As the 500th anniversary of the death of Renaissance great Leonardo da Vinci approaches, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is reaching deep into its archive to exhibit four rarely shown drawings by the Old Master.

The incredibly fragile artworks, normally kept in storage due to their sensitivity to light, will go on view in the museum’s prints and drawings galleries on January 29. There, they will be joined by other works on paper by masters such as Rembrandt van Rijn and Wenceslaus Hollar to illustrate Leonardo’s lasting legacy. (A full-scale exhibition, “Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing,” is being held across 12 cities in the UK to mark the occasion.)

In his masterwork, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, first published in 1550, Giorgio Vasari is particularly effusive about the way that Raphael’s work was influenced by Leonardo da Vinci. Raphael went to Florence in the early years of the 16th Century with the intention of studying great artists and took the opportunity of observing Leonardo at work on, among other projects, the portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the young wife of Francesco del Giocondo.

“ … after seeing the works of Leonardo da Vinci, who had no peer in the expressions of heads both of men and of women, had surpassed all other painters in giving grace and movement to his figures, he [Raphael] was left marveling and amazed; and in a word, the manner of Leonardo pleasing him more than any other that he had ever seen, he set himself to study it, and abandoning little by little, although with great difficulty, the manner of Pietro [Perugino], he sought to the best of his power and knowledge to imitate that of Leonardo. But for all his diligence and study, in certain difficulties he was never able to surpass Leonardo; and although it appears to many that he did surpass him in sweetness and in a kind of natural facility, nevertheless he was by no means superior to him in that sublime groundwork of conceptions and that grandeur of art in which few have been the peers of Leonardo. Yet Raffaello came very near to him, more than any other painter, and above all in grace of colouring.”

Raphael’s ‘Young Woman on a Balcony’, pen and ink sketch, c. 1504.

The subject of the Raphael Sketch is treated at length [See ‘Historical Evidence’], but is re-emphasised here to underline how the ‘Earlier Mona Lisa’ likely not only spawned numerous copies that today are revered in museums and exclusive collections around the world, but possibly also inspired one of the most extraordinary Renaissance artists to follow and experiment with innovative compositions. This demonstration represents significant evidence, as previously mentioned, that Raphael’s decision to come to Florence and study the works and methods of Leonardo paid a handsome dividend for which he was grateful – he revered Leonardo until his own death. It would seem that these images are specifically derived from the ‘Earlier Mona Lisa’, the one on which he was working at the time of Raphael’s visit. It is further evident that there is little artistic connection between these Raphael works and the Louvre ‘Mona Lisa’.