Brilliance Left Bare

Leonardo's unfinished works are sometimes more revealing than his completed ones. The Adoration of the Magi survives only as a brown underpainting, never carried to a finished surface.

Stripped of color and polish, it lays his method bare: the swirling crowd, the careful geometry, and the psychological tension between figures are all visible in raw form. We can watch a great painting being thought through, frozen at the stage most artists hide.