familiarity and accessibility. Traditional anticlericalism provided such a motif, one gaining new life in the often bitterly satiric attacks on monks and nuns found in evangelical art. Two further examples, demonology and fascination with monsters, came together in numerous woodcut compositions depicting leaders of the Catholic church in animal or bestial form in order to suggest their satanic origins.

Naturally, Reformation polemicists sought inspiration from scripture as well. For example, the Bible offered helpful resources for those hoping to show a radical antithesis between the evangelical simplicity of Christ’s life and the corruption said to characterize the curia Romana. Attacks on the papacy ultimately secured their place as the dominant theme finding expression in Protestant polemical art.

Works of the graphic arts produced by early German Protestants, of course, undertook to present both positive and negative subjects; many strove to teach and promote acceptance of the evangelicals’ own beliefs. This body of pedagogical art pursued two main goals—to communicate the key doctrines of the Protestant reform and to assist in the creation of a new church with a clear sense of identity and mission. Giving visual embodiment to abstract theological tenets proved difficult. Probably the most successful of the doctrinal compositions were those illustrating the polarity of law and gospel in Lutheran teaching. Cranach developed the standard iconographic formula for this purpose at the end of the 1520s, and over the next half century it found widespread use in the evangelical lands influenced by Wittenberg. The concept of a new church, on the other hand, found pictorial expression in works portraying the act of preaching to an assembly of believers or in compositions commemorating the Lutheran sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

Although Lutheran Bible and book illustrations sometimes employed the same imagery as that found in independent woodcuts and engravings, they nonetheless constitute a separate category of Reformation art meriting brief mention. Visual imagery accompanied the publication of Luther’s Bible translations from the very beginning. His first German New Testament in 1522 included 21 woodcut illustrations. The initial edition of Luther’s complete German Bible, published in 1534, contained 118. By the time of Luther’s death in 1546 more than 500 different pictorial compositions had been created for inclusion in the various Wittenberg editions of the reformer’s Bible. With regard to the selection of New Testament texts to illustrate, Luther and his publishers displayed a surprising conformity to tradition. As a result, the gospel books generally received only evangelist portraits, and the epistles fared no better. The majority of the New Testament woodcuts, in all the early Lutheran Bibles, adorned a single scriptural book, Revelation. Greater originality characterized the Wittenberg approach to artistic embellishment of the Old Testament. This applied most conspicuously to writings of the prophets, which now were given more attention than was common among medieval illuminators. Luther and his collaborators exercised astonishing freedom in their interpretations, placing explicitly New Testament scenes into the background of these compositions as an overt statement of their belief that the ancient Hebrew prophets already foretold the life and passion of Christ.

In addition to the Bible translations, several other early Lutheran publications typically acquired woodcut illustrations. These included Luther’s Large Catechism, prayer book, postils (sermon collections), and hymnals. Generally speaking, tradition and perhaps theological scruples exerted a less restrictive influence on the selection of pictorial matter for these works than was the case with scripture editions.

Besides employing the graphic media, German Protestants linked with Wittenberg also made fairly extensive use of certain of the more monumental art forms, particularly oil painting and relief sculpture. The following discussion focuses on panel paintings, altarpieces, decorated pulpits, and pictorial epitaphs. All four categories were well established in earlier art tradition but experienced somewhat altered treatment from the early Lutherans.

The earliest group of German paintings reflecting a distinctly Lutheran point of view consisted of independent panels produced by the Cranach workshop, beginning at the end of the 1520s. Most important among them iconographically are three groups of works entitled The Law and the Gospel, Christ and the Adulteress, and Christ Blessing the Children. The Law and Gospel motif, which simultaneously found wide use in pedagogical woodcuts, has already been noted above. The Christ and the Adulteress compositions appear to have used a familiar biblical story to advance a doctrinal message similar to that of works in the preceding group, asserting that salvation comes through divine grace and not through human deeds. Although the popularity of the Christ Blessing the Children works is customarily attributed to the possibilities it offers for the polemical defense of infant baptism, it, too, may have been intended, in part at least, as a good example of the simple, childlike trust in God implied by Luther’s doctrine of salvation by faith alone.

A substantial number of Lutheran altarpieces were introduced into evangelical churches from the late 1530s. Although sometimes contributed by Protestant princes or municipal councils, these often were commissioned and installed by private donors—that is, wealthy laypersons who may have been motivated by a mixture of religious piety, family pride, and civic patriotism. Although the size and form of such works varied considerably, many proved to be large, imposing constructions. The traditional triptych design, with painted wing panels and predella, continued for a time to be popular. From the 1550s fixed altars with stone or wood relief sculpture also found increasing use.

Clearly the new Lutheran altarpieces differed from their late medieval forerunners not so much in configuration or format as in iconography. Many traditional Catholic themes, of course, were abandoned—above all, Mariological motifs and the lives of the saints. There arose an almost exclusive reliance on scriptural sources, with special emphasis upon the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The most widely used subject of all seems to have been the Last Supper, despite the fact that the theme appeared relatively infrequently in earlier altarpiece art. Luther himself called special attention to the appropriateness of portraying this biblical event on altars designated for the sacrament of Holy Communion.

Celebration of the Sacrament was closely linked to proclamation of the word in Lutheranism, and accordingly the pulpit received fresh attention in the Reformation. Hundreds of new stone and wood preaching platforms, most of them adorned with relief sculpture or paintings, were erected in the Lutheran churches of central and northern Germany in the century following the break with Rome. The iconography displayed on these pulpits differed from that on other evangelical art works in relatively minor ways—for example, in the more frequent depiction of the four evangelists, a theme that was traditional in such settings.

The largest single group of art objects placed in Lutheran churches in sixteenth-century Germany was formed by epitaph monuments. These consisted of artistically conceived memorials honoring the deceased and normally containing three parts: a portrait, a painted or sculptured representation of a religious theme, and a commemorative inscription. Although Lutherans normally needed only one altar or pulpit in a church, there existed no fixed limit upon the number of epitaphs that might be installed. In some instances these funerary monuments may have compensated for side altars and chapels that had become superfluous with the advent of the Reformation. The iconography of the Lutheran epitaphs offers little that is new; the themes are drawn either from traditional biblical subjects or from the corpus of evangelical motifs already encountered in panel painting and altarpiece art.

In contrast, in the Protestant art of the northern Netherlands, there was a set of circumstances differing markedly from those existing in Germany. The Reformed churches that ultimately came to dominate there adopted a largely Calvinist theology and thus demonstrated little sympathy for the creation or installation of works of ecclesiastical art. Occasional exceptions—including some new stained glass, sculptured tomb monuments for a few very distinguished parishioners, and painted organ shutters—do not substantially alter the generally accepted view of a worship community devoted to simplicity and even austerity in church furnishings. Consequently, religious painting depended upon private patronage and was subject to no ecclesiastical control. These factors, however, make it all the more difficult to identify which art works should be labeled Protestant, particularly since it is now known that Dutch Calvinism grew very slowly, with the result that a confessionally mixed population endured far longer than used to be thought. Catholic artists continued to practice in the northern Netherlands even in the seventeenth century.

Despite the difficulties of evaluating Dutch religious art, it does seem possible to single out a number of iconographic motifs whose popularity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries probably should be linked with spiritual ideas or practices deriving from the Reformation, even if the artists involved in their creation were not in every instance orthodox Protestants. One such theme derives from the parable of the prodigal son. The immense popularity of this subject is recorded in one index of Netherlandish art that lists well over a hundred examples. Some of these depicted the biblical story in a predominantly moralistic sense. Others, however, including Rembrandt’s famous painting now in Leningrad, seem to have followed Protestant commentators from Luther and Calvin onward, who interpreted the scriptural text and above all its characterization of the forgiving father as a demonstration of God’s unmerited grace.

