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"The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne " by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) "If you are visiting the Louvre and find the crowd surrounding the Mona Lisa too thick for comfort, you might retreat into an adjacent room to contemplate another of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpieces in greater seclusion. The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, though less famous than its sister painting, is equally enigmatic, and even more profound. Now just steps away from each other, the two paintings have been companions since their inception. In 1503, a Florentine clerk named Agostino Vespucci mentioned the two paintings together while comparing Leonardo’s artistic method to that of the ancient Greek painter Apelles. Leonardo, like Apelles, tended to begin by painting the head and shoulders of his subjects before finishing the rest of the tableau. In the case of both the Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, Vespucci provides the earliest clear evidence for the existence of the paintings. Leonardo continued to work on the two paintings for more than a decade, fleshing out the figures and filling in the craggy backgrounds, but left both unfinished at his death in 1519. The two paintings were acquired by King Francis I of France and after gracing the walls of various royal palaces eventually ended up in the Louvre in 1793." https://us.magnificat.net/home/art