Leonardo da Vinci: Thinker, Researcher, and Poet

acquitted, conditionally, as the form required, "with the condition that they be re-denounced" original: "cum conditione ut retamburantur". This refers to the legal practice of allowing a case to be reopened if new evidence appeared.. The new re-denunciation Tamburation From the Italian 'tamburo' (drum), referring to the boxes where anonymous accusations were placed. came to a conclusion on June 7th, with a new acquittal for all the accused. At that time, in the era of the blossoming cult of everything considered ancient—and therefore excellent—sodomy was the most elegant of all vices; and this period, in which people had grown accustomed to accusing their neighbors of the most monstrous things without hesitation, was always first at hand with this specific charge. But whoever values that acquittal less than the accusation, and whoever today still sees something other than the purely artistic in Leonardo's cult of beauty—even if intended as praise—reveals themselves to be a poor connoisseur of Leonardo's writings and a bad psychologist regarding the majestic soul from which those writings flowed. Of the works from this era, which Vasari describes for us with graceful art, none have been preserved for us: neither the cartoon for a woven door-curtain with Adam and Eve in Paradise, which he saw at that time "in the happy house" of Ottaviano Medici, nor the round shield with the terrifying mythical creature, whose creation Vasari describes so charmingly and which went to the "Duke of Milan," nor the Medusa head, the description of which has brought so many false Leonardos with the same theme into the museums of Europe. Just as little does the Mother of God with the flower-filled water flask exist, to which the Munich Madonna with the Carnation perhaps stands in a certain ancestral relationship. — The earliest authenticated work by Leonardo is a pen drawing kept in the Florentine Uffizi, a landscape with castle-crowned rocks, lovely hills, trees, a plain, and water, all full of delicate, youthful charm. The sheet is dated by Leonardo's hand: "day of Saint Mary of the Snows — on the 5th day of August 1473" original: "dì di Sta Maria della Neve — ad dì 5 d’agosto 1473" — with fan-