There followed four or five years of eager experiment, much being planned and rather little carried to completion. Relieved from the pressure of a master, actual painting seems to have become irksome. He loves to sketch, to turn his designs over until they reach perfection, leaving them in the condition of the swiftest and most accurate notations. Lack of system and paralysis of will are already apparent. For about two years of this joyous and irresponsible creation he remained a primitive. Such he is in the idyllic little Annunciation of the Louvre,[51] Figure 149, which should be for its fluent technic no earlier than 1476. He takes the motive which he had previously done under restrictions, reduces it to a symmetrical order, rejects distracting details, floods it with warm light breaking through ragged apertures of the trees, and invests it with a penetrating humility and grace. The little picture, which many critics set too early, is really Leonardo’s declaration of independence. It shows features which anticipate his mature style—a combination of a severe geometrical symmetry in figure composition with a romantically strange setting and lighting. Of less import is the unpretentious little Madonna of the Flower, recently discovered, and in the Hermitage, at Petrograd. It is authenticated by numerous composition sketches. Its vivacity and youthful lightness of effect are entirely in Verrocchio’s manner, nothing is new but heavier shadows and more emphatic modelling. [Illustration: FIG. 150. Leonardo da Vinci. Pen Sketches for the Madonna of the Cat.—_British Museum._ ]