Retrato de um Músico

This is the only male portrait we have from Leonardo, painted in Milan around 1485, and he never finished it. The face is fully alive, lit and turning, unmistakably his, while the body and the clothes stay flat and unresolved, probably left to an assistant. For a long time nobody knew he was a musician at all. A later hand had painted over the bottom, and only in a 1905 cleaning did a slip of sheet music reappear in his fingers. That scrap gave him a profession and set off a hunt for his name. The writing on it has been linked to Franchino Gaffurio, who ran the music at Milan cathedral and was a friend of Leonardo's, though others have proposed different musicians from the same court. What you can still see clearly is the moment Leonardo cared about, the eyes fixed on something outside the frame, a man who has just heard or is about to sing.