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It must have been towards the end of 1500,[1] Leonardo returned to Florence from Milan, having en route paid a visit at Mantua to Isabella d'Este, Marchesa of Mantua, of whom he did two sketches with a view to painting her portrait. One of them he left with her, and the other he kept for himself, and showed it to one of her agents in Venice on March 13, 1500.[2] On hearing that Leonardo had arrived in Florence, the Marchesa wrote on March 22, 1501,[3] to one of her friends in that city, Fra Pietro da Nuvolaria, General of the Order of the Carmelites, about the promised portrait, and his answers to her letters are two of the most important authentic documents we have in connection with the master, both of which I shall give in full:—
- 'I will apply all my care and haste to the commission, but, according to everything I hear, Leonardo's life is full of variety, and subject to many changes. He seems to be living without care for the morrow. He has only done one cartoon since he has been at Florence. His composition is an infant Christ hardly a year old, slipping from His mother's clasp to catch hold of a lamb and embrace it. The Virgin, rising out of the lap of St. Anne, endeavours to part the Babe from the lamb—the animal must not
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- ↑ I am inclined to believe that Leonardo returned to Florence some time in the end of 1500, though his biographers state 1501. He had already transferred his money there in 1499. He was in Mantua before March, 1500, then went on to Venice, where he was in March, 1500. By the beginning of March, 1501, he had nearly finished the St. Anne cartoon and the two portraits, which must have taken some months.
- ↑ 'Leonardo da Vinci is at Venice; he has shown me a picture of your Highness, which is very natural and appears to me as perfect as it can be.' Lorenzo da Pavia, March 13, 1500.
- ↑ Müntz (vol. 2, p. 11). Dr. Gronau gives this date as March 17th in his short life of Leonardo (p. 33). Dr. E. Solmi, in his Monograph, gives the letter as dated March 27th. Müntz's date (March 22nd) must be correct, as he takes it from M. Yriarte's article in 'La Gazette des Beaux-Arts,' 1888 (vol. 37, p. 123), which was written after perusal of the documents collected by M. Arnaud Baschet.
