La Virgen adorando al Niño Jesús

The nickname the Ruskin Madonna comes from John Ruskin, the Victorian critic, who once owned this panel and prized it. It was made around 1470 in the busy Florentine workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, a shop that trained the young Leonardo da Vinci and Domenico Ghirlandaio among others. That crowded authorship is why scholars still argue over exactly whose hand made it. The Virgin kneels in adoration before her child amid the ruins of a grand classical building, and the perspective of that architecture is handled with such invention that some believe the young Leonardo, who entered the shop in the early 1470s, may have designed it. The paint has since been lifted from its original wooden panel onto canvas.