The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne
The original, as its museum records it
Every line above is reproduced from the holding institution’s own catalogue entry, which is linked. Where their title, date or attribution differs from ours, theirs is the one printed here.
The file this print is made from
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About this painting
Anne is not in the New Testament. She comes from a second-century text the Church never canonised, and Leonardo stacks her anyway: grandmother, mother, child, three generations locked into one pyramid of bodies, so the Incarnation arrives down a real human line rather than out of the sky.
The child has hold of a lamb. In 1501 a friar wrote to Isabella d'Este describing exactly this — the boy taking the sacrificial animal, his mother reaching to separate them.
He is grasping his own death. She is trying to take it off him. Anne does not intervene.
Sources: Musée du Louvre, INV 776 ; MR 319 · Fra Pietro da Novellara to Isabella d'Este, 3 April 1501 (Villata, no. 150, 134–35) · e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha, North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocrypha · Charles Nicholl, Leonardo: Flights of the Mind
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 18,032 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.