Another theme that enjoyed unprecedented favor among Netherlandish artists of the Reformation era derives from the biblical story of the calling of Matthew. In this narrative of Jesus’ summoning of a sinful tax collector to Christian apostleship, Calvin had perceived a striking illustration of the grace of God. Other sixteenth-century evangelicals saw in the text a foreshadowing of their own later call to reform. It seems to have been mainly artists sympathetic to this point of view who turned their talents to reproducing the gospel story in visual form.

The Bible, of course, describes a spiritual turnabout even more famous than that experienced by the evangelist Matthew—the conversion of Paul. This dramatic Damascus road episode also offered congenial subject matter for Netherlandish artists influenced by the reform movement. Paul’s scriptural writings contain the most explicit discussion of justification by faith found in the Bible, and Protestants, beginning with Luther, repeatedly had turned to them for theological confirmation of their own teachings. The apostle could scarcely avoid being regarded as a spiritual hero by evangelicals. Some, including Rembrandt, seem to have personally identified with him. This may explain the existence of almost a dozen pictures of Paul by the Dutch painter, at least one of which depicts the conversion.

Netherlandish artists inspired by the Reformation also gave new or unusual prominence to certain other iconographic motifs—the raising of Lazarus, the preaching of Jesus and John the Baptist, and the family saying grace. Like other religious themes, however, these found expression in art works destined for personal use rather than placement in churches.

The Protestant assault on ecclesiastical art naturally provoked a defense of religious imagery from the opposing side. The earliest Catholic writings of the Reformation era on this theme arose in Germany during 1522 and were stimulated by Karlstadt’s major iconoclastic manifesto, which was published that year. Over the next four decades a number of authors from several countries contributed further treatises to the gradually intensifying debate over images. The most influential Catholic statements on religious art, however, appeared only after the Council of Trent had issued its ruling on the matter. By then Calvinist iconoclasm, above all in France, had become a sufficiently serious problem that a decisive statement clearly was needed—a fact that helps explain Trent’s decision finally to address this issue. For it was not until the last session of the assembly that the conciliar fathers issued their decree “De invocatione, veneratione, et reliquiis sanctorum, et sacris imaginibus” (On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints, and on Sacred Images; 3–4 December 1563).

The Council of Trent’s brief declaration on images consists of two parts, the first containing a defense of ecclesiastical art and the second addressing abuses that might arise in its use. It unequivocally affirms that honor and veneration are to be given to likenesses of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and other saints, though not because of any divinity or special virtue residing in them. The honor shown to images passes to the prototypes or subjects that they represent. Further, the decree declares images to be useful because they instruct the people and remind them of God’s blessings; because they provide salutary examples from the lives of the saints, in imitation of which the faithful may fashion their own lives and conduct; and because they help promote the love of God and the cultivation of piety.

Next follows a treatment of potential abuses, perhaps partly motivated by the hope that their prevention might deflect Protestant criticism. The representation of false doctrine receives censure, especially “such as might be the occasion of grave error to the uneducated.” The decree also commands the elimination of any superstition that might be associated with the use of images. Finally, all lasciviousness must be avoided. Oversight is placed squarely in the hands of the bishops, under whose responsibility it falls to ensure that nothing disorderly, unbecoming, profane, or disrespectful appears in the house of God. This highly significant call for an expanded role of the bishops echoes several earlier Catholic treatises on images, as well as the previous pronouncements of provincial church councils.

The Tridentine decree on images, viewed as a whole, takes on the aspect of a concise, moderate, and practical Catholic response to one of the burning questions of the Reformation. It breaks no new doctrinal ground and leaves unaddressed certain intra-Catholic disputes of long standing—for example, that concerning the proper degrees of veneration to be accorded to various types of images. The emphasis falls upon instruction and the addressing of concrete problems. The major weakness of the pronouncement lies in its brevity, no doubt partly explained by the circumstances of its composition. The failure to furnish more details, however, made inevitable the appearance of further discussions of the topic, in which there would be provided refinement and elaboration of the conciliar decree.

In fact, a large number of important Counter-Reformation writings on religious art and the image question made their appearance in the decades following Trent. Although some of these continued in a polemical vein, the better known and more significant of them concerned themselves primarily with interpreting and augmenting the Tridentine decree for the benefit of the Catholic community itself. Among authors contributing to the latter group, the two most important were Johannes Molanus, professor of theology at the University of Louvain, and Gabriele Paleotti, a reforming cardinal and bishop of Bologna. Molanus’s major work first appeared in 1570, while Paleotti’s came out in 1582. Further treatises of note were contributed by G. A. Gilio da Fabriano (1564), Carlo Borromeo (1577), Raffaele Borghini (1584), and Antonio Possevino (1593). Despite individual emphases, these works develop a number of common themes.

Trent’s call for doctrinal orthodoxy in religious art found agreement in the statements of later Catholic authors. This could take the form of a denunciation of specific iconographic motifs that were considered theologically objectionable. Molanus, for example, attacked the practice of depicting the preformed body of the Christ Child descending from heaven to the Virgin in paintings of the Annunciation. Orthodoxy would be preserved by the artist adhering to scripture or other approved religious sources and not indulging in uncontrolled flights of imagination. Molanus acknowledged that artists could fill in missing information not provided in the text, but they must do so intelligently and in accord with church tradition.

There existed a widespread consensus on the need for accuracy, clarity, and simplicity in religious compositions. Gilio and Borghini agreed that beauty must not take precedence over accuracy of representation, as, for example, in martyrdom scenes. Paleotti argued that historical accuracy was particularly essential in biblical pictures; there can be no credibility in a crucified Christ who shows no evidence of suffering or wounds. The saints must be portrayed true to life if they are to be effectively imitated. Paleotti coupled a strong demand for clarity with an attack on its opposite; obscurity in a visual representation constituted a sin against the essential didactic function of art. Finally, there was the need for simplicity, without which (as Borghini noted) the visual message would not be accessible to the illiterate.

Decorum and decency both received strong endorsements from all these authors. Decorum was understood to mean that everything in a composition must be appropriate to the subject matter portrayed, the intended audience, and the place where it was to be displayed. Indecency in an artwork obviously constituted a major breach of decorum; indeed, it has been asserted that following Trent the decency of images was as closely watched as their orthodoxy. The problem assumed its most notorious form with regard to the matter of nudity in paintings and sculpture. Molanus contributed important comments on this question; it was he, for example, who pointed out that indecent (nude) images represented a total distortion of the purpose of religious art, which was to arouse the pious devotion of the people. He even opposed naked pictures of the Christ Child for fear that youthful spectators might be corrupted.

The iconography of Catholic art as it developed in the later sixteenth and seventeenth century represented a conscientious response to the needs of the Catholic church during the post-Tridentine era. There were old doctrines to be reaffirmed and new saints to be honored. There appeared a tendency to proclaim the very teachings that had been most disputed by the Protestants, which in certain instances meant that visual motifs that had held only modest importance now took on greater prominence. Moreover, a few subjects arose that were entirely original.

