Untitled 1 (from Leonardo) by Jean-Michel Basquiat is the most reduced image in the portfolio — a single spinal column, carefully drawn, occupying the lower centre of an almost entirely bare sheet of Okawara paper. The scale of empty ground around it is not incidental. Basquiat had been working in dense, layered paintings across 1982 and into 1983, and the decision to place a single anatomical fragment in this much space was a deliberate shift in register — the body isolated, examined, given nothing to compete with.

The spine was one of the forms Basquiat returned to most consistently across his output, rooted in the copy of Grey's Anatomy he had kept since childhood. In the context of the Leonardo portfolio, it carries an additional resonance — Leonardo's own anatomical drawings of the spine, made in the early sixteenth century, were among the most technically advanced studies of the body produced before modern medicine, and were unknown to the scientific establishment for centuries after his death. Basquiat's version is not a copy or a homage but a response — the same subject, the same impulse to understand the body through drawing, separated by five hundred years and arriving at something entirely different in feeling.

The incidental marks visible across the Okawara paper — transfers and stains from the studio floor, absorbed into the sheet before printing — give the work a quality of age that the sparse imagery alone would not produce. A document and a drawing simultaneously, Untitled 1 (from Leonardo) is among the quietest things Jean-Michel Basquiat made, and among the most considered.

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