The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne by Leonardo da Vinci

The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne by Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1503–19)

Three generations

Saint Anne sits on a rocky ledge, and her daughter Mary sits on her lap, leaning forward and reaching down with both arms. At their feet the Christ Child has seized a lamb, straddling it and pulling its head round, and he looks back up at his mother over his shoulder. Anne looks down at them both with a slight smile. The three bodies make one continuous movement: Anne's shoulder runs into Mary's arm, Mary's arm into the Child's forearm, and a long diagonal descends from Anne's head through Mary's arm to the lamb.

The lamb is an animal of sacrifice and stands for the Passion. The Louvre reads Mary's gesture as undecided, between holding her son back from his fate and offering him to it; she seems caught at the moment of accepting it, and the knowledge lights all three faces with a smile. Behind them a tree rises on the right, and beyond, a range of jagged blue mountains and lakes fades into the sky. In the foreground the rock is layered and washed by water, with pebbles at the edge.

From Florence to Amboise

The subject had a special meaning in Florence, which had honoured Saint Anne as a protector of the Republic since 1343, and the Louvre thinks Leonardo took it up on his own initiative after returning to the city in 1500. On 3 April 1501 the Carmelite Fra Pietro da Novellara wrote to Isabella d'Este describing a cartoon in which the Christ Child, about a year old, slips from his mother's arms to seize a lamb, while Mary tries to separate him from it and Saint Anne seems to hold her back. A separate composition, the full-size cartoon now in the National Gallery, London, shows the two women with the Child and the infant Saint John.

The painting itself was begun in Florence by October 1503 at the latest: a note written that month by Agostino Vespucci, a colleague of Machiavelli, mentions "the head of Anne, mother of the Virgin" as unfinished. Leonardo may have set it aside for the Battle of Anghiari, begun at the end of 1503, and taken it up again after leaving Florence for Milan in 1506. He kept it with him for the rest of his life, revising it slowly; he may have painted the mountain landscape during this later campaign. In October 1517 the Cardinal of Aragon admired it at Leonardo's house at Clos-Lucé, near Amboise. At his death in 1519 it was still unfinished, and it very probably entered the collection of Francis I, King of France.

Unfinished

The restoration of 2010–12 found Leonardo's last brushstrokes on Saint Anne's dress, which remained at the stage of an underlayer. Mary's head, at the centre of the picture, also lacks the final and finest transitions from shadow to light that Leonardo gave his most finished faces. The Louvre dates the painting to the first quarter of the sixteenth century, about 1503 to 1519.

It is oil on poplar, 168 centimetres high. It was 113 centimetres wide and was later enlarged to its present 130. It hangs in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre (INV 776).

About this print

Made from a photograph of the whole panel, including the dark strips at either side, from the peaks at the top to the rock ledge at the bottom.

Sources: Musée du Louvre, INV 776 (catalogue text by Vincent Delieuvin, 2021) · Wikimedia Commons · Wikidata Q563727