La Madone Litta

This small, tender picture of the Virgin nursing the Christ child was made in Leonardo's Milan workshop around 1490, and who exactly held the brush has been argued over ever since. The Hermitage, which owns it, gives the whole thing to Leonardo. Many scholars outside Russia are less sure. They point to the crisp, hard outlines, so unlike Leonardo's famous soft melting edges, and to a surviving drawing by his pupil Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio whose baby's head matches this one almost exactly. The likely truth is a collaboration, Leonardo designing and perhaps painting the Virgin's face while an assistant finished the rest. Look at how the child turns his eyes sideways toward us even while feeding, and at the two arched windows behind, opening onto a cold blue mountain landscape of exactly the kind Leonardo loved to paint.