2023-11-11 15:39:30
Not a simple waterfall but a “miraculous source”, from which “holy water” gushed, it could be the one depicted on the right of the sheet in the first known drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, the “8P Landscape” kept in the Uffizi Galleries and dated by the artist to 5 August 1473, the day of Santa Maria della Neve. The hypothesis, based on new unpublished documents discovered in the State Archives of Florence, is put forward by the archivist Paolo Santini in his book “Gli Statuti di Vinci del 1418″, published by the publisher Olschki in the prestigious series of the ‘Biblioteca Leonardiana of Vinci – Research and Documents”.
Santini, as he explained to time.news, found an official document from the Municipality of Vinci from the year 1474, included in the “reforms of the statutes” – kept in the “Fond of the Statutes of the autonomous and subject communities” to the power of Florence – in which it is said that in 1473 a spring of water gushed out on the Montalbano mountains in the area of the Santalluccio woods “which is beneficial to many people”. And precisely this “miraculous fountain”, described in a notarial deed, proving the echo that the event had in the birthplace of the Renaissance genius, may have been depicted in the drawing that Leonardo made at the age of 21.
By virtue of the miracle, the Municipality of Vinci, to honor the Lord God and the Virgin Mary, had started the construction of a chapel dedicated to the Madonna, foreseeing that “to come to the fact of said hbuilding which is estimated to take several years or some years more hundreds of lire will be spent”.
Hence the new hypothesis on the waterfall depicted in the Leonardo landscape kept in the Uffizi. The enigmatic drawing, according to the suggestion of the archivist Paolo Santini, “may have finally found a new and, we believe, more complete explanation. It is reasonably possible that Leonardo was fascinated and struck, even impressed, by this fact, evidently grandiose and immediately spread with great fanfare among the people as a miracle. So much so that in the notarial document the water is already defined as ‘holy water’. Did Leonardo therefore want to portray the water that flows from the miraculous spring on Montalbano in his drawing? Could it be a our opinion of Leonardo’s desire to represent a miraculous fact which had evidently immediately aroused widespread interest”.
The identification of the place could also help to more accurately relocate Leonardo’s observation point with respect to the overall layout of the drawing.
This event of 1473 was unknown until today and no one had ever considered it as part of Leonardo’s baggage, “while we firmly believe that it was – writes Santini in his book – We then remember here that the Acqua Santa ravine is the origin del Vincio. The fact that the Municipality takes on the burden of constructing a building in a remote place on Montalbano, defined as sterile, is an absolutely unique circumstance”.
Subsequently the Municipality of Vinci, finding itself in difficulty from an economic point of view – as the archivist Paolo Santino reconstructed – granted anyone who wanted it the possibility of building buildings for the sale of bread and wine at a distance of half a mile, for all those who would have rushed to draw from the miraculous source and who otherwise would not have found anything to refresh themselves, given the remoteness of their homes. The concession to build would have been issued by the Council of Twelve of the upon payment of a sum to be established, which in any case would have been used for the continuation of the construction work of the chapel dedicated to the Madonna.
In order to achieve the goal, an effective way was therefore devised to continue the construction of the sanctuary dedicated to the Madonna, the archivist Paolo Santini explained to time.news: to allow those who wanted to build buildings to resell food products , in anticipation of the large crowd that would flock to an isolated place far from the houses to draw the miraculous and therapeutic water, upon payment of a tax, the proceeds of which would then be used to finance the construction work already underway and evidently rather onerous. Thus, the patrons would have found sustenance and the Municipality of Vinci would have collected money.
However, the Florentine approvers, having examined this provision, established that the tax to be paid should not be more than six lire for each housing built, thus severely limiting the potential of the operation conceived and implemented by the Vincians. We read, in fact, in the unpublished documents brought to light: “they want the captains and twelfth councilors to be able to tax and condepnate who will build accommodation near the holy water at a half mile distance as they wish, not passing said tax the sum of six lire for each accommodation and each to be paid as is ordered in the aforementioned statute”.
Paolo Santini then recalls, to corroborate his suggestive hypothesis, that Leonardo in the Arno diversion project of 1503 marked “Sant’Allucio” prominently on the Montalbano ridge, a place he knew well. The place called the Holy Water then appears numerous times in later documents, and in many documents linked to Leonardo’s family.
The volume edited by Paolo Santini offers the edition of the statutes of Vinci of 1418, the text of which, previously unpublished, has been transcribed in full and accompanied by a rich array of critical notes and introductory essays. This is followed by a brief general history of Vinci and a detailed diachronic analysis on the history of local institutions up to the approval of the aforementioned municipal statutes.
The first part of the work ends with a paragraph dedicated to the so-called “Leonard suggestions in the Statutes of Vinci”, which emerged on the basis of Santini’s own discoveries in the State Archives of Florence.
The in-depth study of the content and an accurate analysis of the manuscript of the Statutes as a whole have made it possible to finally restore the original order of composition to the papers, a circumstance which has allowed – among many other things – to trace, in the examination of the ‘ reforms’ added after the drafting of the initial text, surprising information relating to some events that occurred between 1473 and 1474, crucial years in the life of Leonardo da Vinci.
In the second part, focused on daily life in Vinci in the 15th century, the volume hosts the carefully commented transcription of the Statutes, in turn preceded by an index of the rubrics which allows you to easily retrace the complex structure of the statutory corpus.
(by Paolo Martini)
#Holy #water #Leonardos #landscape #Miracle #discovered #Vinci