Description
The Benois Madonna – the painting the museum kept paying for through a revolution
The Benois Madonna is one of those Leonardo paintings the world long believed lost. It shows a young mother playing with her child – a scene so familiar that it is hard to remember it is nearly half a millennium old. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this warm, intimate scene into your home, painted in oil on canvas.
The early Leonardo learning to be Leonardo
The work was made around 1478–1480, when Leonardo was in his late twenties and only beginning to open his own path. The composition is still a little stiff, yet everything that would become his signature is already there: the soft light on skin, a face smiling inwards, and a movement that runs through the whole figure. The original is painted in oil on canvas, measures 49.5 × 33 cm, and is held in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.
What the painting shows
Mary sits by a window and offers the child a flowering sprig. The flower is no ornament: it is shaped as a cross, and the child reaches for it with a serious, almost investigating attention. A scene that at first glance is simply maternal thus announces, in a quiet register, the future of Christ – a device well understood in Renaissance Florence. Mary’s smile is one of the first of those Leonardo smiles that cannot be read all the way down.
The family name, and a purchase a revolution did not stop
The painting is named not after its patron but after its owners: it passed into the Benois family inheritance when Maria Sapozhnikova married the architect Leon Benois. In 1909 it was shown in Saint Petersburg as part of the Benois collection, to sensational response. The Hermitage bought it in 1914; negotiations were led by the curator Ernst Friedrich von Liphart, and the price was a record for its day – the dealer Joseph Duveen had valued it in 1912 at 500,000 francs. The museum paid in instalments that continued running even after the October Revolution of 1917. The attribution to Leonardo is now generally accepted, although Bernard Berenson doubted it in 1912.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
Every reproduction of the Benois Madonna is entirely hand-painted in oil on canvas – not a print, but a real painting created for you by an experienced artist. It is available in eight sizes, stretched on a wooden frame on request and in a frame from our 3D range. The dark ground and warm skin tones make the work rewarding in a bedroom, a child’s room, or a quiet corner of a living room. Among our canvas wall art you will also find Leonardo’s other Madonnas: The Madonna Litta, The Madonna of the Carnation and The Virgin of the Rocks.
- Subject: The Benois Madonna, Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1478–1480
- Technique: hand-painted oil painting on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 8 dimensions, stretched on a wooden frame on request
- Fact: the Hermitage bought it in 1914 and paid it off in instalments that ran on past the revolution of 1917
