Description
Portrait of a Musician – the only male portrait Leonardo painted
The Portrait of a Musician is a singularity in Leonardo’s work: of all his portraits, it is the only one showing a man. For centuries it was believed the Duke of Milan looked out of it – until a cleaning revealed a hand holding a sheet of music and changed entirely who this person might have been. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this collected face into your home, painted in oil on canvas.
A painting that stopped half way
The work was made around 1483–1487 in Milan, measures 44.7 × 32 cm and is painted on a walnut panel; it is held in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan. In truth only the face and hair are finished. The doublet was left unexecuted and the stole is merely undercoated. That incompleteness is instructive: we see Leonardo’s way of working, carrying to completion first what interested him – the head – and leaving the rest for a later that never came.
The hand that changed the painting’s name
Until the early twentieth century the portrait was taken to show Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. In 1904–1905 the restorers Luigi Cavenaghi and Antonio Grandi removed a layer of overpaint – and beneath it appeared a hand holding a folded sheet of music. The duke fell away, and the painting acquired the name it carries today. The notes and letters on the sheet are largely illegible given the painting’s condition; scholars have suggested the partly surviving letters “Cant” and “An” stand for Cantum Angelicum, angelic song. Who the musician was remains unknown.
The face is Leonardo’s, the body perhaps not
Modern scholarship counts the work among Leonardo’s. Over the body, however, uncertainty remains: some hold that a pupil assisted him, the names raised most often being Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Ambrogio de Predis. On the face agreement is much wider – it is generally held to be entirely Leonardo’s. That is how to read the painting honestly: the master’s head, perhaps a workshop body, and between them a border you can see.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
Every reproduction of the Portrait of a Musician is entirely hand-painted in oil on canvas – not a print, but a real painting created for you by an experienced artist. It is available in eight sizes, stretched on a wooden frame on request and in a frame from our 3D range. The dark ground and sharp gaze make the work strong on a quiet wall, in an office, or beside an instrument.
- Subject: Portrait of a Musician, Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1483–1487
- Technique: hand-painted oil on canvas, painting reproduction
- Sizes: 8 dimensions, stretched on a wooden frame on request
- Fact: until 1905 the sitter was thought to be the duke – until a cleaning revealed the hand holding a sheet of music
