Leonardo da Vinci's paintings

Vinci and Florence, 1452 to 1481

He learned to paint in Verrocchio's workshop in Florence. From those years come a shared painting, an Annunciation, a portrait, two small Madonnas and a predella panel the Louvre now gives to a fellow pupil. Then two panels he never finished: the Saint Jerome, and the Adoration of the Magi, ordered from him in 1481.

1. The Baptism of Christ

   About 1470 to 1475Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

   

   Documented, with a caution: this is Verrocchio's painting. The Uffizi names him first and Leonardo second. Vasari recorded the young pupil's share, the angel on the left. Current studies give him more: the river behind, the glow of the light and Christ himself.

   John pours water over Christ's head in the river Jordan, and two angels kneel at the left. The angel on the left, seen from behind and turning to look back over its shoulder, is Leonardo's.

   Vasari wrote that the pupil painted his angel so well that it troubled his master, and a third, older painter probably worked on the panel too: God's hands and the dove at the top come from a weaker hand.

   See the Baptism of Christ in the wing

2. Annunciation

   About 1472Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

   

   Documented. An early work, painted while he was still in Verrocchio's workshop. Nobody knows who ordered it or where it first hung. The Uffizi received it in 1867 from a church just outside a city gate of Florence.

   Gabriel kneels on the grass of a walled garden and offers Mary a lily. She sits at a reading stand in front of a palace, her book open.

   The angel's wings are modelled on those of a real bird of prey, and Mary's right arm looks too long: the Uffizi thinks he drew it for a viewer off to the right, where a side altar would put us.

   See the Annunciation in the wing

3. Ginevra de' Benci

   About 1474 to 1478National Gallery of Art, Washington

   

   Documented. Her identity is firm. Who ordered the portrait is not: it may mark her marriage at 16, or the Venetian ambassador Bernardo Bembo, who admired her, ordered it. His emblem was laurel and palm, and his motto lies under hers in infrared images, so the back at least was probably his.

   The front: Ginevra de' Benci, a young woman of a Florentine banking family, before a juniper bush, ginepro in Italian, a pun on her name. The back of the same panel, which the wing hangs beside the front: laurel and palm wreathed around a juniper sprig, and a ribbon with a Latin motto, beauty adorns virtue. A strip was cut off the bottom of the panel, probably because of damage, and her hands went with it.

   See Ginevra de' Benci in the wing

4. Madonna of the Carnation

   About 1475Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich

   

   Documented. One of his earliest panels, made in his years with Verrocchio, and an early trial of oil paint.

   Mary, in a room with windows, holds a red carnation out to the child, who sits on a cushion in front of her. Mountains show through the windows.

   Those are the first of the blue, far-off mountains we know from his hand, and the panel once belonged to Giulio de' Medici, who became Pope Clement VII.

   See the Madonna of the Carnation in the wing

5. Annunciation, predella panel

   About 1475 to 1478Musée du Louvre, Paris

   

   Disputed, and here the holder itself takes the other side. The Louvre labels it Lorenzo di Credi, who trained beside Leonardo under Verrocchio, with Leonardo as a former attribution, and dates it about 1475 to 1500. Scholars today split three ways: Lorenzo, Leonardo, or the two together.

   A small, wide panel: the angel kneels before Mary in a garden. It comes from the predella, the strip of small scenes under an altarpiece, of the altarpiece Verrocchio's workshop painted for Pistoia Cathedral, where the main panel still stands.

   The Louvre finds the large eyes, the plainer faces and the flatter folds closer to Lorenzo. It bought the panel in 1863 with the collection of the Marquis Campana in Rome, sold off after his bankruptcy.

   See the predella panel in the wing

6. Benois Madonna

   About 1478 to 1480State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. The Hermitage's own page lists it as not in the permanent display, so check before a visit.

   

   Documented. The paint was moved from its wooden panel onto canvas.

   Mary is very young here, her dress and hair in the Florentine style of her day. She holds a small flower up to the baby, who grabs at it and steadies her hand. The petals form a cross, a sign of what is to come.

