Leonardo da Vinci's The Virgin of the Rocks shows a meeting the Gospels never describe: the infant Christ and the infant John the Baptist in a dark grotto, watched over by the Virgin Mary and an angel. Christ blesses, Mary holds her hand over him, and in the Louvre version the angel points at John. The picture celebrates the Immaculate Conception, the belief that Mary was free of sin.
The men who ordered it belonged to the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in Milan, and they wanted an altarpiece for their chapel that said something about Mary. Leonardo painted the scene twice. The two versions, now in the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in London, do not tell the story in quite the same way.
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A third design lies hidden under the London version. In 2005, conservators at the National Gallery pointed an infrared camera at the Virgin's head, hoping to find a drawing under the paint. What appeared instead were the face and hand of another figure.
The scans revealed a completely different design. In it the angel and the baby Christ sat higher up in the picture, and the angel looked down at the child. The Virgin was there too, her outline relatively clear. Leonardo had begun another picture and dropped it for the one that hangs in London.
X-rays then showed that none of that first design was ever painted. Leonardo drew it, covered it with a light gray layer of priming and began again. I find that harder to explain than the London painting itself, which at least had a client waiting for it.
The legend behind the meeting
The meeting does not come from the Gospels. It comes from legends of a childhood encounter between Christ and John, which became popular in the 14th century. When King Herod ordered the Massacre of the Innocents, the killing of Bethlehem's infant boys, the Holy Family fled to Egypt.
On the road they met the infant John, who had escaped too. In one telling, the archangel Uriel had escorted the boy there.
Leonardo cut the road and kept the meeting. Painters usually set the Virgin and Child in bright daylight against the sky. He chose a dark background of rocks instead, so that the faces are modeled in light and shadow rather than outline.
The confraternity had its own reason for the scene. Its altarpiece was due for installation on December 8, 1483, the feast day of the Immaculate Conception. The reasoning behind that belief ran like this: if Christ was free of sin, his mother "also had to be free of sin."
The order itself was precise. In April 1483, Leonardo and two Milanese painters, the half brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista de Predis, signed a contract with the confraternity to gild and paint a carved altarpiece. Leonardo owed the central panel, a Virgin and Child with angels, and two side panels of angels making music.
The carved frame belonged to someone else. The woodcarver Giacomo del Maino had been hired to build it in 1480, three years before the painters signed. Ambrogio de Predis almost certainly painted one of the musical angels, the one playing a lute. Leonardo's central panel, with its four silent figures, was not paid for in full until 1508.
What You'll Discover
What the gestures say.
Why the payment fight lasted decades.
What changed between the two paintings.
Why Leonardo scrapped his drawing.