Visual puns and variable perception: Leonardo's Madonna of the Yarnwinder: in the second of two articles on Leonardo da Vinci, Larry J. Feinberg explains how the delight artist took in rebuses��visual puns��was part of a larger interest in the relativity of perception, as an un-noticed pun in his Madonna of the Yarnwinder suggests

Over time, Leonardo's interest in vision and perception increasingly became fused with his literary inquiries and recreations. From the very beginning o his artistic career he found that ideas could be more effectively communicated, or recorded for himself, in the juxtaposition of images and text each reinforcing the other. For members of the Sforza court and other patrons he also jauntily involved himself in the interplay of words and pictures in his fashioning of witty imprese and emblemi with mottos. (1) Occasionally, h even integrated another type of literary device, the visual pun, into his painting as in the celebrated representation of a juniper (Italian: ginepro) in his Portrait of Ginevra de' Benci (e. 1474; National Gallery of Art, Washington) and his inclusion of an ermine (Greek: galee) in his Cecilia Gallerani (c. 1485; Czartoryski Museum, Cracow). (2)

At the Milanese court, Leonardo witnessed the use of visual puns in heraldry for Ludovico Sforza, Beatrice d'Este, and her sister, Isabella. (3) The playwright Niccolo da Corregio invented an impresa for Isabella that featured a basket-weave motif, punning on the term for such basket-work, 'vinci', and the word 'vince', meaning 'she conquers'. (4) Leonardo's employment of iconic symbols or signs as the equivalent of a verbal text led, as Carlo Vecce remarked, to 'what was perhaps the strangest intellectual experiment of his life--the compilation of his rebuses or series of pictographs.' (5) These picture puzzles depended, like puns, on the assonance of words that have different meanings. For example, beneath a rebus image Leonardo drew of a cat with wings, he wrote 'pia gatta vola' (pious eat flies) which, when said quickly, sounds like 'piang' a tavola' or, in English, 'painted on panel' or 'cry at the table'. (6)

The rebuses--serial visual puns, really--may have been no more than a passing fancy for Leonardo; the majority of his pictographs, including the winged cat, are found on just one double-sided page, preserved in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle (c. 1487-90; no. 12692). (7) Yet, it is quite possible that this scarcity is simply an accident of survival, and that such visual texts may have been a relatively serious preoccupation for him. As Vecce has noted, Leonardo's pictographs, realised with a few quick strokes of the pen, nevertheless represented for him 'the essential properties of the object [or] animal--even in motion'. (8) Indeed a penchant for rebuses, shared by painter and patron, may help to account for an uncommon feature in one of the artist's later works, the Madonna of the Yarnwinder (c. 1501; Drumlanrig Castle, collection of the Duke of Buccleuch).

Whether by the hand of the master or by his workshop, the painting (Fig. 1) no doubt owes to Leonardo its intellectual conception as well as its eponymous prop. (9) The dark yarnwinder which the Christ Child embraces, has been understood by some as both a symbol of the Virgin's domesticity and a prefiguration of the crucifixion. (10) When, in 1501, Fra Pietro da Novellara, Isabella d'Este's agent in Florence, viewed the picture, or another version, he commented that the Virgin, in fulfilling her maternal duties, 'was intending to spin some yarn'. (11) He added that the child appeared desirous of the cruciform object, and was unwilling to yield it to his mother.

Others have tentatively suggested that the yarnwinder may allude to the spindle of the Three Fates, and should thus be regarded as a metonymic symbol of death--a classical counterpart to the cross. (12) According to Greek mythology, the Fates Lachesis and Clothe command the spindle, from which their sister, the Fate Atropos, cuts off the thread of life. (13) Yet curiously --and perhaps significantly--Leonardo has neglected to wind any yarn around the spindle, so that the entire black shaft is exposed. While his intention may have been to make the yarnwinder appear more cross-like, he quite possibly had another, more subtle, reason for representing it in this manner.

Among the myriad rebuses on the aforementioned double-sided sheet at Windsor, there is an elaborate one on the verso that includes an image of a black yarnwinder (Fig. 2). (14) At the upper left of the page, Leonardo executed a series of thumbnail sketches, with accompanying inscriptions, that represent, from fight to left: a pear tree (pare), a saddle (sella), a woman with a sail (fortuna--a personification of fortune), two notes on a musical stave (mi and fa), a fern (felce), the letters 'tal; a face (vise), and a black yarnwinder (aspo nero). When read together, Leonardo's word-pictures form the whimsical sentence, 'Pero se la fortuna mi fa felice tal vise asponero!'--However, if fortune makes me happy, I will show such a facet' The words 'aspo nero' merge to make the exclamatory word/phrase 'asponero'--'I will show'.

