Last week, at a press conference in Rome, Italy, some scholars unveiled a small painted tile portraying a curly-haired, rosy-cheeked Archangel Gabriel. But the two experts, art historian Ernesto Solari and handwriting expert Ivana Rosa Bonfantino, revealed something else, which may be of crucial importance. It seems that they actually discovered a small signature positioned along the figure’s jawline. The signature read “Da Vinci Lionardo”. This prompted the two experts to believe that the painted tile might actually be Da Vinci’s earliest known work.
The tile is actually a “majolica”, which is a style of pottery that was very popular in the 15th century Italy. The painting belongs to the Fenices, a family of aristocrats from Ravello. According to Solari, the descendants of this family stumbled upon the tile when cleaning the house. However, they had no idea about its incredible origins. Luckily for them, they realized quickly that what they found was of greater importance than every other thing in their house. Three years have passed since then, and the two scholars spent them analyzing the painted tile. It seems that infrared analysis revealed a creation date of 1471, written near the signature. Further dating revealed that indeed, the painting was done in the 15th century.
Leonardo Da Vinci’s possible first creation
Last Wednesday press conference in #Rome by prof. #ErnestoSolari in which he revails that an 8 inch tile featuring a figure styled as the Archangel Gabriel is the earliest known work by #LeonardodaVinci and that the figure is #Leonardo himself at age 18 #artnews #art #renaissance pic.twitter.com/96IPRYnfXn
— Alain Chivilò (@AlainChivilo) June 25, 2018
According to Bonfantino, the way in which the year 1471 was written was similar to the one on other famous Da Vinci paintings, with the “1” a lot shorter than the other numbers. She says that everything seems to indicate towards a young Leonardo Da Vinci writing that number.
What’s even more interesting is that the signature was done in mirror writing, one of Da Vinci’s favorite techniques. Moreover, near it, experts also found two other numbers: 52 and 72. The first number might refer to his birth year, 1452. The other two, 7 and 2, correspond to the letters G and B in the alphabet, clearly alluding to the painting’s subject, Archangel Gabriel.
Image source: flickr