St Anne with the Virgin and the Child Embracing a Lamb

religious

This painting is a fairly faithful copy of Leonardo's The Virgin and Child with St Anne in the Louvre. The picture in Florence differs from Leonardo's in the landscape, which is entirely reformulated here, and a few, yet significant, details, such as the foreground in which an alluvial riverbank is replaced by a sumptuous meadow. A possible explanation of the differences could be that the painter of the Florence version used as model not Leonardo's painting but his cartoon (now lost) which probably showed only the figures without Leonardo's final alterations, and no landscape at all.

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St Anne with the Virgin and the Child Embracing a Lamb

About the Artist

Francesco Melzi

1493 – 1570

Italian painter, pupil, assistant and confidant of Leonardo da Vinci. He worked with Leonardo in Rome, Bologna and he also followed him to France. He was clearly dependent on his master and he was his companion during the last stage of his life. He was also the one who completed Leonardo's treatise on painting after his death. Melzi appears to have shared the master's knowledge, and Leonardo developed his last works together with him. He made him his main heir and left him his workshop together with all his notebooks and drawings.

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