Placed prominently in Leonardo's painting, the word/image 'asponero' has a special resonance. For in the picture, the Christ Child not only eagerly seizes the instrument, but, with his left hand, emphatically points heavenward--a gesture, often associated with John the Baptist that indicates 'I will show' the way to redemption. (15) Indeed, the Christ Child, who, unlike his counterparts in Leonardo's Madonnas in Munich and the Hermitage, appears to see and perceive clearly, looks at both the yarnwinder and his raised index finger, its directional thrust extended by the shaft and point of the spindle. At the same time, the bold motion of the child's arm, parallel and proximate to the cross-like yarnwinder, suggests that this salvation comes through his sacrifice. In poignant contrast, the Virgin's poised fight hand, as Martin Kemp has sensitively described, 'hovers uncertainly between anxiety and acquiescence'. (16) Here, as in his Adoration of the Magi and his imprese and allegories, which, in Vecce's words, 'were conceived in movement', Leonardo has presented symbols in dynamic and multivalent terms.' (17)

Although perhaps unprecedented, Lennardo's inserted rebus was by no means unique in sixteenth-century European painting--Lorenzo Lotto's Portrait of Lucina Brembati (about 1518-20; Accademia Carrara, Bergamo contains the well-known rebus of a moon (luna) divided by the letters 'ci'; and Hans Holbein's French Ambassadors (1533; National Gallery, London) includes the famous anamorphically-distorted skull, a memento mort, which is also probably pun on the artist's name: hohl Bein or hollow bone. (18) By the third quarter of the sixteenth century, rebuses were common enough in Italian emblems that Giovanni Andrea Palazzi, regarding them as lowminded and, possibly, as a French import (see below), felt the need to disparage them in his Discorsi sopra l'imprese. (19)

Yet, such deft wordplay would have been much appreciated, perhaps almost expected, by the patron of Leonardo's Madonna of the Yarnwinder, the prominent French statesman and diplomat, Florimond Robertet (c. 1459-1527). (20) Visual puns and rebuses had been popular features in the heraldic imprese or devises of France for centuries. (21) Since at least the time of King Louis Le Jeune, who, in the twelfth century, ordered for his son, Philip Augustus, a blue dalmatic sewn with gold fleurs-de-lys, a flower whose name--as Fleur de Loy--played on his own, visual puns were ubiquitous in French heraldry. Throughout the middle ages and early renaissance, similar puns appeared on countless French chivalric shields, called armes parlantes for their phonetic character, including those of Engeurrand de Candavene, count of St Pol in the late twelfth century, whose escutcheon bore a sheaf of oats (canne d'avoine), and Gui de Munois, a thirteenth-century monk of St Germain d'Auxerre, whose clever seal featured a cowled ape in the sky, scratching its back with both hands--a rebus that could be recited as 'singe-air-main-dosserre.' (22) Two centuries later, the renaissance chronicler Jean Juvenal des Ursins reported that, in 1416, the dauphin Louis emblazoned his standard with a rebus comprised of a golden letter 'K', a swan (le cygne) and a golden 'L' to proclaim his romantic interest in a certain young woman of the Casinelle family, one of his mother's ladies in waiting. (23)

According to Paolo Giovio's Dialogo dell'imprese militari e amorose, such chivalric devises were popularised in Italy at the end of the fifteenth century by the army captains of the invading French king, Charles VIII, under whom Robertet served as Treasurer from 1483 to 1498. (24) Although imprese were known and created in Italy for many years prior to Charles VIII's campaign, the Italian humanist's statements, published in 1555, indicate how closely imprese wet associated with French heraldic art and Charles' regime. Significantly, before Robertet became one of the French king's most trusted advisors, he was raised and educated in Lyons, a major book market and, from 1473, a principal publishing centre of heraldric devices, emblems, and literature for we over a century, beyond even the time of the printing in that city of Andrea Alciati's acclaimed Emblemata (1550) and Claude Paradin's influential Devise heroiques (1551).

That Robertet himself enjoyed visual puns and witty emblems is suggested by one of his heraldic devices and by some of the possessions listed in the inventory drawn up by his widow, Michelle Gaillard, in about 1532. (25) An emblematic tapestry designed for Robertet (c. 1510-20; Musee de Cluny, Paris, Fig. 3) includes a subtle visual pun on his first name, Florimond: in the right field of the textile are flowering branches that have been lopped off and pruned--that is, fleurs emondes. (26) Among the works listed in the inventor. is a picture described as 'Charles VIII, Louis XII, Francis I, all in the same painting; they are passing the sceptre and crown from one to the other to show the successive order of their reigns; at their feet is a river flowing from a mountain'. (27) Undoubtedly, the water flowing from a mountain at the kings' feet is another rebus for the name of the patron, 'fluer mont', who served under all three rulers.

