Leonardo's Monster - Circular Wooden Panel (Vasari's Anecdote)

Vasari tells a lovely story about a wood panel painting created by Leonardo da Vinci upon his father’s request.

Ser Piero da Vinci’s request was a benevolent deed for a local peasant, whom he knew and valued as someone who often assisted him with hunting and fishing. The peasant brought Ser Piero a round piece of figtree wood and asked if it could be taken to Florence to be painted.

[We don’t actually know with any certainty which of Vasari’s anecdotes are based in truth and which are either gossip or a figment of his fruitful imagination. But this story gives us an insight, irrespective of its veracity, into people’s attitudes to art at the time. And craft too – after all, the peasant seemed to have carved out the wood himself and his desire to turn it into an art object is a reflection of ordinary people’s affinities with the process of creation.]

Ser Piero didn’t provide specifics - he just asked his son (and I quote Vasari directly here) “to paint something upon it”. Thus, Leonardo had full freedom to create whatever his heart desired. It turns out, his heart desired something a little scary.

The story unravels into a typical leonardesque whimsy with a touch of horror. Leonardo decided to paint a frightful monster, akin to the head of the Medusa. To make this monster as naturalistic as possible, he collected all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures – lizards, grasshoppers, bats, locusts, etc. The unfortunate thing is that the creatures seemed to have died in Leonardo’s studio. But he kept on painting, ignoring the smell (the dedication!).

By combining their features, he came up with a creature “coming out of some dark broken rocks, with venom issuing from its open jaws, fire from its eyes, and smoke from its nostrils, a monstrous and horrible thing indeed”. When Ser Piero arrived to pick up the painting, Leonardo staged his own house of horrors by setting it up in the dimly lit room and scaring the living wits out of his dad. Ser Piero loved it so much that instead of giving it to the peasant, he sold the curious masterpiece to the Florentine merchants for 100 ducats, who, in turn, sold it to the Duke of Milan for 300.

He then purchased a similar wooden disk with a heart, pierced by a dart, and gave that back to the unwitting peasant, who remained none the wiser and forever grateful.

Image:

Studies of crabs, ink on paper, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, Germany