A painting with no documented history
Of the Uffizi Annunciation we know neither its original location nor who commissioned it. The painting resurfaces in the records only in 1867, when it reached the gallery from the sacristy of the monastery of San Bartolomeo a Monteoliveto, outside Porta San Frediano: before that date, silence. Its attribution was uncertain for decades too: first given to Ghirlandaio, then to Ridolfo Ghirlandaio according to Giovanni Morelli, it settled on Leonardo only with the discovery of a preparatory study for the angel’s sleeve, now in Oxford, dated to 1473. Once the name was resolved, scholarship stopped there: it established who, not why. No source explains how the idea was born, whom it was meant for, or what it was supposed to say to those who would look at it. It is a work that lacks precisely what usually allows us to understand a fifteenth-century painting: the contract, the patron, the destination. I believe this gap is not a hole in the documentation but the very nature of the work: no one commissioned it, because it was born not from a contract but from advice given within the workshop.
Verrocchio’s advice
The relationship between Leonardo and Verrocchio was not the usual one between master and apprentice. Verrocchio, a sculptor before he was a painter, had recognized something different in him: not an apprentice to be taught a trade, but a son in art. A mutual exchange had grown between them: advice that went beyond the technique of painting, in return for a trust that Leonardo repaid in his own way. I believe it was Verrocchio himself who suggested that he consecrate his own story — his birth, his mother, everything he carried with him without being able to speak of it — not in words, but in a painting. Words can be repeated, betrayed, carried to those who must not hear them. An image, if well built, remains crystallized forever in what it shows, without ever openly saying anything. From that moment, I believe, Leonardo stopped speaking of it: the secret was no longer to pass his lips; it was only to be seen, by those who knew how to look.
The garden as a skull
The enclosed garden behind the two figures follows exactly this logic. It is not the usual hortus conclusus of the Marian tradition, the enclosure of purity: it is closer to a skull, a boundary that holds memory and from which nothing escapes, just as nothing was ever again to escape Leonardo’s lips. Within that enclosure, the sacred scene and a private one overlap: the angel and Mary are also Leonardo and Butes, his mother (the name by which, in my previous books, “I segreti di Leonardo, le parole svelate” and “Leonardo, the First Book of Secrets”, I identified Caterina through the inscription hidden on the Mona Lisa’s dress: from Buti, her surname, to Butes (Blue), a name of Kalinago origin). He announces the gift of a son, she accepts, and in the very instant she recognizes it — in that lowered gaze and that barely raised hand — she reveals the secret she carries. The altar and the book over which Mary leans work on two levels at once, one documented and one symbolic: that marble lectern really does reproduce, as scholars have established, the tomb that Verrocchio carved for Piero and Giovanni de’ Medici in the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo. That is a fact, not my interpretation. But a second level is added to that fact: the same thread that, in the picture-rebuses of the Virgin of the Rocks, leads to the inscription “GIOVANNI-PIERO-DE-ME-DI-CI-TORNABUONI”, Leonardo’s first baptismal name, and which also makes that altar the physical place where the mother guards what no one must know.
The meadow and the hand-shaped rock
The flowering meadow, which at first glance seems the most peaceful detail of the painting — grass, flowers, a corner of tamed nature — is the unconscious laid out on the ground: a stormy sea disguised as a garden. And above that magma, at the focal point of the perspective, the hazy mountain in the background hides something that in the works of his maturity will become a precise, recurring signature: the hand-shaped rock, the same one we will find again in the Virgin of the Rocks and the Mona Lisa, linked there to the island of Carriacou and to his mother’s origins (the place that, in my reconstruction, connects Caterina Butes to Lorenzo the Magnificent — the son she would have borne and whom Leonardo, raised by her in turn, would always have regarded as a brother). Here, in the Annunciation, that hand is not yet declared: it is only planted, waiting to sprout in the paintings to come.
Two hands, not two styles
One question remains: why are the angel and Mary treated so unevenly? The first is defined, almost sculpted; the second idealized to the point of abstraction, in a manner that might recall certain figures by Piero della Francesca. Having settled the overall attribution thanks to the sleeve study, scholars dismissed this disparity as youthful uncertainty — Leonardo was just over twenty. It is a convenient explanation, but a partial one: it does not ask why Mary’s face in particular, and not the angel’s, remained vague. I believe that Verrocchio, after starting the work, entrusted Mary’s face to another pupil of the workshop — not to Leonardo. This is no minor detail: it means that the mother’s face, within the sacred fiction, was not to be defined by the one who carried the secret, but by an outside, neutral hand that painted without knowing. Only the angel — the part of the work closest to Leonardo — could afford to be sharp, because it was the only voice authorized to say something. That the painting bears more than one hand is not merely my hypothesis: infrared analysis has revealed that the angel’s wings were lengthened at a later stage by yet another, anonymous hand, departing from the original, more naturalistic proportions. The work, in short, was never as closed and unified as it is usually described: its very material already carries the same many-voiced logic that I read in its meaning.
Who sends the angel
One last question remains, perhaps the most important: who sends the angel? Who is the third presence that the painting presupposes but never shows? It is not God in the literal sense, and it is not a patron — there was none. I firmly believe it is Verrocchio, disguised as heavenly will: only under the authority of the sacred could a secret of this magnitude be put into an image without it becoming an accusation. A painting by several hands, then, at least in its conception: born from Verrocchio’s suggestion, partly entrusted to a neutral pupil, and completed in its most revealing part by Leonardo, in the only language still open to him at that point.
Mary’s drapery and the Saint Anne cartoon
One last detail links the Annunciation to the works of Leonardo’s maturity: the drapery folded over Mary’s knees. Set beside the preparatory cartoon for The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist, made by Leonardo some thirty years later, it reveals the same module: the same folds falling from the knees, the same lap shaped as a place of welcome. I read this detail as a subliminal, pre-conscious trace: something that surfaces in the Annunciation in his youth, not yet declared, and that Leonardo reworks later on, with the full awareness of maturity. In the cartoon that drapery no longer clothes one mother but two, and beside them appear two children: the meaning of the two mothers, Dianora Tornabuoni and Caterina, and the memory of the meeting between them, Leonardo and Lorenzo, which took place when Leonardo was still a small child. What in the Annunciation was only an echo in the folds of a mantle becomes, many years later, the very subject of the work.
Note. As I recorded in my book, the account of this meeting was given only once, at the wish of Dianora Tornabuoni. Reading it was made possible by the constellation codes of the Louvre painting The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1503-1519, Louvre Museum, Paris), in which the Child embraces a lamb.
The thread leading to the Baptism of Christ
All this leads directly to the Baptism of Christ, the other workshop painting in which Leonardo’s extraordinarily defined hand can be recognized in the two angels: the same hidden turtle marks the two figures as brothers — Leonardo, raised by Caterina, and Lorenzo the Magnificent, born to her — one in noble dress, the other in humble garments, hands joined like two people guarding a secret together. It is the very same gesture that binds the angel and Mary in the Annunciation. Here Leonardo does not yet tell everything: that will come only decades later, in the picture-rebuses, in the codes of hidden constellations, in the dolphin of the Mona Lisa and the Salvator Mundi. And it will come through the shape of the island as well, which is not a recurring decorative motif but a design trace: the very principle of the iconographic form from which entire compositions are born — the hands of the Last Supper, the group of Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child — built from the outline of the island, not decorated with it afterwards. In the Annunciation Leonardo merely seals, with gestures and symbols, a story that cannot be told in words, as I described in my book — but the intention is already clear: from this point on, for the rest of his life, only images would be the casket of his secrets.
Maurizio Pecorari
