There is more to art than meets the eye. Today we publish the underdrawings obscured beneath Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi. The surface of the painting at the Uffizi in Florence is one of the best-known pictures in the world. For more than five centuries, art critics have drawn attention to the Madonna and Child arranged in the pyramid shape that was to become Leonardo’s signature composition. Exegetes have remarked on the clash of symbols. The ruins in the background are said to signify the decline of pagan culture in the face of the new world of the Christian era.

Now multispectrum imaging has shown up Leonardo’s first sketches underneath the finished painting. These include a gang rebuilding the ruined temple, an elephant and a bloody skirmish between knights. Here is rich new grist to keep the art crit mill grinding for another five centuries. Is it too naive to interpret the elephant as a mount for Balthazar? Were the commissioning monks horrified by seeing bloody corpses so close to the Madonna’s head? But the revelation has more general significance. It affirms the unfashionable truth that genius consists of 90 per cent perspiration as well as 10 per cent inspiration. It demolishes the sentimental Britart notion of the artist as splat-and-run (wo)man. It contradicts Andy Warhol, who said: “If you want to know everything about me, just look at the surface of my paintings, it’s all there, there’s nothing more.”

But no great artist sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Originality is the art of concealing your sources. And, as usual, Leonardo led the way.