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

above time, Leonardo's interest in vision and perception increasingly became fused with his literary inquiries and recreations. From the real beginning o his artistic career he place that ideas could be more effectively communicated, or recorded for himself, in the juxtaposition of images and body 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 plane integrated another type of literary device, the visual clinch 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 calembourgs 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 upon the term for such basket-work, 'vinci', and the word 'vince', meaning 'she conquers' (4) Leonardo's employ of iconic symbols or signs as the equivalent of a verbal true copy 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 embarrasss 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, unhurts like 'piang' a tavola' or, in English, 'painted upon panel' or 'cry at the table'. (6)

The rebuses--serial visual conceits really--may have been no more than a passing fancy for Leonardo; the majority of his pictographs, including the winged cat, are lay the foundation of on just one double-sided page, preserv in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle (c 1487-90; no. 12692) (7) nevertheless it is quite possible that this scarcity is simply an accident of survival, and that similar visual texts may have been a relatively serious preoccupation for him. As Vecce has noted, Leonardo's pictographs, realised with a not many quick strokes of the compose nevertheless represented for him 'the essential properties of the percept [or] animal--even in motion'. (8) Indeed a penchant for rebuses, shared by the agency of painter and patron, may help to account for an unwonted 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 through the hand of the master or through his workshop, the painting (Fig. 1) no doubt owes to Leonardo its intellectual conception as well as its eponymous shore up (9) The dark yarnwinder which the Christ Child embraces, has been understood by dint of some as both a token 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 make comments [i]or[/i] remarksed that the Virgin, in fulfilling her maternal duties, 'was intending to spin a certain number of yarn'. (11) He added that the child appeared desirous of the cruciform external reality and was unwilling to yield it to his mother.

Others have tentatively proposeed that the yarnwinder may allude to the spindle of the Three Fates, and should thus be regarded as a metonymic representative of death--a classical counterpart to the cros (12) According to of greece mythology, the Fates Lachesis and Clothe command the spindle, from which their sister, the Fate Atropos, make an incision ins off the thread of life. (13) nevertheless curiously --and perhaps significantly--Leonardo has pass overed to wind any yarn around the spindle, in the way that that the entire black shaft is expos While his intention may have been to make the yarnwinder appear more cross-like, he quite possibly had another, more designing reason for representing it in this manner.

Among the myriad rebuses upon the aforementioned double-sided sheet at Windsor, there is an elaborate individual on the verso that includes an image of a black yarnwinder (Fig. 2) (14) At the upper left of the page, Leonardo execut a series of thumbnail sketches, with accompanying inscriptions, that exhibit from fight to left: a pear tree (pare), a saddle (sella), a woman with a sail (fortuna--a personification of fortune), sum of two units notes on a musical stave (mi and fa), a fern (felce) the alphabetic characters 'tal; a face (vise), and a black yarnwinder (aspo nero) When read together, Leonardo's word-pictures form the whimsical judgment 'Pero se la fortuna mi fa felice tal vise asponero!'--However, if fortune makes me happy, I will present to view such a facet' The words 'aspo nero' submerge 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 solitary eagerly seizes the instrument, on the other hand with his left hand, emphatically points heavenward--a gesticulation 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 diocese and perceive clearly, looks at the two the yarnwinder and his raised index finger, its directional thrust reach forthed by the shaft and point of the spindle. At the same time, the fearless motion of the child's arm, parallel and proximate to the cross-like yarnwinder, insinuates that this salvation comes [i]or[/i] part of to the other his sacrifice. In poignant contrast, the Virgin's poised fight hand, as Martin Kemp has sensitively described, 'hover 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 not awayed symbols in dynamic and multivalent terms' (17)