Works by Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci left some 13,000 pages of drawings and notes, and most of the works below are drawings: heads in red chalk, caricatures, studies of drapery, a bird's-eye map of the Tuscan coast.

He joined the Florence workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio as a studio boy at around 14 and was an apprentice there by 17. His portrait of Ginevra de' Benci, from about 1474–78, sets a pale, unsmiling face against a dark bush of needle-like leaves, and only on the right does the panel open onto still water, trees and blue hills. Each curl around her face is painted on its own, gold where the light falls. On the back of the same panel, a wreath of laurel and palm rings a sprig of juniper as spiky as that bush, with a scroll reading VIRTUTEM FORMA DECORAT.

In 1482 Leonardo went to Milan, where he served Ludovico Sforza until 1499. The sitter of Lady with an Ermine, from about 1490, is presumed to be Ludovico's lover Cecilia Gallerani; her head turns hard away from her shoulders at a time when many portraits still kept to a stiff profile, and the white animal in her arms turns with her. For a Milan confraternity he painted the Virgin of the Rocks of 1483–86, its figures kneeling in a cave of dark, dripping stone. He finished it twice: the later version, at the National Gallery, drops the angel's pointing hand and adds thin gold haloes. He also drew faces pushed toward caricature but apparently taken from life, like the old woman with a flower in her bodice of 1489/90, and smooth young profiles under heaps of curls, often linked to his assistant Salaì.

Back in Florence by 1503, he began the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the Mona Lisa, and went on working on it for years. Its shadows melt into one another with no visible brushstroke, a softness later called sfumato, and the same smoky shading models the faces in the large Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, drawn in black chalk on tinted paper. He seems never to have painted from that drawing; the nearest painting is the Saint Anne in the Louvre, where Mary sits on her mother's lap and leans down to hold back the Child as he wrestles a lamb.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, National Gallery, Royal Collection, Louvre, National Museum in Kraków. Portrait: Attributed to Francesco Melzi.