L'Annonciation

Leonardo was barely twenty when he worked on this, still a junior hand in Verrocchio's Florence workshop around 1472. You can see him testing ideas that nobody had asked him to solve yet. Look at the angel's wings. They aren't the flat, patterned wings of earlier altarpieces. Leonardo studied real birds and built them from actual feathers, so they look like they could beat the air. And there are places where his ambition ran ahead of his skill. Mary's right arm reaching toward the lectern is stretched oddly long, and the stonework behind her doesn't quite settle into space. Some scholars think the picture was meant to hang high and be seen from the right, which would pull those distortions back into order. The distant harbor, dissolving into blue haze, is the part that already looks fully like the older Leonardo we know.