Among the sacraments challenged by Protestants, two in particular figured in Catholic art—the Eucharist and penance. The former, which frequently appeared in paintings under the form of the Last Supper motif, now usually featured Jesus’ consecration of the Communion wafer and asserted by implication the disputed doctrine of transubstantiation. The same dogmatic point found bold affirmation in a number of allegorical compositions dramatically celebrating the triumph of the Sacrament and including an exhibition of the elevated chalice or monstrance. Works displaying the last communion of a saint also enjoyed considerable favor.

The sacrament of penance, also the occasion of much controversy in the Reformation, now received heightened attention in Catholic art. But rather than representing the rite itself (confession and absolution), the most popular approach involved depicting the remorse of individual penitents. Most frequently portrayed were Mary Magdalene, believed to have been a converted harlot; Peter, whose tears reminded the viewer of that disciple’s denial of his Lord; and the prodigal son, from Jesus’ parable. All three functioned as symbols of the sacrament, as well as exemplary models of moral contrition.

A desire to provoke emulation also apparently gave rise to many of the numerous martyrdom scenes found in Counter-Reformation art. This is particularly true of the earlier and more explicit ones dating from the 1580s and 1590s, which were often the subject of either wall frescoes or altarpieces created for Jesuit churches and seminaries. Ignatius Loyola’s militant followers in the Society of Jesus regarded the viewing of images of earlier Christian heroics as useful in overcoming their own impending trials and tribulations. Martyrs and martyrdom remain an important iconographic theme as one moves into the baroque art of the seventeenth century. During the later period, however, there can be detected a diminution of interest in the graphic details of physical suffering and an enlarged concern with illuminating the spiritual exaltation of those who had overcome pain and death.

The hagiographic tradition of the church, of course, included many saints who were not actually martyrs. Some of the most popular of these—for example, Francis—continued to attract frequent attention from painters and sculptors. By the 1620s their ranks had swelled to admit several newly canonized heroes of the faith—Borromeo, Teresa of Ávila, Filippo Neri, Ignatius Loyola, and Francis Xavier. All quickly found their way onto the list of most favored subjects for Catholic artists.

Among those deemed worthy of veneration, the Virgin Mary, as would be expected, continued to occupy a special position. Visual images of the Virgin’s bodily assumption into heaven, alone or combined with the Immaculate Conception, gained greatly in popularity. Immaculate Conception compositions experienced extraordinary popularity, above all in Spain during the seventeenth century.

Finally, brief note should be taken of a number of additional themes, whether new or only newly emphasized, that enjoyed considerable currency in Counter-Reformation art. These include guardian angels, often shown as protectors of the young; Joseph, husband of the Virgin depicted as a worthy example of paternal devotion; founder portraits, commemorating the origins of pre-Reformation ascetic orders; the ecstasies of the visionaries and mystics of the church; and the works of charity and mercy.

The Reformation and Counter-Reformation clearly had a considerable effect upon the visual arts, beginning with a significant impact upon demand. Large-scale works of painting and sculpture designed for churches, which previously had provided vast employment for artists, lost their markets in regions adopting Reformed Protestantism. Lutherans, to be sure, continued to commission ecclesiastical monuments, but on a greatly reduced scale. On the other hand, the graphic arts—above all, woodcuts—for a time enjoyed significantly enlarged usage, as they were called into service to advance the polemical and pedagogical purposes of the early evangelical movement.

The iconographic repertoire of European art also underwent change, expanding in some directions and contracting in others. The largest losses, of course, occurred in Protestantism through the rejection of what was regarded as nonscriptural subject matter. Nonetheless, evangelicals, to the extent that they continued to use religious images, demonstrated tendencies found also in Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Both combined a modest degree of iconographic innovation with a pronounced inclination to give new interpretations or new prominence to visual motifs already at hand in the Christian tradition.

Beyond these considerations there remains an interesting question concerning the extent to which artists were prompted to shift to more secular subject matter in order to compensate for lost opportunities in religious art. But this opens up a topic extending beyond the scope of this essay.

1. Life.

In 1467 he enrolled as master in the Ghent painters’ guild, sponsored by Joos van Wassenhove, master painter in Ghent in 1464 after registering in Antwerp in 1460. In 1469 the two together acted as guarantors for the illuminator Sanders Bening when he became a master, and it was from Hugo that Joos borrowed money when he went to Rome. Sanders Bening was married to Kathelijn van der Goes, perhaps Hugo’s sister. Hugo’s status within the guild is further attested by the fact that he was guarantor for two other painters in 1471 and 1475, that he was one of the dean’s jurors in 1468–9 and that he himself served as dean from towards the end of 1473–4 to at least 18 August 1475. He was employed regularly by the town of Ghent between 1468 and 1474 for the decorative ephemera essential to the pageants of public life.

Van der Goes’s reputation extended beyond Ghent, for he was one of the many painters called to Bruges for the celebrations on the marriage of Charles the Bold with Margaret of York in 1468. His pay of 14 sols a day compares unfavourably with the 20 sols plus 3 sols expenses paid to Daniel de Rijke, another Ghent painter. In 1480, however, when the town of Leuven employed him to evaluate paintings left unfinished when Dieric Bouts died in 1475, he was honoured with a gift of wine and was described in the accounts as one of the most notable painters to be found.

By this date, Hugo had become a frater conversus, or lay brother, in the monastery of the Rode Klooster in the Forêt de Soignes near Brussels, where his half-brother Nicholas was also a monk. The precise year of Hugo’s entry is not recorded. Between May 1473 and May 1477, he was the tenant of a house in the St Pieters Nieuwstraat in Ghent belonging to the van der Sickele family, and he last appears in their accounts in March 1478. He may have stopped living there somewhat earlier, for Gaspar Ofhuys, who joined the Rode Klooster in 1475, maintained that he and Hugo were novices together. Ofhuys discussed Hugo at length in his early 16th-century chronicle of the monastery, not so much for the painter’s fame, which was so great that ‘people used to say that he had no equal this side of the Alps’, as for the moral lessons to be drawn from his lapse into insanity. According to Ofhuys, Hugo was travelling back from Cologne, some five or six years after becoming a monk, when conviction of his damnation drove him to frenzy and he had to be restrained from injuring himself. He was treated gently on his return and recovered, only to die shortly afterwards.

Ofhuys’s account reveals that Hugo continued to practise as a painter after entering the monastery and to attract the attention of the great of the world, who came to see his pictures and gossiped about his madness. He was given special privileges to entertain his visitors, among them Archduke Maximilian, and Ofhuys concluded that, in trying to achieve the anonymity of the cloister, Hugo actually acquired greater personal fame. Hugo seems to have accepted that he was guilty of pride, since he renounced any special favours when he recovered from his illness and lived as the others, ‘continually reading in a Flemish book’. Anxiety about his art may have contributed to his madness, for ‘he was deeply troubled by the thought of how he would ever finish the works of art he had to paint, and it was said then that nine years would scarcely suffice’. He was buried simply in the cloister under the open sky, but in his epitaph Art was told to lament, for his equal would never be found.

5. Tradition and innovation.

Hugo’s popularity may have resulted from his assimilation of established conventions, which made his new formulations of existing types and subjects stimulating but not shocking. His advances in landscape construction and in the exploitation of its expressive potential can be set within a developing trend to which he gave new impetus. The written evidence makes David and Abigail, with its landscape setting, his most famous painting. Abigail was a type for the Virgin but an unusual choice for an independent scene, perhaps selected as much for its pictorial possibilities as its meaning. The two other Old Testament subjects associated with Hugo also require landscapes: Jacob and Rachel and Hagar Driven into the Desert, partially recorded in a drawing (Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.). He also set the Virgin and Child in a landscape, if van Mander’s description of an epitaph painting in the St Jacobskerk, Ghent, can be believed, a type increasingly adopted in the later part of the century.