   The Hermitage says her face comes from a living model, not an ideal, and take away the gold haloes and what is left is a mother playing with her son.

   See the Benois Madonna in the wing

7. Saint Jerome in the Wilderness

   About 1480 to 1490Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City

   

   Documented. The Vatican says the attribution has never been doubted. It dates the panel about 1482, because it is so close in style to the Adoration of the Magi. Some historians put it nearer the 1490s.

   The scholar saint as a penitent in the desert, thin, beardless and in rags, kneeling with a stone in his fist, raised to strike his chest, and a lion lying before him. It never got past the brown underdrawing on most of the panel, and a red patch stands for his cardinal's hat.

   The panel was split into five pieces at some point. Napoleon's uncle, Cardinal Joseph Fesch, tracked them down and had them joined, and Pope Pius IX bought it in 1856.

   See Saint Jerome in the wing

8. Adoration of the Magi

   About 1481 to 1482Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

   

   Documented. The monks of San Donato a Scopeto, an Augustinian house just outside Florence, ordered it in July 1481 for their high altar and gave him 30 months. He left for Milan before it was finished. In the end Filippino Lippi painted the altarpiece for them.

   The three kings kneel with their gifts before Mary and the child, a crowd curving around them, and behind them ruins, a half-built structure with stairs, and horsemen in a fight. Most of it never got beyond drawing: some figures are only outlines, others nearly modelled.

   The restoration of 2012 to 2017 showed that he worked the composition out on the panel itself, rather than settling it on paper first, a rare thing even for him. Earlier restorers had coated the panel in a tinted varnish that made it look nearly monochrome.

   See the Adoration of the Magi in the wing

Milan, 1482 to 1499

In Milan he painted an altarpiece for a confraternity, which exists in two versions, the London one, many think, with his workshop's hand in it. Three portraits follow, one of them disputed, and a nursing Madonna that many think a pupil painted from his design. On the wall of a dining hall he painted the Last Supper for Ludovico Sforza, which closes this page.

1. Virgin of the Rocks, Louvre version

   About 1483 to 1494Musée du Louvre, Paris

   

   Documented. The contract is dated 25 April 1483: Leonardo and two painters, the brothers de Predis, would paint and gild the altarpiece of a confraternity's chapel in Milan. A long dispute over money followed. This is the earlier of the two versions.

   Mary kneels in a rocky grotto, one hand over the child Jesus, and with the other she draws the small John the Baptist closer. An angel supports Jesus and points a finger at John, and Jesus blesses him. Behind them, mountains and water.

   How it reached France nobody knows: the first record of it is at Fontainebleau in 1625. Infrared images taken in 2009 show that the angel was first painted without the pointing hand, as in the London panel, and that Leonardo added the gesture near the end.

   See the Virgin of the Rocks from the Louvre in the wing

2. Portrait of a Musician

   About 1485Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan

   

   Disputed, though mostly by older voices. The Ambrosiana gives it to Leonardo without a doubt, and most scholars agree. The doubt began in 1890, when Ambrogio de Predis was proposed. A 1987 study suggested Leonardo painted the head and bust, and someone else, possibly Boltraffio, later added the hand with the sheet.

   A young man seen to the shoulders, turned a little away from us and looking to his right, with a folded sheet of music in his hand. Who he is, nobody knows: he passed for the Duke of Milan until a cleaning in 1905 uncovered the hand and the sheet, and the names proposed since include the cathedral's choirmaster Franchino Gaffurio and Leonardo's musician friend Atalante Migliorotti.

   His two pupils are not the same size, the left one a touch smaller, as though caught just as the eye opens wider in fading light, a thing Leonardo described in his notes.

   See the Musician in the wing

3. Lady with an Ermine

   About 1489 to 1491Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, Muzeum Książąt Czartoryskich, Kraków

   

   Documented. Ordered by Ludovico Sforza, the museum says, when the sitter was about 16, and Poland's one painting by Leonardo.

