The stories behind the paintings

A sixteen-year-old mistress with a reputation for outsmarting the philosophers at her own dinner table. A small white animal caught mid-turn in her arms, its fur rendered hair by hair. And, four and a half centuries later, a Nazi governor who liked the painting enough to hang it in his own office while he ran occupied Poland from the castle upstairs. Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine is barely the size of a serving tray, one of only about seventeen paintings scholars agree he actually finished, and easily the most eventful decade any Renaissance portrait has ever had. Quick facts Artist: Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) Date: c. 1489–1491 Medium: Oil on walnut panel Dimensions: 54.8 × 40.3 cm (21½ × 15⅞ in) Collection: Czartoryski Museum, Kraków Notable fact: Recovered in 1945 from the Bavarian country house of Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, who had kept it in his Wawel Castle office for most of the war Leo...

The Vulture That Wasn't There: Freud's Mistranslated Secret in Leonardo's Virgin and Child with St Anne (c. 1501–1519) In 1910, Sigmund Freud published an essay claiming to have found a hidden vulture folded into the blue drapery of the Virgin's robe in one of Leonardo da Vinci's last paintings — proof, he argued, of a childhood memory the artist had buried and then, without knowing it, painted. The theory would go on to shape a century of psychoanalytic art criticism. There was just one problem: Leonardo never wrote the word "vulture." Freud was working from a German translation that had mistranslated the Italian word Leonardo actually used, and the bird he described was something else entirely. The painting that carried this famous error for over a hundred years is the Louvre's Virgin and Child with St Anne , a work Leonardo kept at his side, unfinished, for nearly two decades — and never delivered to the patron who commissioned it. Leonardo da...

In February 1967, a portrait smaller than a dinner plate crossed the Atlantic sealed inside a modified American Tourister suitcase, booked into a first-class seat under a false name, and met on the tarmac by federal agents. It was Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra de' Benci — and the $5 million the National Gallery of Art paid to bring it home was, at the time, the largest sum ever spent on a single work of art. Three decades before he painted the Mona Lisa, a 22-year-old Leonardo had already produced his first masterpiece of psychological ambiguity, and hidden a second, secret message on the back of the panel. Leonardo da Vinci, Ginevra de’ Benci, c. 1474/1478. Oil on panel. Source: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Accession 1967.6.1.a. Open Access / Public Domain. Print available from the Sapiens Verbum shop. 🖼️ Get this painting as a print → Quick facts Artist: Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) Date: c. 1474–1478 Medium: Oil on panel, painted on both sides Collec...

Jesus sits alone at the centre of a long table, his arms spread on the cloth, his eyes lowered. He has just said: "One of you will betray me." On either side, twelve men react at once, leaning back, jumping up, pointing at themselves, asking each other who it could be. Only one of them pulls away into shadow, a small bag clutched in his hand. Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper , painted between about 1495 and 1498 on the wall of a monastery dining hall in Milan, is perhaps the most famous image in Christian art, and one of the most fragile. Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, c. 1495–1498. Mural. Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan. Image via the Sapiens Verbum print shop. 🖼️ Get this painting as a print → Quick facts Artist: Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) Date: c. 1495–1498 Medium: Tempera on gesso, pitch and mastic, on wall plaster, 460 × 880 cm Location: Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan Commissioned by: Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan What does the...

An older woman sits on a rock with a younger woman on her lap. The younger one leans forward, reaching down to hold back a naked little boy who has grabbed a lamb by the ears and is trying to climb onto it. The boy looks back at his mother over his shoulder; the older woman watches them both with a quiet smile. Behind them, blue mountains rise like a dream. This is Leonardo da Vinci's The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne , in the Louvre: Jesus, his mother Mary, and her mother Anne, folded into one of the most daring compositions of the Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, c. 1501–1519. Oil on panel. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Image via the Sapiens Verbum print shop. 🖼️ Get this painting as a print → Quick facts Artist: Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) Date: c. 1501–1519, never fully finished Medium: Oil on poplar panel, 168.4 × 130 cm Collection: Musée du Louvre, Paris (INV 776) Notable fact: Leonardo kept working on it until his death and too...

Christ faces us head-on against a black background. He wears a blue Renaissance robe embroidered with interlaced bands. His right hand is raised in blessing; his left hand holds a clear crystal sphere. The face is soft, almost veiled, the curls fall to the shoulders, and the eyes look past us as much as at us. Salvator Mundi , "Saviour of the World", painted around 1500 and attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, became in 2017 the most expensive painting ever sold at auction. It is also one of the most argued-over pictures in the world. Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi, c. 1500. Oil on walnut panel. Image via the Sapiens Verbum print shop. 🖼️ Get this painting as a print → Quick facts Artist: Leonardo da Vinci (attributed; some scholars see workshop participation) Date: c. 1499–1510 Medium: Oil on walnut panel, 65.7 × 45.7 cm Owner: Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism; not publicly shown since 2017 Auction record: US$450.3 million, Christie's ...

A woman sits in a loggia, turned three-quarters towards us, her hands resting quietly one on top of the other. Her smile almost arrives, then stops. Behind her, a strange landscape of winding roads, a bridge, rivers and blue mountains dissolves into haze. Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa , begun in Florence around 1503 and now in the Musée du Louvre in Paris, is probably the most famous painting in the world. It is also one of the most carefully made: Leonardo kept working on it for years, and never handed it over to the man who had ordered it. Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, c. 1503–1519. Oil on poplar panel. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Image via the Sapiens Verbum print shop. 🖼️ Get this painting as a print → Quick facts Artist: Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) Date: begun c. 1503, worked on until c. 1517–1519 Medium: Oil on poplar panel, 77 × 53 cm Collection: Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv. 779) Also known as: La Gioconda (Italian) or La Joconde (French) Who was Mona Lisa? Th...