Portrait of a musician

Portrait of a musician
Leonardo da Vinci , around 1485–1490
Oil and tempera on panel
45 × 32 cm
Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan

Detail of the sheet of music

The Portrait of a Musician , also a Portrait of a Young Man , is a painting that is attributed to the Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) or to his school . The work, dated around 1485–1490, is in the collection of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan .

It is Leonardo's only surviving portrait of a man, even if there are numerous well-known portrait drawings of this type in his notebooks and sketchbooks , such as the so-called " Self-Portrait of Leonardo da Vinci " .

The work

The portrait is executed in oil and tempera on wood. It shows the head of a young man in quarter profile ; the face is turned slightly from the frontal view. He is holding a document with a score in his right hand .

The painting is sometimes referred to as unfinished. Compared to the detailed face of the depicted person, the red beret , clothing and hair appear only fleetingly. One suspects in the negligent execution of the peripheral areas possibly an artistic intention of Leonardo or the participation of another painter.

Some art historians assume that the Leonardo pupil Ambrogio de Predis (around 1455 - after 1508) was involved, but assume that the carefully executed face comes from Leonardo. It is possible that the manuscript and document were later added to the original work.

history

The portrait probably came to the Ambrosian Library through Count Galeazzo Arconati . In 1637 Arconati donated his extensive collection of works by Leonardo da Vinci to the Ambrosiana, including manuscripts and notebooks such as the so-called Paris manuscripts and the Codex Atlanticus .

The painting appears in the Ambrosiana's records for the first time in 1671. In a Pinacoteca catalog from 1686 the work is listed as a “ Portrait of a Duke of Milan ”. When the painting was cleaned in 1905, the score became visible in the right hand of the man depicted. Hence the current name.

The person depicted

The identity of the person represented is unclear. In the 19th century the picture was still interpreted as a portrait of Ludovico Sforza (1452–1508), Duke of Milan and supporter of Leonardo da Vinci in his first Milanese era from 1482 to 1499.

Today it is believed that the portrait represents the composer Franchino Gaffurio (1451–1522), who from 1484 worked as Kapellmeister at the Milan Cathedral . He is the author of numerous music theoretical works, including the " Theorica musice " published in 1492 , in which he describes the legend of " Pythagoras in the forge ", the alleged discovery of the mathematical basis of musical harmony.

literature

• Martin Kemp : Leonardo . CH Beck, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-56821-3 .
• Charles Nicholl : Leonardo da Vinci - The biography . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 978-3-10-052405-8 .

Web links

Commons : Portrait of a Musician by Leonardo da Vinci  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Ritratto di musico (Portrait of a Musician) from the Biblioteca Pinacoteca Accademia Ambrosiana website , Italian, accessed March 3, 2013

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Charles Nicholl: Leonardo da Vinci - The biography . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 978-3-10-052405-8 . Pp. 304-305.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Pinacoteca Ambrosiana ( Memento of the original from December 6, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ^ Carlo Pedretti, Catherine Frost: Leonardo, Art and Science . Giunti Editore, Florence / Milan 2000, p. 106