   Cecilia Gallerani, a young lady at the Milan court and the duke's mistress, turned three-quarters and looking past us, with a white ermine in her arms. Her name was proposed around 1900 and is accepted now, since a court poet wrote a poem on Leonardo's portrait of her. The ermine stands for the duke, who was called the White Ermine after an order he received in 1488, so the museum reads the picture as a double portrait.

   In an upper corner someone wrote, around 1800, that the picture shows La Belle Ferronnière, the name of the next portrait on this page, so for a time both carried the same name.

   See the Lady with an Ermine in the wing

4. La Belle Ferronnière

   About 1490 to 1497Musée du Louvre, Paris. The Louvre listed it as not on display when we checked.

   

   Documented. Who she is remains open. The oldest candidate is Lucrezia Crivelli, the duke's mistress from around 1495, named in a Latin poem that was copied into Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus. Others propose Beatrice d'Este, the duke's wife, or Isabella of Aragon.

   A young woman at a stone parapet, her body turned one way and her head the other, in a red dress in the Milanese fashion with sleeves tied by ribbons, a thin cord across her forehead with a red stone. Her gaze slides just past us.

   The name is a mistake, and the Louvre's own title says so: it was another portrait's name in the French royal collection, a print of this picture carried it by error, and in 1784 an inventory even called her Anne Boleyn.

   See La Belle Ferronnière in the wing

5. Madonna Litta

   About 1490State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

   

   Disputed. The Hermitage lists it as Leonardo's, without a qualifier, and dates it to the mid-1490s. Many scholars think his pupil Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio painted it from Leonardo's design. Martin Kemp has said that nearly all specialists see it that way.

   Mary nurses the child in a dark room with two matching windows, each opening onto wide mountains. The Louvre has a study for it, the Hermitage says, and the name comes from the Milanese Duke Antonio Litta: the Hermitage bought it from the Litta collection in 1865.

   When London's National Gallery borrowed it in 2011, the painting hung as a Leonardo while a drapery study for it in the same show was labelled Boltraffio.

   See the Madonna Litta in the wing

6. Virgin of the Rocks, London version

   About 1491 to 1508National Gallery, London

   

   Qualified attribution. The National Gallery gives it to Leonardo alone. The Louvre's curator sees pupils' work in parts, the infant John close to Boltraffio, and reads it as largely painted by the workshop under Leonardo's eye, with his own hand in places.

   The same scene as the Paris picture, with differences: the angel no longer points, the figures wear thin gold haloes, and the infant John holds a reed cross. It was painted for the Milan chapel named in the 1483 contract, and the gallery found three phases of work: begun in the early 1490s, Christ's head turned to profile a few years on, and the blue sky added after Leonardo was called back in 1506.

   The plants in the grotto are not real species: the gallery says they are mixtures of several different plants.

   See the Virgin of the Rocks from London in the wing

Venice, Florence and the Romagna, 1500 to 1506

Back in Florence he began the Mona Lisa and the Saint Anne, and worked on both for years to come. A small Madonna for the French king's secretary survives in two versions, each with a qualified attribution. On a wall of the Palazzo della Signoria he started a battle that is lost and known here through a copy.

1. Madonna of the Yarnwinder, Buccleuch version

   About 1501Buccleuch collection, on loan to National Galleries of Scotland

   

   Qualified attribution. Two versions exist, side by side in the wing. Under the paint of each, study found the same reworkings, made as both grew in the studio. Martin Kemp reads that as Leonardo using one order to make a second picture for sale. Others ask how much of each is his.

   Mary sits among rocks and reaches out as the child, twisting across her knees, grabs at a yarnwinder, the cross-shaped tool for winding yarn, here a sign of the cross to come. A friar wrote to Isabella d'Este in April 1501 that Leonardo was painting it for Florimond Robertet, secretary to the King of France. In August 2003 two men posing as tourists took it off the wall at Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland, and the police found it four years later in a Glasgow law office.

