The bust of a child from front and back

Two studies of the bust of a child: above, the shoulders, seen from behind, and the head not shown; below, the same seen from the front Leonardo's first outline for a treatise on anatomy, drafted around 1490, included a note to study 'which are the members which, after the child is born, grow more than the others, and the measurements of a child of one year.' This drawing seems however to be simply a visual survey of the soft contours of a thriving infant, with no attempt to analyse its proportions. Another drawing, of the bust of a child in left profile (RCIN 912519), must be related for the chest of the child terminates at the same horizontal line in all three studies. The obvious context would be a terracotta bust of the Christ Child or Infant Baptist, common during the Renaissance as suitable exemplars in children’s nurseries. While no such bust by Leonardo is known – indeed, no surviving sculpture is generally accepted as being by the artist – the Milanese artist and writer Gian Paolo Lomazzo described in 1584 a terracotta bust of the Christ Child supposedly by Leonardo, in his own collection. The careful handling of the red chalk in this drawing suggests a date around 1500. The putative terracotta could thus have been executed either during Leonardo’s last years in Sforza Milan – perhaps for the nursery of Ludovico’s sons Massimiliano (b. 1493) and Francesco (b. 1495) – or soon after his return to Florence. Text adapted from Leonardo da Vinci: A life in drawing, London, 2018