The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) · c. 1503-1519
Three generations are folded into one interlocking group. Saint Anne sits on a rock, her daughter Mary perched on her lap, and Mary leans forward to catch the Christ Child, who has scrambled away to grasp a lamb. The lamb is the point of the whole invention: it is the sacrificial animal of the Passion, and the Child embraces it willingly while his mother instinctively tries to draw him back. Anne watches with a faint smile, apparently untroubled, as if she already knows how the story ends. Behind them a landscape of icy blue mountains and misty water stretches toward a horizon that dissolves rather than stops.
Leonardo worked on this panel for well over a decade and never declared it finished, and the unfinished passages are part of what you see. The lower left area and parts of the drapery remain thin and underpainted, while the heads are brought to a polish of impossible smoothness. The composition is a masterpiece of contrapposto on a group scale: every body twists on its own axis, yet the four figures and the lamb read as one continuous spiral. A restoration completed in 2012 removed discoloured varnish and revealed far cooler blues and a much deeper space than the honey coloured picture visitors saw for generations.
The painting was probably begun in Florence around 1503 and travelled with Leonardo to France, where it was in his possession at his death at Amboise in 1519. It passed through Francis I's collection into the royal holdings and so into the Louvre. Sigmund Freud famously wrote an essay in 1910 reading the composition, and a supposed vulture shape in Mary's drapery, as evidence about Leonardo's childhood.
Did You Know? Freud built an entire 1910 psychoanalytic essay on this picture, claiming to see a vulture hidden in the folds of the Virgin's blue mantle.
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