In the Treatise on Painting, Leonardo da Vinci urges painters not to despise the act of stopping and looking, allowing themselves to be stimulated by stains on walls, the ash of fire, clouds, mud, and other similar places. In these accidental forms, the mind can recognize images and figures, through a mechanism we would today call pareidolia.
In such forms it is possible to identify battle compositions, figures of animals and men, landscapes, and monstrous things. Leonardo, however, distinguishes this initial moment from true pictorial invention: what arises from accidental perception must be intentionally transformed and inserted into painting. The “invenzioni mirabilissime” (Leonardo’s own expression) are not mere visual recognitions, but images deliberately formed, integrated into the composition, and complete in the necessary particulars, in such a way as to make the artist’s conscious intervention recognizable.
Leonardo clearly distinguishes between what the eye may grasp accidentally in confused things and what the painter must instead reduce to an integral and sound form.
Stains, clouds, walls, and mud can suggest images, but—as Leonardo warns— “they do not teach you to finish any particular”. The decisive difference is therefore not in seeing something, but in knowing how to build it.
Leonardo sets a preliminary condition that precedes any possible invention: the artist must first know how to make the parts well of men, animals, and landscapes (rocks, plants, and the like).
By this statement, Leonardo is not referring to a partial skill, nor to an isolated exercise of fantasy, but to full mastery of drawing and painting. Knowing how to make the parts means being able to build forms in space, govern proportions and relationships, light and shadow, and bring a figure to completion.
The parts thus constitute the rational filter that separates accident from art. Without knowledge of structures, volumetric construction, and spatial relationships, the image remains confused; with it, the accidental cue can become invention.
A clear methodological consequence follows: before one can use invenzioni mirabilissime, the artist must simply know how to paint well. Whoever lacks this mastery remains at the level of the stain; whoever possesses it can transform the accidental cue into a complete form worthy of honor.
In Leonardo’s painting, in the “sfumato,” the contours of figures are never rigidly outlined, and this favors the emergence of secondary profiles and images. This feature makes it possible to identify forms and figures even where they have not been necessarily constructed as autonomous images.
But a practical criterion of verification consists in checking the necessary particulars. A true invenzione mirabilissima withstands close observation: details are consistent with an anatomical, natural, and luminous logic.
If particulars do not exist, are not structured, or do not maintain coherent relationships, the image is in all likelihood a simple pareidolia.
A decisive methodological point is that invenzioni mirabilissime, when they are truly such, never appear as flat or graphic images. They present themselves as volumes, built through light, shadow, and tonal gradation.
A face recognizable as an intentional invention is never a mere silhouette: it shows a coherent three-dimensional structure, with planes, recesses, reliefs, cast shadows and passages of light compatible with a real form in space.
This aspect is fundamental, because it clarifies that in Leonardo’s practice there is no separation between “normal” painting and the insertion of invenzioni mirabilissime.
The invenzioni mirabilissime are not added elements, hidden or extraneous to painting: they are part of the same constructive process by which Leonardo models bodies, landscapes, and figures.
Painting is one. Invenzioni mirabilissime are not a separate language, but an internal manifestation of the same act of knowledge, when the mind recognizes, organizes, and refines forms born from accident.
Among the concealed images identified, the recurring presence of the artist’s self-portrait takes on particular significance. Methodologically, the self-portrait represents a highly significant case, since the recognizability of style and facial features makes the intentional nature of the image evident. It is therefore not an isolated episode, but a conscious element of relationship between Leonardo and his works, whose analysis will be developed in the following pages.
Verification takes place through direct comparison between the identified figures and works certainly attributed to Leonardo, considered in their formal and stylistic aspects. Added to this is the presence of a coherent and non-arbitrary meaning of the concealed image, an aspect that will be addressed in a later section of the research.
Among the characteristics frequently found in the invenzioni mirabilissime is the representation of a single eye: sometimes by defining the right eye with the other only hinted at, sometimes through a profile rendering of the figure.
The honor of which Leonardo speaks does not consist in merely making an image appear, but in a far higher result: the invenzione mirabilissima is inserted into a form already correctly constructed.
A hill remains a hill, a mountain remains a mountain, a lamb remains fully such. The primary form is not deformed, nor sacrificed.
And yet, observed under a different orientation of the image, the same form can become a face, a portrait, a recognizable figure.
The honor lies precisely in this: having been able to construct a real form so solid and coherent as to sustain multiple readings, without losing its identity.
There are not two paintings, nor a “normal” level and a “secret” one. There is a single pictorial act, so well founded as to generate invenzioni mirabilissime without ceasing to be painting.
Based on the criteria adopted here, an invenzione mirabilissima is only that which:
On this point, Leonardo’s thought is clear and textually grounded: honor does not derive from merely seeing, but from knowing how to construct form.
In the following pages, images are analyzed by applying the methodological criteria described here.