While Hugo clearly learnt from the Ghent Altarpiece and other Eyckian models, his landscapes also reflect more recent north Netherlandish tradition. The apparently early David and Abigail, judging by surviving versions, used Bouts’s device of overlapping hills to establish recession, whereas the Fall of Man and Jacob and Rachel share an ability to unite foreground, middle ground and background and to set figures in, not against, landscape. The flatter, more continuous landscapes were achieved through lowering the viewpoint and giving a new emphasis to the middle ground, bringing buildings forward from their usual place on the horizon and giving them a contemporary appearance to relate them to the viewer’s experience of the actual world. This device can be seen in Jacob and Rachel and the St Hippolytus donor wing (Bruges, St Salvator) and the small landscapes of the Monforte Adoration and Portinari Altarpiece.

In the Nativity the Annunciation to the Shepherds appears in a background landscape, where the hovering angel is the light source irradiating the shepherds. Hugo seems to have been the originator of a nocturnal Nativity, where light from the Child in the manger dramatically lit the Virgin and other worshippers, with the annunciating angel as a subsidiary light source in a similar background incident, as seen in versions attributed to Gerard David and Michel Sittow (both Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.) and in the Grimani Breviary and other Ghent–Bruges manuscripts. The extreme contrasts of light and dark would have been awkwardly conveyed in a drawing, and the original must thus have been a painting accessible at least to the initiator of the chain of imitations and variants.

Hugo seems to have been most faithfully copied in his half-length compositions, which were smaller and more easily exactly repeatable. He did not invent the half-length narrative, for van der Weyden had originated a half-length Descent from the Cross, but he does seem to have used the form more than any of his predecessors and with an inventiveness only exceeded by Bosch. Some seem to have been reworkings of larger compositions: an Adoration of the Magi (versions in New York, Met.; Copenhagen, Nmus.) is closely related to the Monforte Adoration, and another Nativity (version Wilton House, Wilts) is related to the Nativity (Berlin, Gemäldegal.).

Hugo’s most famous half-length, to judge from the 200 odd copies still extant, was a broad format Descent from the Cross (versions Naples, Capodimonte; Amsterdam, Rijksmus.), perhaps derived from his lost Descent from the Cross altarpiece that stood in the St Jacobskerk, Bruges. The gold back wall with a cornice, some of the figures and their restricted grouping are taken from van der Weyden’s great Descent from the Cross (Madrid, Prado). Here and in the half-length diptych with the Descent, which has slightly more movement, Hugo successfully abstracted iconic images from narrative, the diptych form allowing a perfect balance between the two focal-points, Christ on the left wing, the Virgin on the right. Versions of both compositions of the Descent from the Cross, attributable to Hugo’s workshop, if not his own hand, survive on cloth (fragment of horizontal format, Oxford, Christ Church Pict. Gal.), and these smaller, close-up compositions were more widely available than the great altarpieces and also more accessible as visual and emotional experiences. That the most successful was derived in composition as well as type from van der Weyden demonstrates again how Hugo, inspired but not restricted by Rogier’s dominating influence, came to rank with him as a creator of patterns central to the development of Netherlandish art.

Although he brought relatively few works to completion, and even fewer have survived, Leonardo was responsible for some of the most influential images in the history of art. The ‘Mona Lisa’ (Paris, Louvre) may fairly be described as the world’s most famous painting. When the extent of his writings on many branches of science became increasingly apparent during the 19th century, he appeared to epitomize the idea of the universal genius and was hailed as one of the prophets of the modern era. More recent assessments of his intellectual achievements have recognized the medieval and Classical framework on which his theories were constructed but have done nothing to detract from the awesome range and intensity of his thought.

Life and works

Leonardo’s father, Ser Piero da Vinci (d 1504), came from a family of property owners and notaries in the Tuscan hill-town of Vinci. Leonardo was the illegitimate first child of Ser Piero and Caterina, who later married a local man. His father subsequently married four times. Tax returns and other references indicate that Leonardo was brought up in his paternal grandfather’s house, as a member of an extended family, and enjoyed a particularly close relationship with his uncle Francesco da Vinci. His father pursued a successful career as a notary and from 1469 appears to have been more or less permanently based in Florence with a flourishing legal practice, including work for the Florentine government.

First Florentine period, 1472–c. 1482.

The first reference to Leonardo as an artist occurs in 1472, when he was required to pay his dues to the painters’ Compagnia di S Luca in Florence. His apprenticeship in the studio of the sculptor Andrea Verrocchio is recorded by Vasari and confirmed by a reference in 1476 to his continued residence there, but the date at which this apprenticeship started is unknown. Verrocchio’s workshop, which undertook a wide range of commissions, including sculpture in bronze, stone and terracotta, decorative work in metals and various stones, paintings and at least one major feat of engineering (the orb on the top of the lantern of Florence Cathedral), provided a solid grounding for Leonardo’s subsequent versatility. Verrocchio was himself an inventive artist, particularly in figure sculpture, in which he pioneered a freedom of movement and viewpoint.

The first dated indication of Leonardo’s ability as an artist is a remarkable pen-and-ink drawing of a Tuscan Landscape dated 5 August 1473 (Florence, Uffizi), which already signals an exceptional talent and mind at work. The subsequent record of his activities before his move to Milan c. 1482 is sparse. In 1476 he was accused anonymously of sodomy, but no prosecution was sustained. His receipt of an official commission in January 1478 for an altarpiece in the chapel of S Bernardo in the Palazzo della Signoria indicates his growing reputation. The altarpiece was not executed by Leonardo and was eventually supplied by Filippino Lippi (Florence, Uffizi). The note on one of his drawings, the Studies of Heads and Machines (1478; Florence, Uffizi), saying that he ‘began two Virgin Marys’, probably refers to small panels rather than the altarpiece. A year later he made an annotated drawing of the Hanged Body of Bernardo Baroncelli (Bayonne, Mus. Bonnat), the murderer of Giuliano de’ Medici, brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, which may have been connected with a project to depict the traitors on the outside of the Palazzo del Podestà in the customary manner. The second recorded commission from this period was in March 1481 for an altarpiece in S Donato a Scopeto. Although the subject is not recorded, the unfinished panel of the Adoration of the Magi (Florence, Uffizi) was almost certainly intended for this destination. Filippino Lippi subsequently provided a completed altarpiece of the same subject (Florence, Uffizi).

Leonardo da Vinci: Adoration of the Magi, oil on panel, 2.43×2.46 m, c. 1481 (Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi);

The visual record of Leonardo’s work from this first Florentine period includes a remarkable group of inventive drawings for varied artistic projects. These, together with notes and an inventory of works completed just before or after his arrival in Milan , also show the first signs of the broadening range of his interests. The surviving drawings illustrate machinery (including the precise gearing of scientific instruments), aspects of military engineering, as well as optical phenomena and geometry, and the inventory lists studies made from nature, detailed representations of surface anatomy, portrait and compositional drawings, together with ‘some machines for ships’ and ‘some machines for water’. Besides the drawings, there is a small body of paintings that can be attributed in whole or in part to him (see §II, 1 below).

First Milanese period, c. 1482–99.

