Leonardo's room with a view uncovered

By Bruce Johnston in Rome
January 13, 2005

The workshop where Leonardo da Vinci first met and may have begun painting the woman he immortalised as the Mona Lisa has been discovered in a military college in Florence.

The studio and lodgings, filling five rooms on two floors and still showing traces of wall paintings bearing what one expert called "astonishing associations" with his work, have come to light in what was once part of the friary of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence.

A team of restorers found the rooms behind a hidden door leading into the complex where da Vinci stayed in 1500. Until now all that was known about his time in Florence was his interest in experiments on insects.

The artist's father, Ser Piero da Vinci, had represented the friary in a legal dispute in 1497 and Leonardo is thought to have left the complex in either 1500 or 1501.

The Mona Lisa, generally believed to be a portrait of a Chianti girl of noble origins, Monna Lisa Gherardini, is said to have been painted between 1500 and 1504. Her wealthy husband, Francesco del Giocondo, was also a client of Ser Piero's, and involved in the same 1497 dispute.

"It was during this period that the artist probably at least made the acquaintance of the sitter of the Mona Lisa, before possibly painting her later," Roberto Manescalchi, a restorer at the institute, said.

During this stage of his time in Florence, Leonardo is also thought to have prepared the cartoon for his painting of Madonna and Child with St Anne, now in the National Gallery in London.

According to Mr Manescalchi, the artist also painted the Madonna dei Fusi for the secretary of state of Louis XII of France, Florimond Robertet, and drew studies of birds in flight.

Among the frescoes uncovered on one of the walls of the newly discovered premises are images of birds over what appears to have been a madonna, now lost.

Although the images may have been those of a pupil rather than the artist himself, Mr Manescalchi said they clearly reflected Leonardo's own studies.

He said that he had also found "beyond a shadow of a doubt" that Andrea del Sarto, one of the leading Florentine painters of the generation after Leonardo's, had later stayed in the same lodgings.  An exhibition which showcases Leonardo's inventions has just opened in Rome. In Leonardo Da Vinci: A Curious Genius, models based on the Atlantic Codex, a 1286-page collection of drawings and writings, appear alongside their modern incarnations. In many cases there is not a great amount of difference between them.

The Telegraph, London; Reuters