Michelangelo apparently recognised Robertet's predilection for word games the sculptor-poet finished and sent to him in 1508 a bronze David, which had verses inscribed on its base that made punning use of the Italian word 'arco', playing alternately upon the various connotations of the term: military (a bow), sculptural (a bow-like running drill), and musical (a harp). (28) Certainly, Robertet, a polyglot who visited Italy frequently between 1494 and 1524, negotiating intricate agreements with the Florentines, Milanese, and Venetians, would have had no difficulty in negotiating Michelangelo's wordplay or Leonardo's rebus.

For Leonardo, the double meaning of word-images in a rebus, like the deceptive vagaries and elusive nature of vision, must have made him acutely aware of the relativity of perception. Although his earliest notions concerning optics and apprehension derived from Alberti, his own observations caused him to question and ultimately abandon the static and immutable world view implied by Alberti's perspective system, which Leonardo eventually came to consider merely a fallible workshop device. (29) Recognising the fluidity and occasional capriciousness of perception, Leonardo delighted in it, contriving not only rebuses or visual puns, but also optical illusions and even demonstrations of anamorphosis. These amusements, in keeping with traditional Lombard interests in the observation of nature and in illusion, inspired his ingenious Milanese successors, the painter Giuseppe Archimboldo and the art theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, and continue to engage those who, closely inspecting his works, discover Leonardo's mind at play.

I wish to thank Starr Siegele, Dr. John E. Gedo, and Allan M. Burke, MD, as well as Constance Markey, Elizabeth Stepina, and Kristine Nielsen for their assistance in the preparation of this article.

(1) For example, Leonardo's various imprese in MS 2168 preserved in the Biblioteca Trivulziana, Milan. Also, see Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man, London, Melbourne and Toronto, 1981, pp. 164-66 and 184-87.

(2) Ibid., pp. 49 and 200; and David Alan Brown, Leonardo da Vinci Origins of a Genius, New Haven and London, 1998, pp. 101, 114-16.

(3) Kemp. op cit. pp. 153-54, 161-67 and 185-87.

(4) Ibid., pp., 186-87.

(5) Carlo Vecce, 'Word and Image in Leonardo's Writings', In Carmen Bambach et al., Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2003, p. 66.

(6) See Augusto Marinoni, I Rebus di Leonardo da Vinci, Raccolti e interpreti, Floronce, 1954, no. 73, p. 186.

(7) Ibid.

(8) Vecce, op. cit., p, 66. Leonardo's rebuses also appear on a few other sheets and scraps of paper at Windsor Castle, specifically nos. 12693-12699. See Kenneth Clark and Carlo Pedretti, The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London and New York, 1969, vol. I, pp. 175-77. For the possible influence of Leonardo's rebuses, see Carlo Vecce, 'La parola e l'icona; dai rebus di Leonardo 'fermagli' di Fabricio Luna', in Achademia Leonardi Vinci. Journal of Leonardo Studies & Bibliography of Vinciana, vol. VIII, 1995, pp. 173-83; and Carlo Pedretti, 'Ambrogio Brambilla's rebus', in ALV Journal, vol. X 1997, p. 233.

(9) For some recent opinions concerning Leonardo's authorship of the Buccleuch painting, see Martin Kemp, 'Leonardo's Madonna of the Yarnwinder: the making of a devotional image', in idem (ed.), Leonardo da Vinci: The Mystery of the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, exh. cat., National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. 1992. pp. 13-23; Nicholas Penny, 'Review of the Exhibition, "Leonardo da Vinci: the Mystery of the Madonna of the Yarnwinder'", Burlington Magazine, vol. CXXXIV, (August 1992), pp. 542-44; Martin Kemp, Behind the Picture: Art and Evidence in the Italian Renaissance, New Haven and London, 1997, pp. 161-62; and Bambach, op. cit., pp. 233-34 and 524.

(10) Kemp, op. cit. in n. 9 above (1992), p. 11.

(11) Luca Beltrami, Documenti e memorie riguardanti la vita e le opere di Leonardo da Vinci, Milan, 1919, pp. 65-66.

(12) Alessandro Vezzosi, 'Aspo e tessitura' in Leonardo e il leonardismo a Napoli e a Roma, exh. cat., Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples, and Palazzo Venezia, Rome, Florence, 1983, p. 62. Vezzosi (pp. 62 and 66) also loosely associates the yarnwinder with a spindle denoting death in a hieroglyph in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, with the spindle of Hercules (when he was the feminised slave of Omphale), and with various other mythological and cosmic symbols, Also see Alessandro Vezzozi et al., Leonardo dopo Milano: La Madonna dei Fusi (1501). exh. cat., Castello dei Conti Guidi, Vinci, Florence, 1982, pp. 92-94, figs. 128, 129, and 131. For the hieroglyphic spindle, see Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499, facsimile edition, New York and London, 1976, p. QVII.