At some date after the last recorded payment from S Donato for the Adoration of the Magi (Sept 1481), Leonardo left Florence for Milan. He is not firmly documented there until April 1483, but it is likely that he moved during the course of 1482. In the draft of the letter in which he outlined his talents to Ludovico Sforza (‘il Moro’), ruler of Milan and Duke of Bari, he concentrated on his capabilities as a military engineer, promising to ‘apprise you of my secrets’ (Cod. Atlantico, fol. 391r). He listed ten categories of military devices for use on land and sea, ranging from bridges and tunnels to guns and mortars ‘outside the common use’. Only at the end of the letter did he mention that he could ‘undertake sculpture of marble, bronze and clay, similarly in painting whatever can be done, to bear comparison with anyone else, whoever he is’. He also mentions that ‘work on the bronze horse may be taken on’. This refers to the long-standing scheme to erect an equestrian memorial to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico’s father and the first Sforza Duke of Milan, a project for which initially Antonio Pollaiuolo appears to have been considered. The tone of the letter suggests that Leonardo hoped his move to Milan would provide greater opportunities to develop the full scope of his work than had been possible in Florence. It remained true throughout his life that his activities flourished better within a court and in receipt of a regular income than when he needed to make a living from the completion of commissioned works of art.

The first notice of Leonardo’s activity in Milan occurs in a contract for work on an altarpiece. In company with the brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista de’ Predis, he agreed to provide the painted decoration and panels for a large sculpted altarpiece by the wood-carver Giacomo di Damiano ( fl 1469–1502) for the Confraternità dell’ Immacolata Concezione in their chapel in S Francesco Grande, Milan. In addition to polychroming and gilding the wooden architecture and sculpture, the painters were expected to provide paintings of the Virgin, prophets and angels to be set in the frame.

The subsequent history of this commission, which went through a series of protracted legal wrangles, involves some of the lengthiest and most confusing documentation for any Renaissance painting. The dispute centred on the confraternity’s claims that the painters had failed to fulfil their obligations and the painters’ assertion that the value of the panel of ‘Our Lady done in oils’ was far greater than the sum the confraternity was offering to pay. By the time a procurator was appointed in 1496 to settle the dispute, Ambrogio de’ Predis and Leonardo had appealed to a higher authority, probably the Duke. By 1503 matters were still not resolved, by which time Leonardo had left Milan. In 1506 arbitrators stipulated that Leonardo had to complete the painting of ‘the most glorious Virgin Mary’ within two years at an agreed price. The painting was finished by August 1508, when Ambrogio, on Leonardo’s behalf, was given permission to remove the painting from its frame to make a copy.

Of the two surviving versions of the painting, now known as the Virgin of the Rocks, one (London, N.G.) is known to have come from the altarpiece in S Francesco Grande, while the early history of the other version (Paris, Louvre; see fig.), stylistically the earlier of the two, is unclear. Attempts have been made to reconcile the written evidence and the two paintings, but none can be confirmed. The two most straightforward hypotheses are either that the Louvre painting was completed but withheld by the artists and sold privately elsewhere, while the London panel was a second version, made to fulfil the legal requirements; or that either the Louvre painting or some other part of the altarpiece was incomplete until 1508, and that the London version was the copy made in that year and substituted for the original. The stylistic evidence marginally favours the former hypothesis, in that the Louvre Virgin of the Rocks appears to be wholly in the style of the 1480s, while the London version exhibits features of Leonardo’s work from the mid-1490s, even if it is not wholly by him.

Leonardo da Vinci: Virgin of the Rocks, 1.99×1.22 m, 1483–6

The nature of Leonardo’s engagements at the Sforza court is unclear in the 1480s. His Portrait of a Lady with an Ermine (Kraków, Czartoryski Col.), presumed to be the portrait of Ludovico Sforza’s mistress Cecilia Gallerani that was celebrated in a Milanese poem, should be dated, on new evidence, to c. 1490–91. In 1487 Leonardo submitted a model for the scheme to design a tiburio (crossing tower) for Milan Cathedral, although he did not undertake the commission. It is also to this period that the Codex Trivulziano (Milan, Castello Sforzesco), the first of his surviving notebooks, can be dated. For the rest of his life he kept notebooks written in mirror handwriting and filled with drawings and diagrams that record various intellectual endeavours and scientific investigations in which he was involved. The Codex Trivulziano contains, among other things, studies for the tiburio, philosophical aphorisms and Latin word lists. A sheet in pen and ink, with Two Studies of a Human Skull (Windsor Castle, Royal Lib., 19059r), dated 1489, is one of a series of anatomical investigations concerned with the brain, nervous system and senses. Although there had been earlier signs of his interest in a range of scientific and technical matters, sustained explorations of questions lying outside his immediate professional involvements are fully documented only from the late 1480s.

Leonardo da Vinci: Portrait of a Lady with an Ermine (Cecilia Gallerani), oil on panel, 534×393 mm, c. 1490–91.

During the 1490s Leonardo was involved with ceremonial activities at the Sforza court, with painting and sculpture and with his own intellectual pursuits in a growing range of natural, physical and mathematical sciences. Typical of his work as a court artist were his admired stage designs for the Festa del paradiso, a spectacle by Ludovico’s leading court poet, Bernardo Bellincioni, composed in 1490 as a wedding celebration. The same year he resumed serious work on the equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza. In 1497 he is documented as nearing the completion of the Last Supper, begun c. 1495, in the refectory of S Maria delle Grazie, Milan (in situ), and in 1498 he was painting the mural decoration of the Sala delle Asse (Milan, Castello Sforzesco). His notebooks also suggest that he participated in various architectural and engineering projects, including the extensive schemes for canalization, urban planning and decoration in Vigevano, close to Ludovico’s birthplace.

Leonardo da Vinci: Last Supper (begun c. 1495), tempera mural, S Maria delle Grazie, Milan;

In his scientific work, Leonardo began to embrace a variety of concerns. Anatomy and optics were central among these (see Anatomical studies and Science and art), but he also embarked on detailed investigations of statics and dynamics, with an almost obsessional interest in the complex patterns of motion in water. His notebooks reflect a sustained campaign of self-education in the basic theoretical concepts of Classical and medieval science, and in the elements of mathematics. In this latter ambition he was greatly aided by the arrival of the mathematician Luca Pacioli at the court in 1496, and the following year they collaborated on the illustrations of geometrical bodies in Pacioli’s De divina proportione, which was eventually published in Venice in 1509.

The visual record of Leonardo’s artistic products during the 1490s is disappointingly meagre. The project for the huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza progressed to the point at which the full-sized clay model could be exhibited in 1494, but the bronze was never cast, and the model seems not to have survived Ludovico’s fall in 1499. The Last Supper was his major completed achievement. Early viewers testify to its extraordinary impact; however, the partly experimental technique led to the wall painting’s rapid deterioration, and it exists today only as a fragmented ghost of its former presence. Although the Duke requested in 1497 that Leonardo start on ‘the other wall’ when he finished the Last Supper, no sign remains of other work by him in the refectory. The portraits of the Duke and Duchess and their Children added to Giovanni Donato da Montofano’s Crucifixion on the opposite end wall are too damaged to permit a definite judgement, but the underdrawings appear too routine to be attributed confidently to Leonardo.