   See the Buccleuch Madonna of the Yarnwinder in the wing

2. Madonna of the Yarnwinder, Lansdowne version

   About 1501Kenneth C. Griffin Collection, on loan to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

   

   Qualified attribution. The Met's label reads Leonardo da Vinci and Studio. The two versions grew side by side in the studio. By Martin Kemp's account one went to a French official and the other, he thinks, to the king himself.

   The same scene as the Buccleuch panel: the child with the yarnwinder, Mary reaching toward him, rocks behind. It has hung in the Met's European paintings galleries since spring 2026, on long-term loan and without a press release.

   In May 2025 Martin Kemp wrote that the picture could no longer be traced, and a year later it was on a wall at the Met.

   See the Lansdowne Madonna of the Yarnwinder in the wing

3. Mona Lisa

   About 1503 to 1519Musée du Louvre, Paris

   

   Documented. Begun in Florence around 1503, probably for her husband, the silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Leonardo never handed it over: it travelled with him to Milan, to Rome and to France, and he kept working on it. The French king very probably bought it in 1518, from Leonardo's pupil Salaì.

   Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, seated in a chair and turned toward us, one hand laid over the other, a low balustrade behind her and beyond it mountains, water, a winding road and a bridge. The Louvre treats other names for the sitter as a non-question: it is Lisa.

   In 2005 a note turned up in the margin of a book in the university library at Heidelberg: a Florentine clerk wrote in October 1503 that Leonardo was working on Lisa del Giocondo's head, and that settled both the sitter and the date.

   See the Mona Lisa in the wing

4. The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne

   About 1503 to 1519Musée du Louvre, Paris

   

   Documented. No patron is on record. The Louvre thinks he began it without a commission, in Florence between about 1500 and 1503, as a showpiece of what he could do, and he kept it with him in France. The French king very probably acquired it in 1518.

   Anne sits with her grown daughter Mary on her lap, and Mary leans forward to hold the child, who has got hold of a lamb, the sign of his sacrifice. Behind them mountains and lakes, in front layered rock and water.

   It was still unfinished at his death: the restoration of 2010 to 2012 found his last brushstrokes on Anne's robe, and Mary's face never received its final, finest modelling.

   See the Saint Anne in the wing

5. The Fight for the Standard, after the Battle of Anghiari

   Sixteenth century, reworked in the early seventeenth centuryMusée du Louvre, Paris, Department of Prints and Drawings. Seen by appointment only, in the study room.

   

   Copy. A drawing, not a painting, by other hands: the Louvre's artist line reads Rubens. An unknown Italian copied Leonardo's huge cartoon in the sixteenth century, others reworked it early in the seventeenth, and Rubens, who owned it, went over it with pen and watercolour and enlarged the sheet.

   Horsemen locked in a fight over a battle standard, horses and riders knotted into one mass: the centre of the Battle of Anghiari, the wall painting Leonardo began in 1504 to 1505 for the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence, now the Palazzo Vecchio. What he put on the wall was destroyed around 1560, and Rubens never saw it.

   On the back of the Saint Anne panel in the Louvre, infrared imaging found three sketches, one of them a horse's head very like the right-hand horse of this battle.

   See the Battle of Anghiari copy in the wing

Milan again, 1506 to 1513

After his return to Milan he finished the London Virgin of the Rocks, and the smiling Saint John may have been begun here. The wing dates two more works to these years, the large cartoon now in London and a head of a girl with loose hair, though the sources argue over their dates. The Salvator Mundi, disputed, stands here because its date runs to 1510.

1. The Burlington House Cartoon

   About 1506 to 1508National Gallery, London

   

   Documented. Not a painting but a drawing, in charcoal and white chalk on paper, and the only large drawing by his hand that survives. Its date is argued over: the gallery says about 1506 to 1508, the Louvre's curator about 1500, as his first idea for the Saint Anne.

   Mary sits on her mother Anne's lap and holds the child, who reaches toward the infant John, while Anne points upward. It is a full-size drawing that was never used to paint from, since the sheet was never pricked through to transfer the design, so the gallery thinks it was made to show a patron.

   Paper did not come in sheets this size in his day, so he glued many together, and the joins show up close.

