between 1504-1508,[1] and of which Leonardo, no doubt, drew his two versions at the outset (as he does not seem to have prepared any Cartoon), one of which he finished in Milan for the church of St. Francis, is now in the National Gallery; and the other, which he took with him to Cloux, where it was finished, is now in the Louvre. Next comes the St. Anne Cartoon, now in the Royal Academy, drawn, probably, in Milan, the possession of which made him, no doubt, so eager to get the transference of Filippino's commission from the Servite Monks, on his return to Florence in 1500, when he commenced the 'Cartoon' of the St. Anne seen by Fra Nuvolaria, which ultimately went to France, where it was painted with the assistance of Melzi, and now hangs in the Louvre. The alteration in this Cartoon to the Child Christ playing with the lamb may have been due to his having drawn it just before Easter, when the Paschal Lamb was so much in evidence in all the Easter religious services of the Church.[2] Then we have the two drawings for the Portrait of Isabella d'Este, 1499-1500, one of which he gave her and is now in the Uffizi, and the other he kept and took with him to France and is now in the Louvre. Finally we have the two versions of the Mona Lisa (seen by Fra Nuvolaria), one of which went to the Giocondos and the other accompanied Leonardo to France. The St. John, probably drawn in Milan by Leonardo, was painted at Cloux, where he was very much assisted in this picture by his Milanese pupil (Melzi), who worked 'exceedingly well.'
This forms the complete list of Leonardo's lost and extant pictures—that is to say, all those for which we have any contemporaneous evidence that he painted, or, to be more correct, that he commenced to paint them. From it we can see at once that the master himself never lost a single picture. Moreover, it must be remembered that before he returned to Florence in 1500, he had his faithful and devoted pupil and servant, Salai, in his employ; that his intimate friend, Melzi, joined him before he left Milan for Rome; and that both of these true and staunch friends jealously guarded every scrap of art that came from his hand, well knowing its value. Yet in spite of this, and in face of the record given above, we are told that Leonardo himself must have lost or destroyed these five pictures, for they were never traced beyond his own possession, and we are asked to believe it because his biographers cannot account for them
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- ↑ M. Salomon Reinach in 'The Art Journal,' 1912 (p. 8).
- ↑ 'Why Leonardo deserted the Cartoon (the St. Anne) to engage on another version of the same subject (on which he was working in Florence in 1501) it would be hard to determine.' Mr. Bernhard Berenson in 'The Drawings of the Florentine Masters' (vol. 1, p. 158).