Leonardo’s decorative painting in the Sala delle Asse, depicting trees intertwined as a great bower, also survives in an incomplete and heavily restored form. It seems likely that he was responsible for other work in the suite of rooms in the Castello Sforzesco, which Ludovico was transforming and extending, but no traces survive. Three portraits of more or less autograph quality—the Portrait of a Musician and the Portrait of a Woman in Profile (both Milan, Bib. Ambriosiana) and the Portrait of a Woman, known as ‘La Belle Ferronnière’ (Paris, Louvre)—may also be assigned to his period at the Sforza court. When Ludovico fled Milan in 1499, in the face of the invading armies of the French king Louis XII, Leonardo sent money to Florence for safekeeping. Although he apparently entered into some kind of agreement with the King, he left Milan in December. He stayed briefly in Mantua, where he made a portrait drawing of Isabella d’Este (damaged version, Paris, Louvre; for illustration see Este (i), (6)), and in Venice, where he appears to have given some advice on hydraulic engineering. His visit to Mantua is not surprising in view of the close links between the Sforza and the Este families, and of Isabella’s known interest in Leonardo’s art.

Second Florentine period, 1500–mid-1508.

In April 1500 Leonardo returned to Florence, where he was faced with the prospect of re-establishing his career. During the next six years Isabella d’Este endeavoured to obtain a painting from him. She hoped that he would make a painting based on the portrait drawing and subsequently that he would provide a subject painting—at one point she suggested an image of Christ at the age of 12. The correspondence in which Isabella pursued her frustrating quest provides the best evidence for Leonardo’s activities immediately after his return to Florence. Her plenipotentiary in Florence, the Carmelite Fra Pietro da Novellara, wrote to her on 3 and 14 April 1501, mentioning the painter’s obsession with geometry and that his pupils were making copies of his paintings to which he occasionally put his hand. The letters also describe two works by Leonardo. One was a small panel painting for Florimond Robertet, the secretary to the French king, which showed the Virgin and Child contesting the possession of a yarnwinder. Later known as the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, the best versions of this much copied painting are in the Duke of Buccleuch’s collection and a New York collection.

The other work was a large-scale cartoon (untraced) of the Virgin and Child with St Anne and a Lamb, in which the life-sized figures were cunningly compressed into a compact group. The cartoon seems to have been drawn when Leonardo was involved with a commission for an altarpiece for SS Annunziata (later finished by Pietro Perugino), which was apparently ceded to him on his return to Florence by Filippino Lippi. Leonardo was provided with accommodation in the monastery of SS Annunziata, and it was there in 1501 that he exhibited his cartoon to large crowds, though it was probably not intended as the design for the altarpiece.

That Republican Florence did not provide the most appropriate arena for Leonardo’s talents is perhaps indicated by the fact that in 1502 he accepted the appointment as Cesare Borgia’s ‘architect and general engineer’, with responsibilities that took him to Urbino and other Central Italian cities. The most spectacular product of his work for Cesare is the Map of Imola (Windsor Castle, Royal Lib., 12284). In 1503 he was again in Florence and appears to have been one of the engineers involved in Machiavelli’s ill-fated plans to divert the River Arno around Pisa, when Florence was at war with the city.

Later in the same year Leonardo received the highly prestigious commission for a wall painting of the Battle of Anghiari (destr.) in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, the great new council hall in the Palazzo della Signoria, which the Republic had erected after the expulsion of the Medici in 1494. The subject was to commemorate a Florentine victory over the Milanese in 1440. Leonardo was provided with a room in S Maria Novella in which to make the huge cartoon (destr.), and work seems to have proceeded steadily, although it was interrupted during the autumn of 1504, when the Florentine authorities sent him to Piombino to advise on fortifications. Payments were made for materials during 1504, and one of his own notes (Madrid, Bib. N., MS. II, fol. 2r) provides evidence that he was actually painting on the wall in the summer of 1505. In 1504 Michelangelo received the commission to paint the Battle of Cascina (unexecuted) as a companion piece to the Battle of Anghiari and joined Leonardo as an apparently unsympathetic rival.

However, there were growing signs that Leonardo might eventually fail to complete the commission. His characteristically experimental technique was running into trouble, and his notebooks testify that his diverse intellectual concerns were again coming to the fore, including studies of bird flight and geometry. Finally, in 1506 a train of events marked the abandonment of the project. In May he was granted leave of absence to work in Milan for three months, perhaps in response to the settlement of the litigation surrounding the Virgin of the Rocks. Although he returned to Florence briefly in March 1507, and for a longer period from September to the following spring, his residence in Florence was effectively at an end. The winter of 1506–7 was apparently occupied with the study of anatomy, bird flight and mathematics. The last of his substantial artistic involvements in Florence seems to have been the assistance he provided, according to Vasari, to Giovanni Francesco Rustici, who was making the bronze group of St John the Baptist Preaching between a Pharisee and a Levite (1506–11) for the exterior of the Florentine Baptistery (in situ).

It is difficult to assign a single, finished, wholly autograph painting to the years 1500 to 1508. It is reasonable to assume that the Madonna of the Yarnwinder was completed, but even that might not have been entirely by Leonardo. The incomplete and partly ruined painting of the Battle of Anghiari survived until the remodelling of the council hall in the 1560s, and, although strenuous efforts have been made to discover it under the later paintings by Vasari, it has not so far reappeared. A number of projects for compositions of the Virgin and Child can be dated to these years, as can an innovative design for a painting of an Angel of the Annunciation (untraced), which developed into the later composition of St John the Baptist (Paris, Louvre). He also began work on a composition of Leda and the Swan , experimenting with a kneeling figure of Leda (reflected in versions by followers) and a standing version, the latter known to Raphael in Florence as a developed design, cartoon or unfinished painting. The final version of Leda (untraced) may not have been completed until after 1513.

The painting generally regarded as the central product of these years is the so-called ‘Mona Lisa’ (Paris, Louvre), although even it presents some problems of dating. The identity of the sitter was for many years uncertain, but Vasari’s claim that the lady in the portrait was ‘M o[n]na Lisa’, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo (hence the alternative name of ‘La Gioconda ’ or ‘La Gioconde’), was confirmed in 1991 with the publication of the 1525 death inventory of Leonardo’s assistant of 30 years, gian giacomo Caprotti, who seems to have been in possession of a number of his master’s works, including this portrait (see Shell and Sironi). In 1495 Lisa Gherardini (b Florence, 1479) married Francesco del Giocondo, an important figure in the Republican government, whose portrait Leonardo is also thought to have painted. Earlier confusion over her identity arose, among other things, from what was previously thought to be the earliest reference to the portrait, written by Ambrogio de’ Beatis on a visit to Leonardo in France in 1517; he described a portrait of ‘a certain Florentine lady made from nature at the instigation of the late Magnificent Giuliano de’ Medici’ (the Duc de Nemours), who was Leonardo’s patron in Rome after 1513, and it had long been assumed that he was referring to the ‘Mona Lisa’. (It is now thought likely that the work de’ Beatis saw on this visit was the portrait of another Florentine woman.)

Leonard da Vinci: ‘Mona Lisa’, panel, 600×470 mm, c. 1500–07 (Paris, Musée du Louvre);

According to Vasari, Leonardo began the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo between his arrival in Florence in 1500 and the commencement of his work on the Battle of Anghiari late in 1503; after four years, however, the work was still unfinished. The appearance of the picture lends support to the idea that it was painted over an extended period, since the craquelure of the face suggests that it was executed at a different time from the hands, which exhibit the thinness of his latest manner of painting.

Second Milanese period, mid-1508–1513.

