These short lines are perhaps still the best description of the Parma tablet, and can help us appreciate the exquisite and absolutely “modern” interplay between the finishedness of the reclining and ambiguously smiling face, which barely allows the gaze to filter through the slightly swollen eyelids, and the unfinishedness of the hair which, barely held back by a barely visible ribbon, swells with more decisive features around the head and falls in serpentine patterns on the shoulders.
Visual translation of an idea, stylistic exercise, autonomous work with a value in itself then, more than preparatory drawing or working sketch. A perspective of this type would explain some singularities and identifying oscillations that emerge in the vast critical literature on Leonardo, which however agrees in identifying La scapiliata as a sort of unicum in the Master’s corpus. Technical and material singularities first of all, as it is in any case a “painting” (albeit monochrome) on wood, which necessarily extrapolate it from the category of drawings or preparatory sketches, and from Leonardo’s own “head studies”, so much so that it is often defined by ambiguous terms such as “sketch”, “draw” etc. Furthermore, there are difficulties in identifying it, as demonstrated by the alternation of different hypotheses: a study for Leda, for the London Sant’Anna, or for the second version of the Virgin of the Rocks , also in the National Gallery.
One might rather agree with Paolo Toschi who in 1826, in the list attached to the letter with which he proposed to the president of the Academy of Fine Arts of Parma the purchase of the picture gallery of the painter Gaetano Callani offered by the heirs (documentation in the Archives of the National Gallery of Parma), cites it as “A Madonna’s head painted in chiaroscuro”, a declaration that on the one hand, in its conciseness, seems to be an acknowledgement of the self-referential nature of the painting, and on the other, due to the intrinsic polysemantic nature of the term Madonna/Monna typical of cultured language (and still in Leonardo’s time, just think, obviously, of the title of his most celebrated work) but so fashionable in the nineteenth-century revival, leaves the way open to an intriguing interpretative interweaving between the sacred and the profane.
Toschi, comforted by the decision of the “extraordinary meeting” of the Academy on 7 June 1839 (several years have passed in the meantime…) which established the purchase, does not seem to have any doubts about the autograph, inaugurating a critical path in Italy that is almost unanimous, with one clamorous and important exception. In fact, Corrado Ricci, the new director of the Gallery that had just been taken from the management of the Academy, in his 1896 catalogue raises malicious doubts about the authenticity of the work as it comes from the studio of a painter, but without advancing convincing reasons, and perhaps with some hint of “spite” (Emiliani 1994) towards those people from Parma who, as usual, had not truly welcomed with open arms the scholar from Bologna.
However, it was his teacher, Adolfo Venturi (1924), who once again and peremptorily affirmed the autograph of the head, later proposing (Venturi 1925b) to identify it with a work by Leonardo documented in the Gonzaga collection as early as 1531. This “trail” was followed and supported above all by Carlo Pedretti who even recently (1983-84) supported the hypothesis with a whole series of testimonies and documentary references of great and scientific accuracy (able to trace the head back to the commission of Isabella d’Este, and at the same time derive a reliable dating of around 1508, moreover supported by reasons of style), while Riccomini (1985) proposed possible connections between the painter Callani and the intellectual and collecting environment (always, and pour cause , in love with Leonardo) of Milan in the second half of the 18th century.
An indirect but suggestive confirmation of an ancient Lombard location and permanence of our panel is confirmed not only in the ancient copies present in various collections, but also in the actual female typologies that derive from it in a refined Leonardesque painter such as Bernardino Luini, or in the echo that Leonardo’s doing and thinking resonates in the young Correggio, not by chance a debutant in Mantua.
Luisa Viola’s card, taken from Fornari Schianchi L. (edited by), Galleria Nazionale di Parma. Catalogue of works. From the Ancient to the Sixteenth Century, Franco Maria Ricci, Milan, 1997.