Audio Guide Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman

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		Sketches for the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne; Wheels; a Weir, Dam, or Bridge (recto). Leonardo da Vinci (Vinci, 1452–Cloux, 1519). Pen and brown ink and wash over black chalk; 266 x 200 mm (10 7/16 x 7 7/8 in.). The British Museum, London 1875-6-12-17. (Cat. no. 96).

Philippe de Montebello
Martin Kemp, Professor of the History of Art at the University of Oxford:

Martin Kemp
Of all his brainstorm drawings, this is probably the most extraordinary. It's a study for the Virgin; Child; Saint John; and either Saint Anne or Saint Elizabeth, it's not altogether clear; and maybe a lamb. The reason I hesitate is because the main study has become so complicated, he has put in so many things. He's almost sort of carving the composition into the surface of the paper, overlaying chalk, ink, inscribing through, pressing through to the other side of the sheet—because, obviously, even Leonardo was now beginning to see what was happening. And around this extraordinary tangle of lines, this terrific brainstorming, he has marked out a scale. You might think this is a very loose and free sketch, but if you look along the bottom of the sheet—the right-hand edge, the left-hand edge of the group—you will see he's moving frames around and he's actually got a very precise scale. So he knows how big the picture is going to be, and he's experimenting with exactly how this concentrated group of the three holy figures, and maybe with the lamb, can actually be fitted in. This drawing probably is working towards the surviving cartoon, the surviving full-scale drawing for the Virgin, Child, Saint Anne, and Saint John in the National Gallery in London. And this was a theme which occupied Leonardo again and again, and was inexhaustibly interesting for him, both the formal relationship and, of course, the emotional relationship, which is what this is really about.

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