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A pen drawing of a river valley seen from a height, dated in his mirror hand 5 August 1473. It is his earliest dated drawing and one of the first pure landscapes in European art.
At the top left, written right to left, is the note "day of Santa Maria della Neve, 5 August 1473". Leonardo was twenty-one.
The view looks over a plain with a castle on a rock, a waterfall, and fields running away to distant hills. Nothing in it tells a story; there are no saints or shepherds. The subject is the land itself, the light on it, and the way water cuts through rock.
The pen moves fast. Trees are flicks and dots, the far plain a few horizontal strokes. Long before he wrote about rivers, geology and the blue of distance, he was already standing on a hillside drawing them.
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by Mei Lin 