Medusa (Leonardo Da Vinci Painting) - Uffizi Painting

Uffizi Painting

In 1782, Leonardo's biographer Luigi Lanzi, while making a search for his paintings in the Uffizi, discovered a depiction of Medusa's head which he erroneously attributed to Leonardo, based on Vasari's description of Leonardo's second version of the subject:

The fancy came to him to paint a picture in oils of the head of a Medusa, with the head attired with a coil of snakes, the most strange and extravagant invention that could ever be imagined, but since it was a work that took time, it remained unfinished, as happened with almost all his things. It is among the rare works of art in the Palace of Duke Cosimo…

Lanzi summed up his opinion on the newly-discovered painting in his description of the Florentine gallery:

Finally on the following day one sees the head of Medusa with serpents so realistic that it makes credible what we read of Vinci; where in a painting produced like this in which one saw fear and fled; something that does no less honor to modern painting than did the grapes of Zeuxis to the horses of Apelles… Nevertheless the work lacks the final finish, as do the works of Vinci for the most part."

In the period of Romanticism, the reputed Leonardo garnered much praise. Its full-page engravings, first produced in Florence in 1828, spread across Europe, making the painting one of the most popular in Leonardo's corpus of works. In 1851, Jean Baptiste Gustave Planche proclaimed: "I do not hesitate to say that in the Medusa of the Uffizi there is the germ of what we admire in the Gioconda of the Louvre".

As late as 1868, Walter Pater (in The Renaissance) singled out Medusa as one of the most arresting works by Leonardo. In the 20th century, Bernard Berenson and other leading critics argued against Leonardo's authorship of the Uffizi painting. It is now believed to be a work of an anonymous Flemish painter, active ca. 1600.