Leonardo da Vinci is said to have been sent to the court of Milan by Lorenzo de’ Medici to play on a bizarre stringed instrument of his own invention. His drawings do include inventions for novel musical devices. This painting is closely influenced by Leonardo: not only does it imitate his shadowed, dreamy style but it was originally part of the same altarpiece in Milan as his National Gallery masterpiece The Virgin of the Rocks. Leonardo, De Predis and every other Renaissance artist associated music with the mathematics of Pythagoras and the harmony of the universe: the angel here is playing, could we but hear it, such heavenly music. But it is the lute that suggests a very direct influence by Leonardo. The precise and detailed, entrancing way that De Predis depicts its nine strings and the angel’s highly realistic fingering echo Leonardo’s fascination with machinery and technology – in this case the sweet machinery of music. Painted under the hypnotic sway of the Tuscan polymath who was Milan’s court artist, this painting holds you charmed and soothed by the sound of silence.
• National Gallery, London | 
