Drawing Devotion, Imitating Nature in Cinquecento Florence

Abstract

Shortly after his return to florence in 1501, leonardo da Vinci executed a cartoon for the Servite friars of Santissima Annunziata that was put on public display to great acclaim. According to Giorgio Vasari’s later account, “This work not only won the astonished admiration of all the artists but when finished for two days it attracted to the room where it was exhibited a crowd of men and women, young and old, who flocked there, as if they were attending a great festival, to gaze in amazement at the marvels he had created.” While this description initially appears to emphasize the cartoon’s visual appeal, noting first that it won the approval of fellow artists, it then goes on to use language that recalls the type of viewing commonly associated with miraculous or cult images: teeming crowds throng the Annunziata as though “attending a great festival” in order appreciate the “marvels” wrought by the painter’s hand. The fine line between religious worship and aesthetic admiration is suggestively blurred due to Leonardo’s ability to portray “all the simplicity and loveliness and grace that can be conferred on the mother of Christ,” thus capturing “the humility and modesty appropriate to an image of the Virgin who is overflowing with joy at seeing the beauty of her Son.” Writing roughly fifty years earlier, Leonardo evoked a similar scene in his own defense of the superiority of painting over the other imitative arts: