Sacra Famiglia con sant'Anna e san Giovannino

Bernardino Luini worked in Milan in Leonardo da Vinci's long shadow, and this panel wears it openly. Its grouping of the Virgin, her mother Anne, and the infants Christ and John comes straight from a cartoon by Leonardo, the great charcoal drawing now in London. Luini borrowed the design and added Saint Joseph at the left to round it out. Cardinal Federico Borromeo prized the picture, and in 1618 he gave it to the new library and gallery he had founded in Milan, the Ambrosiana. It traveled once, and not by choice. French troops seized it in 1796 and carried it to Paris, where it hung in the Louvre until 1815, when it was returned to Milan. It has stayed there ever since.