LEONARDESCHI. - If the term is intended to encompass all artists who drew inspiration or motifs from the great master’s models, employing them to the point of impressing new aspects upon their own artistic expression, the scope would have to be too broad, for Leonardo’s painting spoke to Raphael as much as to the Florentines (such as Piero di Cosimo or Bachiacca), to Correggio as much as to the Venetians, to Sodoma as much as to the Lodi painters (Agostino da Lodi), to Dürer as much as to the Flemish (Quentin Matsys and Joos van Cleve), and to the French. However, by the term *L.* here we refer to painters within the Lombard orbit who followed the master most closely, whether as collaborators in the execution of works, translators of his sketches and models into painting, or simply as copyists.
Among the first group were Ambrogio de’ BELTRAFFIO (v.); among the second, Giampietrino (v. PEDRINI) and Marco d’Oggiono (v.), painters who, despite their proximity to Leonardo, did not lose their own individuality; the same SALARIO (v.) and Bernardino Luini.
Cesare da Sesto (v.), in whom Leonardesque modes blend with predominant Venetian, late 15th-century Lombard, or central Italian experiences, also belongs to this circle. From the Lombard premises of 15th-century painting, moreover, one cannot exclude those artists who, in the last decade of the 15th century or the early years of the 16th, approached the master and earned the appellation *L.*, appropriating motifs from Leonardo often superimposing them in the most superficial manner onto traditional terminology. Such is the case with the monogrammist X, known for the *Circumcision* in the Louvre, signed and dated 1491, where Leonardesque elements, foreign to 15th-century composition, are concentrated in the central group of the Madonna; and the Master of the Sforza Altarpiece, so called for the altarpiece with the enthroned Madonna now in Brera (formerly in S. Ambrogio ad Nemus in Milan), datable to 1495. This work, rooted in the tradition of Foppa and Zenale, reveals in the delicate chiaroscuro modeling of the Madonna and Child, as well as in the portrait of Ludovico il Moro, the influence of Leonardo, whose premises are also felt in the later *Madonna with St. James* in the Cora collection in Turin. Meanwhile, the panel with *St. Joseph and St. Anne* in the Louvre or the series of *Apostles*, fragments of a predella divided between 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. A similar position, though with less direct resemblance to Leonardo’s types, 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 *Madonna and Child* in the Villa Melzi at Vaprio d’Adda; and, more tentatively, the frescoes of the *Creation* formerly in the abbatial hall of the church of S. Antonio in Milan and now in the Museo del Castello Sforzesco.
Also rooted in the Lombard tradition of Civerchio and Foppa is Bernardino dei Conti (b. in Pavia in 1450, d. in 1526 or ’28; works dated from 1496 to 1523), who, as a portraitist for the leading families of Lombardy, rendered his figures with a wooden dryness and fixed profiles (v. FORZA, 1496). To him has been attributed a group of works centered on the *Vertumnus and Pomona* in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin (the *Colombina* 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 into a coldly mannered idiom—considering Roman and Raphaelite influences—of Leonardo’s prototypes. In the *Portrait of a Young Girl* of 1525, comparisons with Raphael’s portraiture have repeatedly been noted.
Evidence of the broad diffusion of Leonardo’s models—reproduced with variations and adaptations but without understanding their deeper significance—is provided by the numerous copies of the *Virgin of the Rocks*, the *Last Supper*, the *St. Anne*, the *Mona Lisa*, and the *St. John*, left by unknown copyists. Their work often assumes documentary value when dealing with compositions for which only the master’s sketches or drawings are known today. Such are the *Vierge aux balançoires* in the Louvre, the *Madonna and Child with St. John* in the Uffizi (a replica of a motif frequently repeated), the many variants derived from Leonardo’s drawings for the *Madonna of the Cat*, or the replicas of the two versions of the *Leda*. — See pl. LXXI.