Perspective Studies on the Adoration of the Magi by Leonardo da Vinci

This paper aims to unravel the perspective construction used by Leonardo da Vinci for his iconic and celebrated unfinished painting the Adoration of the Magi. This study is the final step of years-long research brought forward by our department focused on the study of the perspective construction used by Leonardo in the preparatory drawings of his masterpiece. The first two published studies demonstrate how Leonardo re-interpreted the Albertian rules of perspective construction and used them in a non-rigorous way to draw the architectural elements of the preparatory drawings. Starting from these discoveries, this contribution aspires to complete the analysis by investigating if the same aberrations and formal errors are also present in the final painting. By inverse construction and comparison with the preparatory drawings, we observed probable perspective aberrations analogous to those observed in Uffizi’s preparatory drawing.