Portrait of a Musician

The Portrait of a Musician is a small painting in oils — and perhaps also tempera, the older technique in which pigment is bound with egg rather than oil — on a panel of walnut wood 43 centimetres (1 ft 5 in) high and 31 centimetres (1 ft) wide. It hangs in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan. It is given to Leonardo da Vinci and dated to around 1485, within the years 1483–1487, when he was living and working in that city. It is his only known painted portrait of a man. No document from his lifetime mentions it. Nobody recorded who paid for it, who sat for it, or why it was made. Every statement about the picture rests on the painted surface itself, and on comparison with other works Leonardo made in the same decade.

What the panel shows is simple. A young man appears from the chest up, turned slightly, looking out past the viewer's left shoulder. He wears a dark cap over curling hair and a dark garment with a lighter band at the neck. Low in the picture, his hand holds a folded sheet of music. The background is plain and dark. There is no room, no window, no coat of arms. Whatever the picture has to say, it says with a face, a costume, and one object.

The manner of the painting was new for Milan. Portraits there in the fifteenth century were normally done in strict profile — the sitter shown side-on, like a head on a coin. A profile records the outline of a face but keeps light out of the job: nothing turns, so nothing needs to be modelled in depth. This panel instead rotates the face part way towards the viewer, so that light can travel across the cheek and describe the flesh in the round. Scholars connect the change to Antonello da Messina, the painter credited with carrying this manner of portraiture — the turned pose, the oil paint, the close attention to skin and light — from the Netherlands into Italy. Leonardo, arriving in Milan from Florence, made the break decisive. In its handling the panel belongs with the other pictures he painted in that city, among them the Louvre Virgin of the Rocks and the Lady with an Ermine.

The panel's oddest feature is that its two halves are finished to different standards. The face is worked with great care: tight modelling around the eyes and mouth, a soft, unbroken fall of light across the cheek, small highlights caught in the hair. Nearly all current scholarship gives at least this passage to Leonardo, on the strength of its resemblance to his other work. Below the collar the painting changes. The shoulders and chest are stiff, the drapery flat, and that rigidity is unlike anything else in his pictures. Two explanations are on offer. The first is that Leonardo simply stopped: the painting is unfinished, and the lower part records an early stage of work that the face has already passed beyond. The second is that a student in his workshop painted the parts the master left. The panel alone cannot decide between them, and scholars have not settled the matter. The imbalance has shaped every judgement of the picture since — praise for the intensity and detail of the face, complaint about the stiff, wooden body beneath it.

The sitter's name is the larger open question, and one repair explains why it stayed hidden so long. At some point after the painting was made, someone applied fresh paint over the lower part of the panel — overpaint, meaning exactly that: a later layer laid on top of the original. That layer buried the hand and the sheet of music. What remained visible was a head and shoulders in plain dark clothing, and a well-dressed young man with no attributes reads easily as a nobleman. So for a long time the sitter was taken to be Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan and Leonardo's employer. Then, during a restoration in 1904–1905, the later layer was removed and the hand and the notes came back into view. The logic of the correction is plain: a man posing with sheet music has sat for a musician's portrait, not a duke's. The old identification collapsed, and the search turned to musicians instead.

It has not ended. Franchinus Gaffurius, a music theorist, was the favoured candidate through the twentieth century; in the twenty-first, opinion has shifted towards Atalante Migliorotti, a singer and lutenist. Josquin des Prez and Gaspar van Weerbeke have also been proposed. Not one of these names rests on a document linking a person to this panel; each is an argument from likelihood — who was in Milan, who mattered, who might have known Leonardo. The intimacy of the portrait has suggested a private commission, or a picture of a personal friend, but that too is an inference from the way the painting looks.

The object's later history is thin but telling. It has been in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana since at least 1672; how it travelled from Leonardo's workshop to that collection across the intervening two centuries is not recorded, and that blank stretch is part of why the sitter's name was lost. It is the only panel painting by Leonardo still in Milan, the city where he made it, and it counts among his best preserved works — an unexpected distinction for a picture that was never finished.

Larger readings have been proposed. Some scholars see the man caught mid-performance, about to sing. Others read the picture as a statement of a view Leonardo himself argued: that painting is superior to the other arts, music included. Both readings ask an unfinished, undocumented panel to carry more than it can bear. What the picture offers securely is narrower and stranger: a face brought close to completion, a body left hard and flat, and a page of notes that changed the sitter's trade without ever supplying his name.