LEONARDESCHI. - If by this term one wished to understand all the artists who drew inspiration or motifs from the great models of the master, availing themselves of them even to the point of impressing new aspects upon their own artistic expression, one would have to range too widely, since Leonardo's painting spoke to Raphael as to the Florentines (such as Piero di Cosimo or Bachiacca), to Correggio as to the Venetians, to Sodoma as to the Lodigians (Agostino da Lodi), to Dürer as to the Flemings (Quentin Matsys and Joos van Cleve), to the French. But by the term Leonardesque here are meant the painters of the Lombard orbit who followed the master more closely, collaborators in the execution of works or translators into painting of sketches and models, or simply copyists.
Among the first were Ambrogio de' Predis and Boltraffio (v.); among the second Giampietrino (v. PEDRINI) and Marco d'Oggiono (v.), painters who in their closeness to Leonardo did not lose their own personality; and the same may be said of Andrea Solario (v.), Bernardino Luini
(v.), and Cesare da Sesto, in whom Leonardesque manners are combined with preponderant Venetian, fifteenth-century Lombard or central Italian experiences. From the Lombard premises of fifteenth-century painting one cannot, moreover, prescind even for those artists who in the last decade of the 1400s or in the early 1500s approached the master, so as to earn the appellation of L., and who appropriated motifs of Leonardo often superimposing them in the most superficial manner upon the traditional terminology. Such is the monogrammist X, known for the Circumcision in the Louvre, signed and dated 1491, where the Leonardism, foreign to the fifteenth-century composition, is gathered in the central group of the Madonna; and the Master of the Sforza altarpiece, so called for the altarpiece with the Madonna enthroned today in Brera (formerly in S. Ambrogio ad Nemus in Milan) datable to 1495; an altarpiece that belongs to the tradition of Foppa and Zenale, but where the subtle chiaroscuro execution of the Madonna and Child, as of the portrait of Ludovico il Moro, testifies to the proximity of Leonardo, whose premises are perceptible in the later Madonna with St. James in the Cora collection in Turin, while the panel with St. Joseph and St. Anne in the Louvre or the series of the Apostles, fragments of a predella divided among the Museo del Castello Sforzesco, the Priester collection in Vienna and the National Gallery in London - certainly earlier than the Brera altarpiece - show the artist confined within traditional forms. An analogous position, though with less physiognomic closeness to the types of Leonardo, can be recognized in the so-called Painter of S. Eufemia, to whom are attributed the fresco with the Madonna, St. Catherine and the donor in the Chapel of the church of S. Eufemia in Milan, and the Madonnone of the Villa Melzi at Vaprio d'Adda; besides, doubtfully, the frescoes of the Creation formerly in the abbatial hall of the church of S. Antonio in Milan and today in the Museo del Castello Sforzesco.
In the Lombard tradition of Civerchio and Foppa is also Bernardino dei Conti (b. at Pavia in 1450, d. in 1526 or '28: his works dated from 1496 to 1523) who, a maker of portraits for the leading families of Lombardy, in the woody dryness of the busts, in the fixity of the profiles (v. the portrait of Francesco Sforza as a child, 1496) does not reveal any echo of Leonardesque understanding; while, though maintaining the same characteristics, he later applies himself to models of the master in the Madonna with Child (1501) and in the Marriage of St. Catherine in the Carrara of Bergamo; or in the later (1522) Madonna with Child and St. John the Baptist in Brera. Still of Lombard motifs one must take account for the belated Cesare Magni, active from 1530 to 1533 (Madonna with St. Jerome and St. Peter, formerly Cook collection in Richmond, 1530; Crucifixion, in the cathedral of Vigevano, 1531; frescoes among which St. Martin and St. George, in the sanctuary of Saronno, 1533) who in the Holy Family of Brera demonstrates only a distant and mediated descent from Leonardo. Equally oblique are the Leonardesque reflections in Francesco Napoletano (active in Milan around 1500) known for the panel signed with the Madonna and saints in the Kunsthaus of Zurich, where the typologies of Leonardo are mingled with Lombard and Flemish echoes, the latter perhaps brought by the painter with him from Naples. To Francesco Napoletano has also been attributed the Madonna with Child, likewise in Zurich in the Kunsthaus, owing to the erroneous interpretation of the signature FR.LIA, to be understood instead as Fernando Llanos, the painter of Valencia, there engaged in 1506, together with Fernando Yanez de la Almedina, on the Stories of the Life of Mary in the Cathedral, remembered, as « Fernando Spagnolo », in the payments of the Florentine Signoria for the painting of the battle of Anghiari, dated 1505.
Among the pupils closest to the master were Salaino and Francesco Melzi, whose names recur often in the notes of Leonardo, whom they followed on the journeys to Rome and to France. Of Salaino (Giacomo de' Caprotti, ca. 1480-1524) no work is known, so that the reconstruction of his artistic personality on the attribution to him of works of the most obvious and manualistic derivation from the models of L. (Madonna with Child, Tabacchi collection, Rome; St. John the Baptist, Ambrosiana, Milan) remains more doubtful than ever. Of Melzi (1492-1570), who after having followed Leonardo in 1513 to Rome passed to France with the master, gathering at his death the inheritance and the precious manuscripts, there are known a signed and dated drawing (1510) in the Ambrosiana, a Virile Head incisively investigated in the manner of Leonardo, and a Portrait of a girl with a parrot (1525) in the Gallarati-Scotti collection in Milan; Lomazzo and Morigi remember him as a « very great miniaturist ».
A group of works has been attributed to him that centers on the Vertumnus and Pomona of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin (the Columbine in the Hermitage in Leningrad; the Holy Family, formerly in the Neles collection in Munich; the replica of the Leda in the Borghese Gallery in Rome) which reveal a translation in a coldly mannerist sense - where Roman and Raphaelesque modes are taken into account - of Leonardo's prototypes: in the Portrait of a Girl of 1525 comparisons with Raphaelesque portraiture have in fact been repeatedly recognized. Of the wide fortune of Leonardo's models - translated with variants and modulations, but without understanding their actual meaning - proof is given by the numerous replicas that unknown copyists have left of the Virgin of the Rocks, of the Last Supper, of the St. Anne, of the Mona Lisa, of the St. John; their work then often takes on documentary value when it concerns compositions for which today only sketches or drawings by the master are known. Thus the Vierge aux balances of the Louvre, the Madonna with Child and St. John the Baptist of the Uffizi (a replica of a motif repeated very often), the many variants from Leonardo's drawings for the Madonna of the Cat, or the replicas of the two versions of the Leda. - See pl. LXXI.
