Christ among the Doctors

In 1504 Isabella d'Este, Marchioness of Mantua and a famously insistent collector, asked Leonardo da Vinci for a picture of the 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple. No such painting by Leonardo is known. This panel, which Luini painted probably between about 1515 and 1530, may preserve something of the idea. In Luke's Gospel the boy stays behind in Jerusalem and sits among the teachers, questioning them. Here he looks straight out at us and counts off the points of his argument on his fingers, while four old scholars press in from the sides. The soft shadow around his face and the sharp, almost caricatured profile at the edge both point back to the older master, and the picture was once believed to be his own. Before it reached London it belonged in turn to the Aldobrandini, Pamphilj and Borghese families in Rome.