From the summer of 1508 to September 1513 Leonardo was resident in or near Milan, working initially for the French rulers of the city under the direct supervision of the governor, Charles II d’Amboise, Comte de Chaumont. He appears to have taken up a range of duties broadly equivalent to those he had performed at the Sforza court, including providing designs for ephemeral items of courtly entertainment. He also embarked on designs for another equestrian monument, for Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, an Italian general who was serving the French. The scheme progressed as far as a detailed specification and costing of the life-size horse and rider, with a substantial base and secondary sculpture (Cod. Atlantico, fol. 179va). The architectural work Leonardo is known to have undertaken for Charles d’Amboise is not clearly identifiable. Charles’s project may have been for the kind of airy, colonnaded villa with which Leonardo had been experimenting since his first Milanese period (e.g. Cod. Atlantico, fol. 158ra). He may also have been involved in the plans for the church of S Maria alla Fontana, Milan, but the executant of the work is firmly documented as Giovanni Antonio Amadeo. After the reinstatement of the Sforza regime in 1512 under Ludovico’s son Massimiliano, Leonardo remained in Lombardy for more than a year.

Among Leonardo’s scientific endeavours during this second Milanese period is a series of outstanding anatomical drawings of human musculature and the skeletal system. His exploration of certain geometrical questions, particularly problems of transformation of volume and area (e.g. the squaring of the circle), became increasingly obsessive, as did his investigation of the dynamics of fluids, whether in the guise of the motion of water or in such related forms as the turbulent flow of the blood in vessels of the human body.

The only documented painting completed on Leonardo’s return to Milan was the Virgin of the Rocks: the style of the second version (London, N.G.) is consistent with its having been begun in the late 1490s and subsequently finished by Leonardo with studio assistants on his return to Milan. By contrast, the only autograph painting that can be wholly assigned with some confidence to this period is the St John the Baptist (Paris, Louvre), which developed from his Florentine Angel of the Annunciation and is reflected in pupils’ drawings datable c. 1509. The Virgin and Child compositions on which he was working for Louis XII cannot be certainly identified with any of the surviving paintings, although it is highly likely that one of them was a variant of the theme of the Virgin and Child with St Anne. Two main types of this composition are known: the version that included the lamb, as in the lost cartoon of 1501 and a surviving painting (Paris, Louvre), and the type in which the young St John is integrated into the narrative, as in the Burlington House Cartoon (London, N.G.). The latter has sometimes been dated to 1490–1500, but the style of its draughtsmanship and of the closest preparatory drawing (pen and ink over black chalk; London, B.M.) is increasingly recognized as belonging to c. 1505–7. The Louvre Virgin and Child with St Anne and a Lamb is not clearly datable by reference to other paintings, but the related drawings (Windsor Castle, Royal Lib., 12527, 12530, 12533), handling of colour and treatment of the landscape suggest a late date, perhaps c. 1515.

5. Rome and France, after 1513.

In October 1513 Leonardo visited Florence on his way to Rome, where he was accommodated in the Belvedere under the patronage of Giuliano de’ Medici, Duc de Nemours. He appears to have been involved with the military work that Giuliano was undertaking for the Medici pope, Leo X, and worked on the design and manufacture of burning mirrors that could have military and civil uses. The continued intensity and variety of his intellectual endeavours, particularly in anatomy (cardiology and embryology), optics and geometry, coupled with his travels in Giuliano’s service, do much to explain the reported impatience of Pope Leo, who doubted whether Leonardo would ever finish anything.

It is possible that Leonardo was present at Bologna in 1515 at the meeting between Leo X and the new French king, Francis I. His elaborate red chalk drawing of the Allegory of the Wolf and Eagle (Windsor Castle, Royal Lib., 12496) may well refer to the concordat between pope and king. In any event, Francis was as enthusiastic about Leonardo’s work as his predecessor and succeeded in attracting Leonardo to France at some point between August 1516 and May 1517. For the rest of Leonardo’s life, Francis seems to have acted as an ideal patron—actively promoting new projects and keen to exploit the range of Leonardo’s talents, but also understanding of the artist’s character as a natural philosopher or seer. Leonardo was clearly regarded as an ornament of the court and, as such, was visited by Cardinal Louis of Aragon’s party on 10 October 1517, the occasion recorded by Ambrogio de’ Beatis, who was the Cardinal’s secretary. As ‘first painter and engineer’ to the King, Leonardo was provided with accommodation at the manor house of Clos-Lucé, Amboise.

Leonardo’s final years have often been seen as dominated by his geometrical obsessions and a growing sense of pessimism, expressed most vividly in the visions of cataclysmic storms in his series of drawings of A Deluge (Windsor Castle, Royal Lib.). His health was also apparently deteriorating. De’ Beatis reported that some paralysis was affecting his right side, probably as the result of a stroke. However, a study of folios and notebooks datable to the period 1516–19 reveals a remarkable range of continuing activities. There are only occasional signs of physical frailty. His assistants, most prominent among whom was the well-born francesco Melzi from Lombardy, probably played an increasing role in the physical work, but his inventiveness appears undiminished.

As in his two Milanese periods, Leonardo furnished designs for courtly entertainments, including a revised version of his design for the Festa del paradiso of 1490. His most ambitious project was for a huge royal palace at Romorantin, with associated canalization. A scheme was devised for an extensive residence, translating French château design into the language of the Renaissance. Leonardo’s concerns extended from the overall conception to such details as the design of toilet doors with counterweights. Although the project did not materialize, echoes of Leonardo’s ideas can be seen in subsequent French château design.

The evidence of Leonardo’s involvement with painting in France is equivocal, relying on secondary sources from later in the 16th century. It is virtually certain that the ‘Mona Lisa’, the St John the Baptist, the Leda and the Virgin and Child with St Anne were taken by Leonardo to France, where some may have been completed. He probably made an anamorphic painting for Francis I depicting a fight between a dragon and a lion in such a way that it made sense only when viewed from a shallow angle. A composition with a half-length female nude, known as the ‘Monna Vanna’, which exercised a notable influence on a series of erotic paintings from the school of Fontainebleau, may also have depended on a prototype by Leonardo himself, possibly a drawing or cartoon (such as that in Chantilly, Mus. Condé). However, de’ Beatis’s testimony that illness had left Leonardo unable to undertake painting needs to be taken seriously, and it is unlikely that any wholly autograph paintings were initiated and completed in France.

On 23 April 1519 Leonardo drew up his will, bequeathing most of his drawn and written legacy to Melzi. Following Leonardo’s death, Melzi wrote movingly to the painter’s brothers in Florence, one of whom’s son, Pierino da vinci, became a sculptor. Several of Leonardo’s paintings seem to have come into the hands of his assistant Caprotti, who had also travelled with his master to the French court. On 12 August 1519 Leonardo was buried in the church of St Florentin at Amboise, although his remains are thought later to have been transferred to the chapel of St Hubert at the château of Amboise.

V. Influence and posthumous reputation.

There has never been a period in which Leonardo’s greatness has not been acknowledged, though perceptions of the nature of his achievements have differed widely and have often not been founded on a secure sense of what he actually accomplished. Some of the most famous accounts, such as that by Walter Pater (1869), were based on an image of the Leonardesque rather than a clear conception of his actual oeuvre.

There was virtually no major aspect of the visual arts in 16th-century Italy (and to some degree in Europe) that remained untouched directly or indirectly by Leonardo’s innovations. Each of his major narrative paintings made a significant contribution to the tradition of history painting. The complex orchestration of a crowd in his Adoration of the Magi was adopted in such works by Raphael as the Disputa and School of Athens (both Rome, Vatican, Stanza della Segnatura); the Last Supper, as much through engravings as the original, continued to influence artists as diverse as Rembrandt and Rubens; and the Battle of Anghiari, with Michelangelo’s Cascina cartoon for its companion piece, became the ‘school’ for young artists who wished to achieve complex interlocking spatial patterns of figures in motion. The pyramidal yet fluent groups of his Virgin and Child compositions set the norm for younger artists, most notably Raphael. His portraits established the ambition to evoke the inner life of sitters, at the same time as setting new goals in formal sophistication for portrait painters such as Bronzino. A large number of his formal motifs were transmitted across Europe through copies, variants and pastiches of his compositions. Even major northern masters such as Quinten Metsys and Hans Holbein the younger proved susceptible to the seductiveness of Leonardo’s inventions.

