Several publications released in the past decade have reinvigorated studies of Leonardo da Vinci and, more specifically, have spurred an ongoing critical reappraisal of his early work. Thorny matters, including the nature of his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio, the range of his experience before entering into that master’s workshop, his delayed matriculation in the Florentine painters’ guild, and—perhaps the slipperiest question of all—how the young artist struggled to find his own style, have been addressed in a groundswell of articles, exhibitions, and monographic studies. Even as the exotic legends surrounding his biography are debunked and the theme of his genius is revisited, Leonardo studies continue to attract readers in numbers paralleled only by those on Michelangelo, the Medici, and Raphael. Conversely, books related to conservation projects rarely find a large audience, even among art historians, and when they do, it is often in the context of a pitched (and frequently, irrational) debate over the restoration, or perceived ruination, of cultural icons.

This recent addition to the expanding list of studies on the juvenile works of Leonardo is a welcome one. The individual contributions of the book’s authors, for the most part, manage to surpass the expectations that usually accompany such a publication. Occasioned by the technical examination and subsequent cleaning of Leonardo’s Annunciation in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence (carried out by the conservator Alfio Del Serra), this is the latest title in the series I veli del tempo: Collana di lettura d’opere restaurate, which showcases the ongoing accomplishments of painting restoration in the city. It may be considered a landmark work, not so much for the new ideas that it brings to the broad discussion of Leonardo studies, but for the wealth of practical information revealed by thorough examination of the painting as both a physical and cultural object. In the volume’s introduction, Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, director of the Uffizi, speaks frankly about how the effort to clean the painting was born during the landmark rehanging of the museum’s Room 15 a decade ago. By that time, this picture had been obscured by old varnish and grime for centuries. The director and the local Soprintendenza (represented in the book by Antonio Paolucci, who provides opening remarks in the preface) decided to clean the panel after subjecting it to thorough examination of materials, techniques, and state of preservation.

Technical results collected at that point, and later during the treatment phase, fill much of the book’s space; they are organized into three essays written by the team of conservators and conservation scientists that worked on Leonardo’s Annunciation. The task of reintroducing the painting into art-historical discourse is undertaken by the other chapters, which offer new opinions on topics as diverse as the young Leonardo’s use of perspective and the iconography of the picture. As a volume of collected essays, the book undulates between two poles: 1) the mathematical abstraction of the work’s physical nature into science; and 2) its contextualization into a historically bound cultural framework that takes into account issues of connoisseurship, patronage, and stylistic development. The former task has not been taken up seriously since the congress convened in 1956 for the five hundredth anniversary of Leonardo’s birth, at a time when modern conservation science was in its infancy and methods of treatment were still largely experimental. The latter task has remained largely unattempted until this book—at least no one had ever attempted a true synthesis implicit in the application of the multiple methodologies of archival research, physical examination, and philological study.

Rather than attempt to tackle the many facets of inquiry himself, Antonio Natali mustered an ensemble of authors (virtually all of them Florentine) from various fields. In the first essay, “Leonardo da Vinci e la prospettiva dell’Annunciazione,” the French scholar Daniel Arasse invites the reader to think of the painting not only as one of Leonardo’s earliest surviving works, but also as an Annunciation made in the heady atmosphere of Florence in the early 1470s. Iconographic details, symbols, and associative systems active in the painting are analyzed further by Roberta Bartoli in her essay, “Il leggio dell’Annunziata: anamnesi e simbologia di un arredo.” Andrea Baldinotti surveys historiography, including the history of the painting’s attributions. Del Serra, the conservator in charge of the analysis and cleaning projects, presents a thorough chronicle of his work (written in layman’s terms) in “L’Incanto dell’Annuncio. Rendiconto di Restauro.” His colleagues Ornella Casazza, Francesca Ciattini, Marco Fioravanti, and Raffaela Rimaboschi provide the technical information regarding the painting’s physical materials in the book’s final chapter. A separate team reports on the underdrawing and Leonardo’s geometric perspective constructions and their alteration during the picture’s making in a brief (but insightful) essay placed between Del Serra’s and that of the forensic chemists. Each essay is copiously and beautifully illustrated; indeed one can hardly recall a prior publication on the artist that brings together such a wealth of visual information in the form of color plates, details, schematics, and technical photographs.

Natali reserves for himself (in the third chapter) the tasks of chronicling the details of the painting’s cultural genesis and placing the Annunciation within Leonardo’s oeuvre. His essay is the most provocative and original of the lot. He confronts the fundamental questions of the picture’s relationship to its patrons (the Olivetan community at San Bartolommeo, outside Florence’s Porta San Frediano), the artist’s growth within the Verrocchio workshop, and the silence of Leonardo’s early commentators regarding this painting. Natali’s extended explorations of the symbolism of the mountain and seaport vignettes in the painting’s center background (alluded to in the book’s title) are fresh and inspired, while still remaining tethered to the late-medieval texts that support his reading of the imagery. In particular, he proposes the new idea that the painting had likely been created for a group of savvy Olivetan patrons who were deeply devoted to the commentaries of Saint Augustine and the sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux (one of the saints especially venerated by the order and its founder, Giovanni—later frate Bernardo—Tolomei). Such a patronage-focused approach has rarely been attempted with a religious painting by Leonardo before, and Natali’s foray proves immensely profitable. Arasse’s investigation of the work within the context of the Florentine Annunciation tradition and Bartoli’s analysis of the lion-footed sarcophagus motif are bold and exhaustive inquiries, but it is Natali’s application of social and religious history that marks a true breakthrough in Leonardo scholarship.

Although these accomplishments are quite sufficient in their own right, the book is not without its problems. Most distressing is the lack of both a bibliography and an index, which will lead some to presume that this volume is little more than a lavishly illustrated “coffee-table book” aimed at a well-heeled tourist trade. The absence of a critical apparatus will surely lead graduate students to lament and specialists to wonder where some of the authors began their investigations.

Yet in truth the book contains several veins of new information whose implications are of great potential for the wider scholarly community. On a purely visual level, the amount of information transmitted through the handsome plates, technical imaging, and detail photography is to be savored. The numerous infrared reflectograms, for example, provide a rare view of the panel’s extensive underdrawing.

Virtually every essay is laced with vital references to the curatorial records of the Uffizi, various archives, and a number of unpublished manuscripts. The significance of these references is obscured, however, since they are buried in the endnotes of each section, and the book lacks all semblance of a global apparatus, presenting unnecessary obstacles (instead of an aid) to further study. The sections authored by conservators contain minimal notes, leaving the reader with the unsettling feeling that it is quite possible that no comprehensive report on the conservation campaign will ever be published. Moreover, each section appears to have been written in isolation from the other contributors. This lack of synthesis leaves the specialized arguments held by some of the authors near obscurity at times; it would have been better had the editor taken greater steps to unify the texts in an introduction or by alerting the authors to their colleagues’ findings. On balance, each of these minor deficiencies is excusable, especially since the book’s seven chapters can easily be treated as separate articles. In the final analysis, the pluses far outstrip the minuses.

L’Annunciazone di Leonardo: La Montagna sul Mare is a landmark book whose authors have shaped a wealth of new or previously unavailable information into a set of judicious essays from two complex and equally important disciplines—art history and art conservation. Major conservation surveys of the type conducted on the Annunciation are rarely the subject of such a well-conceived book. Even more seldom does one find married within one cover an extensive disclosure of scientific data and the sophisticated art-historical analysis by such talented contributors, especially the intellectually rigorous Natali. This results at times in an uneasy coexistence, but the book is a monumental record of both the physical condition of a masterpiece and the state of research on it.