The Da Vinci Painting No One Can Solve

The portrait you are about to see was painted in 1483 and to this day it continues to be studied by experts. But not because this is the most complex painting Leonardo da Vinci ever left behind, rather because it conceals a detail that for more than 200 years has been impossible to resolve. If you look closely, in the right hand of the man we see in this portrait, there is a sheet of paper, a musical score and on that score there is a mysterious inscription whose full meaning art historians have still not been able to decipher. This work is called Portrait of a Musician, though in Italian it is known simply as Il Musico. It was painted by Leonardo da Vinci in the late 15th century and today it is held at the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan. But there is something very few people know about this painting, for more than two centuries nobody knew that the man we see in this portrait was a musician. When this work first appeared in historical documentation, it was in a 1672 catalogue of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana where it was listed as a portrait of a Duke of Milan painted by Ambrogio Figgino, so from the very beginning it was not attributed to Leonardo and certainly not identified as the portrait of a musician. It was in the 19th century that experts began to suspect the author might be Leonardo, but the subject was still identified as a nobleman since the catalogues of the time listed it as the portrait of Ludovico il Moro, who was Leonardo's patron in Milan at the time. And so that remained the official story for more than 200 years, until in 1904 a restorer named Luigi Cavanaghi began cleaning the painting and what he found beneath a layer of overpaint would completely change the history of this portrait. Beneath that additional layer of paint Cavanaghi found a hand, and in that hand a musical score. Suddenly what for more than 200 years had been considered the portrait of a Duke became the mysterious portrait of a musician. But something else they noticed during this same restoration was that the Only a small section of musical notes was visible, and alongside them a partial inscription that read These five letters have generated more than a century of academic debate about what they could mean. The art historian Luca Beltrami was the first to propose a concrete interpretation. According to Beltrami, the letters are an abbreviation of the Latin cantum angelicum meaning angelic song, which would make the incomplete phrase a direct reference to one of the most well-known works of Francino Gafurio, a composer and chapel master of Milan Cathedral at the time, whose musical treatise was titled precisely Angelicum Ac Divinum Opus. If Beltrami is right, the score would not only identify the musician, it would also name him, because the only person for whom it would make sense to hold a score with that title would be the very man who composed it. But there are those who read the inscription in a completely different way. Some historians believe the letters do not abbreviate a title, but a proper name. That cant could be an abbreviation of cantor, meaning singer, and that ang would be the beginning of the name Angelo, a reference to Angelo Testa Grossa, a singer and singing master who worked at the court of Milan at exactly that time. Under this reading, the inscription would not say angelic song, but rather the singer Angelo. Two completely different interpretations of the same five letters, and neither one has been able to be confirmed. But now we come to another of the great questions surrounding this painting, because the mystery is not only what the score says, but who the musician holding it is. As I mentioned earlier, this small detail was discovered in 1905, and since then historians have proposed several candidates. The most supported by academic tradition is Francino Gaffurio. The historian Luca Beltrami proposed him in the early 20th century, and for decades he was the dominant identification. Gaffurio was a personal friend of Leonardo. Both worked for the same patron, Ludovico Sforza, and in 1496 he published a musical treatise titled that included woodcut illustrations attributed to Leonardo himself. So the connection between the two men was real and documented. However, there is a problem. Analyses of the painting suggest that the musician portrayed was around 25-30 years old at the time it was painted, and Gaffurio, born in 1451, would have been over 30 when Leonardo arrived in Milan, so the age does not quite fit. That is why in more recent decades another candidacy has gained strength, that of Atalante Migliorotti, a Tuscan musician and lutenist who had been a friend of Leonardo since his youth in Florence, and who came with him to the court of Milan as a singer. The Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, the museum that holds the work, today points to Migliorotti as one of the most plausible candidates, precisely because his personal friendship with Leonardo would make it more likely that the artist would have portrayed him. Now, although the identity of this man and the content of the sheet he holds are among the great mysteries surrounding this work, there is something else that complicates this story even further. But before we continue, I would like to remind you that if you would like to have this or any other work by Leonardo in your collection, you can purchase it directly from our website. In our catalogue you will find more than 900 carefully selected historical works for you to choose your favourites and begin your own art collection. Shipping is completely free worldwide and by purchasing from the store you will be supporting me enormously in continuing to create videos like this every week. Technical analyses carried out on the painting have revealed that the stole the musician is wearing, that band of fabric crossing his chest, was originally yellow. Today we see it in a sepia tone due to layers of paint that were added afterward which shows that the work was altered from how it originally looked. This means that the painting we see today is not exactly the painting Leonardo left behind and that someone, at some point over the last 500 years, intervened on it. Because of this, historians still debate whether this work can truly be attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. Most experts agree that the face of the musician is definitively from his hand, but the score, the hand holding it, the red hat and the hair, some scholars believe these could have been painted by members of his workshop. Which adds a fascinating paradox to this story, because the very element that defines the entire painting, the score that makes this man a musician, may not have been painted by Leonardo himself. In the end, we could say that we do not know who the man in this portrait is, nor do we know what Leonardo painted in the inscription on the score. In fact, we do not even know whether it was truly Leonardo who painted that score. But what we do know is that this painting, despite having been painted more than 500 years ago, remains an unsolved mystery. I would love for you to leave me in the comments, your interpretation of what you think those letters mean, and if you have any theory about who this man could be, let me know in the comments. Thank you so much for watching until the end, and I will see you in the next video.