   See the Burlington House Cartoon in the wing

2. La Scapigliata

   About 1506 to 1508Galleria Nazionale di Parma, Complesso della Pilotta, Parma

   

   Qualified attribution. The gallery gives it to Leonardo, with Italian opinion almost unanimous, and dates it about 1492 to 1501. The wing follows a proposal of about 1508. Its reserve rests on what the work is: a monochrome sketch on a wood panel, neither drawing nor finished painting.

   The head of a young woman looking down, her hair loose and blown about. Scapigliata is Italian for dishevelled. What it was for is unknown: a study for a painting of Leda, for the cartoon now in London, for the Virgin of the Rocks in London, or something made for its own sake.

   The gallery's own director doubted it in 1896 because it had come from a painter's studio. The gallery had bought it in 1839 from the heirs of a painter, and the inventory that came with it called it simply a Madonna's head in chiaroscuro.

   See La Scapigliata in the wing

3. Saint John the Baptist

   About 1508 to 1519Musée du Louvre, Paris

   

   Documented. No patron is known. He kept it with him in France, and the French king very probably bought it in 1518. Later it wandered: a French duke gave it to Charles I of England, it was sold after that king's execution, and Louis XIV bought it back for France in 1662.

   A young John the Baptist comes out of the dark, smiling, his right hand pointing upward, a thin reed cross in his left, a spotted animal pelt over his body.

   The pelt is spotted like a leopard's, not the camel hair of the Bible, which the Louvre calls unique for its time, and scans show he shifted the body's outline three times or more.

   See Saint John the Baptist in the wing

4. Salvator Mundi

   About 1499 to 1510Private collection, present location unconfirmed

   

   Disputed, more than any other. For Leonardo: Martin Kemp and London's National Gallery, which showed it as his in 2011. Against or unsure: Carmen Bambach, who gives most of it to Boltraffio, and Frank Zöllner, who sees a workshop picture, probably with Leonardo's hand, too damaged and over-restored for a firm call.

   Christ as saviour of the world, which is what the title means, facing us, his right hand raised in blessing, a clear crystal sphere in his left, dressed in blue with embroidered bands. In 1958 it sold at auction for 45 pounds as a school work, and in November 2017 at Christie's in New York for about 450 million dollars, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work of art. It has not been shown in public since, and a report from 2024 says it may be in storage in Geneva.

   See the Salvator Mundi in the wing

Amboise, 1516 to 1519

After three years in Rome he went to France with the Mona Lisa, the Saint Anne and the Saint John still in his hands. The one picture from these years in the wing is from his workshop, not from him.

1. Bacchus, formerly Saint John the Baptist

   About 1517 to 1520Musée du Louvre, Paris

   

   Workshop. The Louvre labels it workshop of Leonardo and attributes it to Francesco Melzi, the pupil who lived with him in France from 1516. The Louvre's suggestion is that Melzi painted it there for the French king, after Leonardo's small Saint John.

   A young man sits in open country, smiling and pointing, ivy on his head, grapes and a staff in his hands, a spotted pelt around him. He was painted as John the Baptist.

   In 1625 a visitor to Fontainebleau noted that the picture did not move one to devotion, and late in that century it was made over into the pagan god Bacchus: the grapes and the ivy were added and John's cross became a staff. The restoration of 2017 to 2019 showed that the pelt is original and the grapes and ivy later.

   See the Bacchus in the wing

On its own wall

1. The Last Supper

   About 1494 to 1498Museo del Cenacolo Vinciano, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan

   

   Not in the picture room. A wall painting, still on the wall it was painted on, in the dining hall of a Dominican convent, and the wing shows a reproduction of it on a wall in the court at the original's size.

   Christ in the middle and the apostles around him at a long table, painted for Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, in tempera on dry plaster rather than as a fresco.

   Because the paint sat on the wall instead of in it, it began to flake within about twenty years. The rest of the story is on its own page.

   See the Last Supper in the wing

   The Last Supper has a page of its own: the door, the bomb, the restoration and how to see it in Milan.