Portrait of a Musician
The Portrait of a Musician is an unfinished painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci, dated to. Produced while Leonardo was in Milan, the work is painted in oils, and perhaps tempera, on a small panel of walnut wood. It is his only known male portrait painting, and the identity of its sitter has been closely debated among scholars.
Perhaps influenced by Antonello da Messina's introduction of the Early Netherlandish style of portrait painting to Italy, the work marks a dramatic shift from the profile portraiture that predominated in 15th-century Milan. It shares many similarities with other paintings Leonardo executed there, such as the Louvre Virgin of the Rocks and the Lady with an Ermine, but the Portrait of a Musician is his only panel painting remaining in the city, where it has been in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana since at least 1672. One of Leonardo's best preserved paintings, there are no extant contemporary records of the commission. Based on stylistic resemblances to other works by Leonardo, virtually all current scholarship attributes at least the sitter's face to him. Uncertainty over the rest of the painting arises from the stiff and rigid qualities of the body, which are uncharacteristic of Leonardo's work. While this may be explained by the painting's unfinished state, some scholars believe that Leonardo was assisted by one of his students.
The portrait's intimacy indicates a private commission, or one by a personal friend. Until the 20th century it was thought to show Ludovico Sforza, a Duke of Milan and employer of Leonardo. During a 1904–1905 restoration, the removal of overpainting revealed a hand holding sheet music, indicating that the sitter was a musician. Many musicians active in 15th-century Milan have been proposed as the sitter; Franchinus Gaffurius was the most favored candidate throughout the 20th century, but in the 21st century scholarly opinion shifted towards Atalante Migliorotti. Other notable suggestions include Josquin des Prez and Gaspar van Weerbeke, but there is no historical evidence to substantiate any of these claims with certainty. The work has been criticized for its stoic and wooden qualities, but noted for its intensity and the high level of detail in the subject's face. Scholarly interpretations range from the painting depicting a musician mid-performance, to representing Leonardo's self-proclaimed ideology of the superiority of painting over other art forms, such as music.
Description
Composition
This painting was executed in oils and perhaps tempera on a small, walnut wood panel. It depicts a young man in bust length and three-quarter view, whose right hand holds a folded piece of sheet music. The painting is largely unfinished save for the face and hair, but is in good condition overall, with only the bottom right corner suffering damage. The art historian Kenneth Clark noted that out of Leonardo's surviving works, the Musician is perhaps the best preserved, despite the fading of colors over time.The bottom of the work may have been slightly trimmed. There is a small amount of retouching, especially towards the back of the head; the art historian Frank Zöllner has noted that this retouching introduced the somewhat unsuccessful shading of the neck and the left side of the lips. With its black background, the portrait is reminiscent of Leonardo's later portraits, the Lady with an Ermine and La Belle Ferronnière, but differs from them in that the sitter's body and head face the same direction. The biographer Walter Isaacson has noted that due to the work's unfinished state, the portrait's shadows are overtly harsh, and the portrait itself features fewer of the thin layers of oil paint typically found in Leonardo's paintings.
The musician
The sitter has curly shoulder-length hair, wears a red cap, and stares intently at something outside the viewer's field of vision. His stare is intensified by careful lighting that focuses attention on his face, especially on his large glassy eyes. He wears a tight white undershirt. The painting of his black doublet is unfinished and his brownish-orange stole is only underpainted. The colors are faded, probably due to minor repainting and poor conservation. Technical examination of the work has revealed that the doublet was probably originally dark red, and the stole bright yellow.The mouth hints at a smile, or suggests that the man is about to sing or has just sung. A notable feature of his face is the effect on his eyes from the light outside the frame. The light dilates the pupils of both eyes, but the proper right far more than the left, something that is not possible. Some have argued that this is simply for dramatic effect, so that the viewer feels a sense of motion from the musician's left to right side of his face. The art historian Luke Syson has written that "the eyes are perhaps the most striking feature of the Musician, sight given primacy as the noblest sense and the most important tool of the painter".
