The lost Leonardo da Vinci painting has been found

The Uffizi Museum is Florence’s premier painting museum. In the museum there are a number of famous paintings by Botticelli, Michelangelo, Giotto, and others. Among the other famous paintings is the Adoration of the Magi by Leonardo da Vinci.

Da Vinci was commissioned for the painting by a monastery in Florence in 1481 and he worked on the painting until 1482. In that year da Vinci left Florence for Milan where he stayed for 17 years. The painting, unfinished, stayed behind in Florence. The unfinished painted entered the collection of the Uffizi in 1670.

When we first saw the painting as students many years ago, it was a bizarre melange of religious figures, animals, partial architectural structures, and vague in dark detail. We thought that if the painting was famous, it had to be because da Vinci was famous. It was a strange puzzle.

da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi, before restoration

When we returned in the early 2000s da Vinci’s Adoration was the same. Dark, confusing, still a puzzle.

In 2011 the puzzle-painting disappeared and was replaced by a sign that said the painting was being restored. The sign was still there the next year. And the next year. And the next. We wondered if the painting had been lost.

In spring 2017 just before we left Florence for home the painting reappeared in a set of rooms devoted to da Vinci’s paintings and the six year long restoration of the Adoration. We saw it just one time that year and we were startled. Five hundred years of dirt and varnish had been removed and the painting no longer seemed so dark and puzzling. Challenging but no longer weird.

da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi, after six years of restoration

For the return of his Adoration of the Magi the museum constructed a new space for its collection of three paintings by the artist. The Adoration, by far the largest painting, has the most prominent display. In the new area there was even a movie about the restoration. I took a hand held video of the section of the movie where they were packing up the painting, loading it on a truck, and driving away with a police escort.

Because of the ubiquity of cell phones, the museum has yielded (given up?) on photography in the gallery. I took a photo of the restored Adoration and found an old, fairly high resolution image the painting before its restoration. The difference between the painting before and after restoration is startling.

Da Vinci’s painting is large, over eight feet square. There is a crowd of figures around Mary and Jesus including the Eastern Kings and Joseph. There are also a number of animals, some ruins, and a battle in the background. The most obvious surprise to us was that da Vinci had begun applying paint to his drawing, something that was not apparent before. Interestingly a central figure, Mary was only sketched but was not painted before da Vinci left Florence.

After six years with a sign in the gallery in place of the painting itself, the restoration has made da Vinci’s Adoration much more accessible.

Da Vinci had a personal history of unfinished projects. The monks at the monastery who commissioned him in 1481 finally lost hope that he would return to Florence and finish his work. The monks commissioned Filippino Lippi, an artist of roughly the same generation, to do his own Adoration of the Magi. Lippi accepted the commission and signed his work with the date of  1496. Lippi’s Adoration came into the possession of the Uffizi in 1666. Today it is shown in the newly constructed da Vinci area.

Lippi produced this Adoration fourteen years
after da Vinci had left Florence

Lippi also assembled a crowd around Mary and Jesus though the crowd is a better organized and includes only people and no odd animals. Instead of a classic ruin, Lippi’s background architecture was a ramshackle shed. In the background in da Vinci’s Adoration there some odd scenes. In the foreground Lippi painted members of the Medici family, some long dead, offering gifts to Jesus and in the background Lippi had people following the light in the night sky to visit the just born Jesus. Lippi’s concept seems more conventional; da Vinci’s concept more daring.