(13) Der neue Pauly Enzyklopadie der Antike, Stuttgart, 2000, vol. VIII, p 342.

(14) Marinoni, op. cit., no. 94, p. 199.

(15) The pointing gesture of Leonardo's own, late enigmatic St John the Baptist (c. 1509, Musee du Louvre) has been interpreted in numerous ways. Kemp, op. cit. in n. 1 above, p. 342, considers it a 'visual restatement' of the Baptist's proclamation (John 1:15), 'There is one who cometh after me', which declares the divinity of his successor. With his left hand on his heart, as if bearing testimony. Leonardo's Baptist could, just as plausibly, be enacting the words of John 1:7, '[John the Baptist] came for testimony to bear witness to the light that all might believe through him', and/or of John 1:23, 'I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord', indicating the path to salvation. For the gesture, also see Cecil Gould, Leonardo da Vinci, New York and London, 1975, pp. 123-27.

(16) Kemp, op. cit. in n. 1 above, pp. 219-20.

(17) Vecce, op. cit. in n. 5 above, p. 66, and see Kemp, op. cit. in n. 9 above (1992), p. 11

(18) Ciro Caversazzi, 'Una dama bergamasca di quattrocent'anni fa riconosciuta in un ritratto del Lotto', Bollettino della Civica Biblioteca di Bergamo, vol. VII, no. 1, 1913, pp. 23-25; and David Alan Brown, Peter Humfrey, and Mauro Lucco, Lorenzo Lotto: Rediscovered Master of the Renaissance, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington; Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti, Bergamo; and Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, Washington, 1997, no. 15, pp. 114-16.

(19) Giovanni Andrea Palazzi, Discorsi sopra l'mprese, Bologna, 1575, pp. 53-55.

(20) For Robertet, see A. Theresa Crowe, 'Florimond Robertet: International Politics and Patronage of the Arts' in Kemp, op. cit. in n. 9 above (1992), pp. 25-33.

(21) the terms 'imprese', 'devises', and 'emblemi' are employed in this essay somewhat loosely and interchangeably. As Kristen Lippincott has shown, the use of the terms was quite variable and fluid in the renaissance. See Lippincott, 'The Genesis and Significance of the Fifteenth-Century Italian Impres' in Sydney Anglo (ed.), Chivalry in the Renaissance, Woodbridge, 1990, pp. 64-66.

(22) John Woodward, A Treatise on Heraldry, British and Foreign, Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo, 1969, p. 672.

(23) Camille Enlart, Manuel d'archeologie francaise depuis les temps merovingiens jusgu'a la Renaissance, vol. III, Le Costume, Paris, 1927, p. 424.

(24) Paolo Giovio, Dialogo dell'imprese militari e amorose, Maria Luisa Doglio (ed.), Rome, 1978, pp. 36-37, and see Claude Paradin, Devises heroique, Alison Saunders (ed.), Aldershot and Brookfield, Vermont, 1989, p. 1.

(25) Crowe, op. cit. pp. 30-33 and Eugene Gresy, 'Inventaire des objets d'art composant la succession de Florimond Robertet, Ministre de Francois I, dresse par sa veuvre, le 4 jour d'Aout 1532', in Memoires de la Societe Imperiale des Antiquaires de France, vol. III. series 10, 1868, pp. 21-66.

(26) Crowe, op. cit., no. 24, p. 82, regards the flowering and fruit laden branches as illustrating the theme of 'fruitful abundance'. Susan Moody, Horticulturalist at The Cloister& kindly examined a photograph of the tapestry and was able to identify a few of the plants for me. The branch at upper left is plum (la prune), at center is mulberry (la mure), and at lower right is columbine (la columbine, ancolie, or aquilegie). Although, according to tradition. these plants may symbolise fidelity, wisdom, and fertility, respectively, it is unclear whether they had a personal significance for Robertet or if they, too, make some sort of punning reference.

(27) Ibid., p. 31, and Gresy, op. cit. p. 42.

(28) Crowe, op. cit., p. 32, and Gresy, op. cit., pp. 59-60. Plays on words (le bon soin/ce besoin) and letters (F = France, Francois, Franchise, and Florimond) in two other Robertet paintings are recorded in his death inventory. See ibid., pp. 41-42.

(29) James S. Ackerman, 'Leonardo's Eye'. Journal of the Warburg and (Courtauld Institutes, vol. XLI, 1978, p. 113.

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