Leonardo’s technique of making free sketches also exercised a profound influence on Italian creative methods, most radically those of the young Raphael, but also of Michelangelo. His revelation of the descriptive and evocative powers of red and black chalk inspired generations of figure draughtsmen in Italy, and, through them, in France and elsewhere. Although only a few of his drawings were directly engraved before the 18th century, a number of his characteristic obsessions, such as proportional studies and caricatured physiognomy, stimulated direct imitation.

None of Leonardo’s major successors adopted his softly shadowed style of painting precisely, but his emphasis on tonal modelling and the principles of his sfumato ensured the passing of what Vasari regarded as the ‘dry’ manner of the Quattrocento. His technique has sometimes been credited with laying the foundations for the soft handling of form by Giorgione, but the Venetian colouristic blurring of contour is very different from Leonardo’s shadow-based system. More obvious heirs may be seen in Antonio Correggio (particularly the early work) and Caravaggio at the end of the 16th century.

In sculpture, architecture and stage design Leonardo’s influence is harder to define, in the absence of certainly autograph surviving works. His clearest impact was on the architecture of Donato Bramante, who responded to the complex spatial geometry of his colleague’s schemes for centralized churches in his designs for the east end of S Maria della Grazie, Milan, and his plan for St Peter’s in Rome. Contemporaries testify to the impact of Leonardo’s various designs for theatrical spectacles and festivities, and it appears likely that he played a crucial role in the invention of the perspectival stage design.

The range, diversity and depth of Leonardo’s scientific interests lay beyond most of his contemporaries and successors in the world of art, but his theories of art did seep into general circulation, although none was directly published before 1651. Perhaps the most significant impact was on Albrecht Dürer, whose ambitions in the theories of proportion and physiognomy come closest in spirit to those of Leonardo. The anthology of Leonardo’s writings, the Trattato della pittura, circulated in various abridged manuscripts in the 16th century and the early 17th, particularly in Italian academic circles. The new generation of academically minded artists in early 17th-century Italy welcomed Leonardo’s insistence on controlled expression in figure style and rational analysis of the forms of nature. One painter–theorist in the orbit of Domenichino, Matteo Zaccolini, compiled four manuscript treatises in a consciously Leonardesque vein, but they were never published, and their impact was limited.

Leonardo’s enduring reputation as the founder of the High Renaissance was ensured by his position at the start of the third part of Vasari’s Vite, and Vasari’s portrait—including his reservations about the erratic variety of Leonardo’s obsessions—dominated interpretations of Leonardo well into the 19th century. The earlier life by Paolo Giovio and the perceptive comments by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo exercised less impact. The first serious attempt to come to terms with the range of Leonardo’s legacy was undertaken by the great patron, antiquarian and arbiter of taste in 17th-century Rome, Cassiano dal Pozzo. Although Cassiano and his collaborator, Conte galeazzo Arconati, did not succeed in their aim of bringing Leonardo’s manuscripts to publication, Cassiano was responsible for providing the manuscript, albeit abridged, of the Trattato della pittura, illustrated by Nicolas Poussin, that Paul Fréart Sieur de Chambray took to France and that was used in Raphael Trichet du Fresne’s first edition of the Trattato (1651). The treatise appeared in France at a crucial stage in the development of the Académie Française and was welcomed by Charles Lebrun as providing an authentic pedigree for his ideas of rhetorical expression in academic painting.

Leonardo’s reputation during the 17th and 18th centuries was not based on clearly defined knowledge of his actual oeuvre. Versions and pastiches were paraded as Leonardo’s own work in the absence of a substantial body of surviving paintings by the master, although a few artists of the highest sensitivity, such as Antoine Watteau, do seem to have responded perceptively to the few autograph works available. By the late 18th century the situation was changing. The ‘rediscovery’ of the drawings in the British Royal Collection, some of which were subsequently engraved, gave a clearer idea of his draughtsmanship. Giovanni Battista Venturi’s transcription of some of his notes on water and other matters evinced a renewed interest in his manuscripts, and Giuseppe Bossi’s publication on the Last Supper in 1810, reviewed so tellingly by Goethe, represented a pioneering attempt to subject Leonardo’s career to scholarly examination.

Great advances were made around 1900 in two main directions. First came the systematic scrutiny and publication of Leonardo’s scattered and diminished (if still extensive) legacy of manuscripts. Jean Paul Richter’s anthology, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), is still a standard point of reference, particularly in conjunction with Carlo Pedretti’s Commentary (1977). A wave of facsimiles, transcriptions and translations of the manuscripts in various European locations (most notably Milan and Paris), under the guidance of such scholars as Gerolamo Calvi, Giovanni Piumati and Charles Ravaisson-Mollien, brought the range of Leonardo’s mind into the public domain. Gabriel Séailles (1892) and Paul Valéry (1895) made the first attempts to grapple with this new, ‘universal’ Leonardo. Second came the establishment of a firmly documented chronology for Leonardo’s career. Eugene Müntz, Francesco Malaguzzi Valeri, Waldemar von Seidlitz, Giovanni Poggi and Paul Müller-Walde played significant roles, but the most lasting contribution was made by Luca Beltrami, whose Documenti e memorie riguardanti la vita e le opere di Leonardo da Vinci (1919) remains the basic source for Leonardo’s biography. Calvi’s book on the dating of the manuscripts was equally fundamental in laying down the groundwork for a chronological understanding of Leonardo’s mind and graphic style.

Since the beginning of the 20th century an enormous body of literature on Leonardo has been published, much of it valueless, but a certain proportion contains material that has clarified his historical position and artistic stature. The study of the manuscripts has been substantially advanced by Edmondo Solmi’s researches into the sources for Leonardo’s opinions, while the more recent studies by Augusto Marinoni and Carlo Pedretti (the latter of whom has scrutinized Leonardo’s legacy in considerable detail) have revealed that meticulous scholarship can still lead to new discoveries.

The greatest contribution to the picture of Leonardo as an artist was made by Kenneth Clark. His catalogue of Leonardo’s artistic drawings at Windsor (1935) established an authoritative chronology, continuing the pioneer work of Anny Popp, and provided a compelling critical assessment of Leonardo as a draughtsman. He used this scholarly foundation as the basis for his relatively brief monograph (1939), which remains the most elegantly evocative account of the artist’s creative personality.

Full-scale monographs continue to appear in large numbers. Among the most regularly cited in English are those by Ludwig Heydenreich (1954), Cecil Gould (1975), Carlo Pedretti (1973), Jack Wasserman (1975) and Martin Kemp (1981). Studies devoted to particular aspects of Leonardo’s work include those by A. E. Popham on his drawings, Vasilij Zubov (particularly valuable on his scientific thought), E. H. Gombrich on his water studies, Kenneth Keele on anatomy, Pedretti on architecture, Pietro Marani on fortifications, Ladislao Reti on the Madrid manuscripts and Kim Veltman on perspective. The literature on Leonardo is now so discouragingly vast that it can only be mastered as a whole by a full-time ‘Leonardista’.