Leonardo and the confraternity that ordered the picture argued about the fee for roughly twenty-five years. The second version, in London, carries haloes and a cross the Paris one does not – most likely added to settle what the painting was allowed to show.

Very dark overall, so it needs a lit wall or it disappears. Hang it alone. Black frame, thin mount. M to L.

Who he was

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) is the defining figure of the Italian High Renaissance and the original polymath: painter, engineer, anatomist and natural scientist in one person.

What sets him apart

He perfected sfumato, the barely perceptible blending of tones that dissolves hard contours into smoke-like transitions. His figures rest on direct anatomical and optical observation rather than inherited formulas. His painted work is tiny – fewer than twenty pieces are securely attributed – because he abandoned as many commissions as he finished. That rarity, and the psychological presence of his figures, is why a single Leonardo carries cultural weight almost no other painting does.

In our collection

The Mona Lisa, painted around 1503–1506 and in the Louvre since 1797, and the Virgin of the Rocks, which exists in two autograph versions – the earlier in the Louvre, the later in the National Gallery in London.