The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist

In 1962 the Royal Academy in London was short of money and announced that it would sell this drawing at auction. It had belonged to the Academy since the 18th century and hung at Burlington House, the Academy's home, which is where its nickname comes from. The price was £800,000. A public appeal raised more than half of it, the Treasury paid the remaining £350,000, and the drawing went to the National Gallery.

It is Leonardo's only surviving large-scale drawing, in charcoal and white chalk on eight sheets of paper glued together. The Gallery dates it to about 1506 to 1508, though older books place it around 1500. The heads and the Child's body are fully modelled, while Saint Anne's raised hand, pointing upward, is left as a bare outline.

On a Friday evening in July 1987, a man fired a sawn-off shotgun at it from about two metres. The glass stopped the pellets but shattered into the paper around the Virgin's chest. Gallery conservators lifted the fragments, put the sheet on a new support and set the pieces back, and the repair was finished by 1989.