The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne

Leonardo's Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, worked on from around 1503 through 1519 and housed in the Louvre, was his most obsessively developed composition — he made multiple preparatory drawings and cartoons over two decades before completing the painting. The composition — Anne, Mary, and the Christ child in a pyramidal arrangement above a vast mountain landscape — was the most ambitious of his mature works and the one that most fully realized his understanding of painting as a vehicle for depicting the relationships between figures, landscape, and atmospheric space. Raphael made a quick sketch of an earlier cartoon version and its compositional influence can be traced through High Renaissance and subsequent painting.

Leonardo's revolutionary sfumato creates an atmospheric unity that envelops the figures in soft, graded light. The pyramidal composition and the complex interlocking of the three figures demonstrate his supreme command of pictorial design.