The curators of an exhibition in Florence have this week unveiled what they say is the only surviving sculpture by Leonardo da Vinci.
It has always been part of Da Vinci’s legend that he made sculptures, including a giant horse, but not a single extant 3D work by him had been identified.
The Virgin With the Laughing Child is the miraculous exception, according to the curators of the exhibition “Verrocchio: Master of Leonardo” at Palazzo Strozzi, where it has just gone on display.
It has an unambiguous label: “Leonardo da Vinci. He is said to have created it around 1472, when he was 19 or 20 and a pupil of the Florentine artist Andrea del Verrocchio.”
The UK has a special interest in the find, which has belonged to the Victoria and Albert Museum since 1858, but had long been credited to Antonio Rossellino.
That is because academics had been bamboozled by the posthumous authority of art historian and British Museum director John Pope-Hennessy, according to Francesco Caglioti, who is leading the new attribution.
Caglioti is well known among Renaissance experts for his unrivaled knowledge of 15th-century sculpture — an art history prodigy who made a catalog of the Louvre when he was eight.
Victorians had no difficulty seeing the Leonardo-esque look of the piece, he said.
The Virgin Mary looks down at the Christ child on her lap with what might be the prototype of all the enigmatic smiles in Da Vinci’s art, the most famous of which is the Mona Lisa’s.
Journalists at the press viewing of “Verrocchio: Master of Florence” gathered around the 50cm-tall red clay sculpture while Caglioti expounded why he thought it was 100 percent Leonardo.
Da Vinci expert Carmen Bambach from the Metropolitan Museum in New York was also there to support the claim.
They focus on two details: First, the voluminous, complicated draperies that flow over the Madonna’s legs are similar to drawings of draperies Da Vinci was making at the time. These drawings are almost obsessive studies of abstract folds and shadowy recesses.
Second, there is the face of the baby Christ and his realistic pose. That same attention to young children’s actual behavior can be seen in Da Vinci’s drawings, but portraying a laughing Christ in the 15th century was not only radical, but practically blasphemous.
In a passage in Da Vinci’s notebooks, he remembers getting into trouble when younger for portraying the infant Christ. Could this be the work that got him into hot water?
If the new attribution wins acceptance, it would ironically mean that just as Britain leaves the EU, its public art collections are once again proved to be among the finest depositories of Europe’s cultural heritage.
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