Virgin and Child (c. 1500): Art, History and Details

Virgin and Child (c. 1500) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452–1519).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Madonna and Child appear in half-length, seated against a dark wall. The Child's body is covered in shadow as he looks over his shoulder at his mother. This painting was bought by James Jackson Jarves as a Leonardo. The landscape and features of the figures are similar to Leonardo's Madonna of the Rocks, and in typical Leonardesque fashion, the figures' heads incline slightly to the left. However, Virgin and Child was later attributed to a member of Leonardo's circle named Francesco Napolitano (active 1500) because of its resemblance to his Madonna and Child with St. Sebastian and St. John the Baptist in Zurich, Switzerland. Virgin and Child has not been widely accepted as a work of Napolitano; however, he was certainly a member of Leonardo's circle. The Sforzesco Castle, the seat of Milan's ruling Sforza family, appears in the background. The castle's original Torre del Filarete, visible in this painting, was destroyed by lightning in 1521 and later rebuilt by Francesco II Sforza. The destruction of the tower establishes a date of about 1500 for this painting.

Object facts

• Title: Virgin and Child
• Date: c. 1500
• Creator attribution: Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452–1519)
• Culture: Italy, early 16th Century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on wood
• Dimensions: Framed: 57.5 x 47 x 4 cm (22 5/8 x 18 1/2 x 1 9/16 in.); Painted surface: 41.5 x 30.3 cm (16 5/16 x 11 15/16 in.); Panel: 41.7 x 30.9 cm (16 7/16 x 12 3/16 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 15th Century and earlier
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1916.779

Collection credit

Holden Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Jarves, James Jackson. Art Studies: The "Old Masters" of Italy : Painting. 1861.
• Hollenden Gallery, James Jackson Jarves, and Liberty Emery Holden. Handbook for Visitors to the Hollenden Gallery of Masters: Exhibited at the Boston Foreign Art Exhibition in 1883-4. S.l: J.J. Jarves, 1883.
• Rubinstein-Bloch, Stella. Catalogue of a Collection of Paintings, Etc. Presented by Mrs. Liberty E. Holden to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1917.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.