Description
The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne – three generations in one painting
The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne is Leonardo’s last great composition, a work he carried with him for almost two decades and never entirely finished. Three generations appear in it: Saint Anne, her daughter Mary, and the Christ Child. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas preserves the soft modelling of the faces and the bluish landscape of the original, painted in oil on canvas.
The work Leonardo carried with him
Leonardo worked on the composition between 1501 and 1519 – that is, until his death. The painting remained unfinished: in places the underdrawing is clearly visible, elsewhere the paint layers are barely laid in. That is exactly what makes it precious, because it shows how the master built a picture. The National Gallery in London also holds the so-called Burlington House Cartoon, a large preparatory drawing in which Leonardo worked out how to bind the three figures into a single natural knot of bodies. The original is in the Louvre in Paris (inv. 776), painted in oil on a wooden panel, and measures 168.4 × 130 cm.
What the painting shows
Saint Anne is seated; Mary sits in her lap and leans towards her son, who is embracing a lamb. The lamb is not decoration: it is the Lamb of God, a sign of the Passion, and Mary’s gesture – as though gently drawing him away – gives the scene a quiet tension. All three figures are bound into a single spiralling movement that Leonardo searched for over years. Behind them a bluish mountain landscape dissolves into air in the distance; this aerial perspective is a Leonardo speciality.
The vulture that was really a kite
The painting is also famous because Sigmund Freud built an interpretation on it: in the folds of Mary’s robe he saw the outline of a vulture and tied it to a childhood memory of Leonardo’s. The reading rested on an error – the German translation had turned Leonardo’s nibbio, that is a kite, into a vulture. The anecdote shows nicely how strongly this calm, almost smiling composition invites reading between the lines.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
Every reproduction of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne 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 an elegant frame from our 3D range. The restrained palette, dominated by blue and golden brown, sits well in a living room or bedroom.
- Subject: The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1501–1519
- Technique: hand-painted oil on canvas, painting reproduction
- Sizes: 8 dimensions, stretched on a wooden frame on request
- Fact: Leonardo kept adding to the painting for almost twenty years and never finished it
