Arno Landscape

Leonardo wrote the date right onto this sheet, in his backwards mirror hand: the day of Saint Mary of the Snow, the fifth of August, 1473. He was 21, still in Florence, and no one had asked him to draw this. It is a wide view over the Arno valley, a fortress on a crag, hills dissolving into a haze of quick strokes, the river only suggested below. What makes it matter is how little else is here. There are no saints, no patrons, no story pinned to it, just land and weather looked at for their own sake, which almost nobody in Europe had bothered to draw before. The rock faces are worked in tight parallel lines, the trees in loose flicks, as if he were testing how far a pen could carry both weight and air. It is the first thing by his hand we can date to the day.