Folio II · Dipinti · Selected paintings
Paintings, finished & unfinished
A small body of work by any measure: about fifteen paintings in fifty years. I would rather leave a panel unfinished than finish it wrong.
Each plate opens large. Click a painting to hold it up to the light.
Mona Lisa
A portrait of Lisa Gherardini that I kept and kept improving — sixteen years of sfumato, the smoke-soft edge where no outline exists.
- Medium
- Oil on poplar panel · 77 × 53 cm
- Client
- Francesco del Giocondo
- On view
- Musée du Louvre, Paris
Lady with an Ermine
Cecilia Gallerani turns toward a voice outside the frame. The ermine is a pun on her name and an emblem of my patron.
- Medium
- Oil on walnut panel
- Client
- Ludovico Sforza
- On view
- Czartoryski Museum, Kraków
The Last Supper
Perspective converges on Christ’s head; the apostles break into four groups of three, reacting to a single sentence.
- Medium
- Tempera & oil on dry wall · 460 × 880 cm
- Client
- Ludovico Sforza
- On view
- Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan
Annunciation
An early large commission from my years in Verrocchio’s workshop — already studying wings from real birds.
- Medium
- Oil & tempera on panel
- Client
- Workshop of Verrocchio
- On view
- Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Ginevra de’ Benci
The juniper — ginepro — behind her is a play on her name. My only painting now in the Americas.
- Medium
- Oil on panel
- Client
- Private commission
- On view
- National Gallery of Art, Washington
Virgin of the Rocks
Geology as stage set: every plant and stratum in the grotto is botanically and geologically observed.
- Medium
- Oil on panel, transferred to canvas
- Client
- Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, Milan
- On view
- Musée du Louvre, Paris
Virgin and Child with Saint Anne
Three generations in one interlocking pyramid, against mountains dissolving into blue air.
- Medium
- Oil on poplar panel
- Client
- Kept in the studio
- On view
- Musée du Louvre, Paris
Saint John the Baptist
A figure emerging from darkness, one finger raised. Perhaps my last painting.
- Medium
- Oil on walnut panel · 69 × 57 cm
- Client
- Kept in the studio
- On view
- Musée du Louvre, Paris
Process
How a painting is made here
- Observation — weeks of drawing from life: hands, drapery, rocks, the water of the Arno.
- Cartoon — a full-size drawing, pricked and pounced onto the gessoed panel.
- Underpainting — a monochrome layer that sets light and shadow first.
- Sfumato — dozens of thin oil glazes, blended until no edge remains.
- Revision — I keep the panel. Some stay with me for the rest of my life.