Studies for a Madonna with a Cat

Around 1480 Leonardo kept circling one homely idea: the Virgin and the Christ child playing with a cat. This sheet is covered with quick attempts at it, the same little group drawn over and over, the child twisting to hold onto a cat that plainly wants to be gone. He seems less taken with the sacred subject than with the puzzle of a wriggling animal in a small child's arms, the way a real toddler clamps a squirming pet against its chest. Several sheets like this one survive, in London, in Bayonne, and here in Florence, each trying a slightly different tangle of arms and paws. No finished painting of the cat Madonna was ever made, as far as we know.