Leonardo da Vinci: Thinker, Researcher, and Poet

written in fantastically decorative letters, from right to left, as remained the Master's habit even in later years. — The so deeply felt Annunciation (Louvre) likely belongs to this same early period. A beautiful study for the head of the Holy Virgin authenticates it as a "Leonardo"; this head certainly belongs to him intellectually, even if the specimen in the Uffizi should happen to be a pupil's copy. And no less belongs to this period the poetic portrait in the Vienna Liechtenstein Gallery, which, being only slightly younger, represents the same personality as the Bust of a Lady (Bargello, Florence) created in Verrocchio's workshop — I mean the well-known one with the primroses in her garment and the soulful hands admired by d'Annunzio — hands which prompted one of Verrocchio's latest biographers, Hans Mackowsky, to also attribute this work to Leonardo. Vasari tells of clay busts of laughing women that were still being cast in plaster from Leonardo's models in his day, and likewise of small heads of children that seemed to have come from the hand of a master; the Milanese painter Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo speaks in his treatise on painting of a small clay bust original: "Tonbüste" of a Christ Child which he owned — perhaps the same one to which Leonardo (Codex Atlanticus, Folio 252 r.) alludes: "when I made our Lord as a boy"... but all of that has disappeared without a trace, as if swallowed by the earth. In its place, we have all sorts of interesting combinations, even if they are not entirely removed from the questionable; for example, those of Müller-Waldes, who likely overestimates the stucco relief original: "Stuckrelief" The Discord (London, South Kensington) when he claims Leonardo's direct authorship for it, or the better-founded conjectures of Wilhelm Bode. Bode recognizes the soulful hand of the youthful pupil in, among others, the beautiful bronze relief original: "Bronzerelief" The Lamentation of Christ (San Maria in Carmine, Venice), which until now had been attributed to Verrocchio.