Description
Leonardo da Vinci – The Virgin and Child (Detail)
This is not a painting in its own right but a detail of one of Leonardo’s greatest works – The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne in the Louvre. The crop shows the central passage: the child leaning down to the lamb and taking hold of it, his head turned back towards his mother. The whole panel is oil on poplar, 168 cm high, and it was left unfinished.
Three generations in one picture
The original joins three generations: Saint Anne, her daughter Mary, and the child Jesus. Anne is seated, Mary sits on her lap and reaches after the child, and the child clasps the lamb. The composition is therefore a family scene and a theological statement at once – three figures gathered into a single pyramidal movement, wholly new for the opening of the 16th century.
Why the lamb
In Christian imagery the lamb means sacrifice – the Passion of Christ, still to come. So the scene is not merely tender: the child reaches for his own fate, Mary tries to hold him back, and Anne watches calmly. It is exactly this tension between a mother’s care and an accepted destiny that gives the painting its weight, and exactly this part of the original that our reproduction crops to.
A painting Leonardo never let go of
The Louvre dates it 1503–1519 – across the last sixteen years of Leonardo’s life. He never declared it finished. By the museum’s own record the work was very probably acquired by King Francis I in 1518, and it passed into state ownership in 1793 from the former royal collection. One fact only the museum record gives away: the panel was later widened – originally 113 cm across, today it measures 130 cm.
Our hand-painted reproduction
Because this is a crop, the format is square and the scene comes right forward. Every hand-painted painting on canvas is made to order in our workshop and never printed. As canvas wall art or a painting on canvas it works well in a bedroom, a child’s room or a living room. If the whole composition interests you, see The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne; the Mona Lisa comes from the same Paris years, and among Leonardo’s mother-and-child scenes The Virgin of the Rocks stands out.
- Original: oil on poplar, 168 × 113 cm – panel later widened to 130 cm
- Dating: 1503–1519 per the Louvre; the painting was left unfinished
- Held at: Louvre, Paris, inv. INV 776 (MR 319); High Renaissance
- Our version: hand-painted crop on canvas, from 50 × 50 cm to 150 × 150 cm, from €600
