Madonna and Child with Saint Anne in a Landscape

Around 1508 Leonardo da Vinci was still turning over one of the hardest problems he ever set himself: how to fit three generations into a single lap. His painting of the Virgin seated on the knee of her mother, Saint Anne, with the Christ Child reaching away from them, occupied him on and off for more than a decade. While he reworked it, his Milan studio kept busy making versions of the design for other buyers. This panel is one of them. It repeats the master's tender pyramid of figures against a hazy landscape, but it came from the hands of his assistants rather than his own, which is why the catalogue lists no single name. Several close relatives of it survive in other collections. Look at how the two women's heads lean together, almost cheek to cheek.