Sheet music
The stiffly folded piece of paper, which is held in an odd and delicate manner, is a piece of sheet music with musical notes and letters written on it. Due to the poor condition of the lower part of the painting, the notes and letters are largely illegible. This has not stopped some scholars from hypothesizing what the letters say, often using their interpretations to support their theory of the musician's identity. The partially erased letters can be made out as "Cant" and "An" and are usually read as "Cantum Angelicum", Latin for 'angelic song', although the art historian Martin Kemp notes that it could be "Cantore Angelico", Italian for 'angelic singer'. The notes have offered little clarity into the painting, other than strongly suggesting that the subject is a musician. They are in mensural notation and therefore probably show polyphonic music. Leonardo's surviving drawings of rebuses with musical notation in the Print Room of Windsor Castle do not resemble the music in the painting. This suggests that this musical composition is not by Leonardo, which leaves the composer and the significance of the music unknown.Attribution
Although the attribution to Leonardo had been controversial in earlier centuries, modern art historians now regard the Portrait of a Musician as one of his original works. Doubts about ascribing the work to Leonardo have existed for almost as long as the painting has been known. Its first appearance in a 1672 catalog for the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana listed it as by Leonardo, but a 1686 inventory of the collection attributed it to Bernardino Luini. This was quickly crossed out and changed to "or rather by Leonardo". In 1798, the Ambrosiana attributed the portrait to the "school of Luini", but it was soon relisted as by Leonardo. When first listed in 1672, it was described as having "all the elegance that might be expected of a ducal commission", which implies that the subject was thought to be Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, who was Leonardo's employer when the painting was executed. This was accepted until the 20th century, when scholars believed it to be a pendant to the Portrait of a Lady in the Ambrosiana, now attributed to Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis but at the time thought to be a portrait by Leonardo of Beatrice d'Este, Ludovico's wife. In the mid-20th century, the Leonardo specialist Angela Ottino della Chiesa identified eleven scholars who supported an attribution to Leonardo; eight who ascribed the work to Ambrogio de Predis; two who were undecided and one who considered it the work of Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, another of Leonardo's students.There is no extant record of the portrait's commission. Its attribution to Leonardo is based on stylistic and technical similarities to other works by him, notably the face of the angel in the Louvre Virgin of the Rocks and that of the titular figure in Saint Jerome in the Wilderness. The dark background of the portrait, a style popularized by Leonardo, furthers this attribution as it appears in later paintings by him, such as the Lady with an Ermine, La Belle Ferronnière and Saint John the Baptist. The Lady with an Ermine in particular has shown many stylistic similarities to the Musician from X-ray testing. Other characteristics typical of Leonardo's style include the melancholic atmosphere, the sensitive eyes, the ambiguous mouth, and curly hair reminiscent of his earlier portrait, Ginevra de' Benci. Also characteristic of Leonardo is the use of walnut wood, a medium he favored and recommended, but which was not commonly used by other artists in Lombardy at the time. The attribution is further supported by a comparison of the pupils of the musician's eyes, which dilate to different degrees; a connection has been noted to the following passage in Leonardo's notebooks:
Challenge to the painting's attribution stems from its rigid and stoic demeanor, which is uncharacteristic of Leonardo's usual paintings. While some scholars consider this a result of the painting's unfinished state, others have proposed that the clothing and torso were painted by a student. If Leonardo was assisted by another artist, the most frequently cited candidates are Boltraffio and Ambrogio de Predis, due to their style being closer to the hard and rigid qualities of the portrait. According to the art historian Carlo Pedretti, Boltraffio and Marco d'Oggiono, another student of Leonardo, depict eyes in the same way as the portrait, suggesting that either might have collaborated with Leonardo on the work. The art historian Pietro C. Marani noted that it is unlikely that Leonardo would have had assistants in the mid-1480s, and even if so, they would not likely have assisted on a portrait for an official or a personal friend. Despite Marani's claims, the modern scholarly consensus on whether Leonardo was assisted remains unclear: Zöllner stated that it is "now accepted that Leonardo executed the face, while Boltraffio is credited with the entire upper body", whereas according to Syson only a "substantial minority" of scholars disagreed with a full attribution. While there is debate on the authorship of the painting as a whole, most scholars are agreed that the face, at least, is entirely Leonardo's work.