The oeuvre of the fascinating Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci is full of controversies and inconsistencies. The famous artist left only a small number of painted works, each of which is disputed by art historians. Read on to learn more about Leonardo da Vinci’s famous paintings. Here are 10 paintings by the great artist that you absolutely need to know!
1. The Baptism of Christ by Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci
The Baptism of Christ is one of the first known works by Leonardo da Vinci, although not a complete one. As an illegitimate son to a notary, he was not legally obliged to follow his father’s career path, instead choosing to become a painter. Aged 14, he entered the workshop of a Florentine artist, Andrea del Verrochio, and spent seven years there as an apprentice.
In The Baptism of Christ, Leonardo’s hand is clearly visible in the image of an angel on the left. Surprisingly, at the age of 20, he already surpassed his teacher in the quality of painting and work with color. While studying with Verrocchio, Leonardo da Vinci met other famous Renaissance masters like Botticelli and Perugino.
2. Mona Lisa
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Sign up to our Free Weekly NewsletterSurrounded by countless rumors and conspiracy theories, the Mona Lisa was not as interesting to its contemporaries as it is to our generation. The portrait of a Florentine noblewoman gained immense popularity after it was stolen in 1911. The Louvre employee, an Italian named Vincenzo Perrugia, claimed that he stole the work for patriotic reasons, planning to bring it back to Italy.
The Mona Lisa is one of the most striking examples of the technique sfumato, invented by da Vinci. Sfumato was a subtle blending of harsh contours normally used for background landscapes. Due to the softness of line and tone and the illusion of light smoke, it created a deeper and more realistic sense of space.
3. The Last Supper
The Last Supper was a rare attempt by da Vinci to master fresco painting. Traditionally, it was made by layering pigment directly on a wet plaster wall and it required swift and decisive work. Da Vinci, however, was known to paint extremely slowly and had to resort to tempera paint to win more time to finish the mural.
Over the years, the painting suffered horrible damage while hanging in the dining hall of the Santa Maria delle Grazie monastery in Milan. One of the worst traumas treated by restorers was a large square tear at the center of the piece. In 1652, the monks cut a doorway to their kitchen right through the painting, believing it was useless and destroyed beyond repair anyway.
4. The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne
Commissioned for the Florence Church of Annunciation (Basilica della Santissima Annunziata), the painting featured figures of the Virgin Mary, her mother Anne, and infant Jesus, who reached his hands to the lamb, symbolizing his future suffering. Mary tries to restrain him, as if knowing of his fate that is yet to come. Leonardo da Vinci spent ten years painting the work yet never managed to deliver it to the commissioners, leaving it in his studio.
The Virgin and her mother, despite representing different generations, look surprisingly similar. Sigmund Freud interpreted this as da Vinci’s own childhood memory. According to most experts, he was raised by his biological mother at first and then passed on to the young wife of his grandfather, who was almost the same age.
5. Lady with an Ermine
One of Leonardo’s most famous works is a portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, the mistress of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan and da Vinci’s patron. The ermine in her arms is usually interpreted as a symbol of purity and dignity. According to a legend, an ermine would rather die than soil its fur.
Da Vinci was one of the first artists ever to be concerned with expanding the borders of a painted image and adding realistic dynamism to it. His Lady with an Ermine (which, strangely, is several times larger than the actual animal) is not simply standing in the picture frame; she is turning her head toward someone entering the room. This someone, who probably is the Duke of Milan, exists in our space as well, as we are inclined to follow the lady’s gaze in his direction.
6. Madonna of the Carnation
Allegedly, this painting of The Virgin Mary was created while Leonardo was still studying at Verrocchio’s workshop. Giorgio Vasari described the work in detail in his writings on the most outstanding painters of his time, which made it rather easy to attribute, still, at the time of the work’s accidental discovery. Many experts believed it was merely a copy of the lost original painted by Leonardo da Vinci. In the Christian Renaissance culture, carnation symbolized the connection between the Virgin and her son as of the Church and Jesus, as well as pure love and compassion. Like most artworks of this era, the painting was full of symbols and allegories.
7. Portrait of Ginevra de Benci
The portrait’s strange composition was a challenge for art historians, who were at first hesitant to attribute the work to Leonardo. In his treatises on painting, he insisted that a portrait with hands is much more expressive than a portrait without them and advised artists to always include them in compositions. The dominant version today is that one of the owners had to cut the canvas since it was damaged by water or fire. One of the surviving sketches by da Vinci featured a drawing of a woman’s hands in an angle strikingly similar to the one expected on the missing bottom part of the portrait.
8. La Belle Ferronniere
Another famous portrait by da Vinci featured another lover of his patron, the Duke of Milan. The versions vary: some experts believe this was another of his mistresses, and some—that the woman was his wife, Duchess Beatrice d’Este. Yet again, it was compositionally unusual, including a strange angle and a specific turn of the woman’s head.
The title of the painting still confuses most art historians. The word Ferronniere might refer to the woman’s identity as a wife or a daughter of an ironmonger (ferronnier) or to her similarly sounding birthplace. The portrait’s title also refers to the name of a specific type of head jewelry worn on one’s forehead. In the 19th century, jewelers started to call it ferronniere, referencing the painting.
9. Lucan Portrait of Leonardo da Vinci
One of the most controversial paintings attributed to da Vinci, this image is widely believed to be Leonardo’s self-portrait. Some noticed the similarity of the portrait’s features with da Vinci’s drawings and even the Mona Lisa, further encrypting da Vinci’s already controversial oeuvre. The style of the painting is different from that of other works by da Vinci, and yet the fingerprints on it matched those found on Lady with an Ermine.
The phenomenon of Leonardo’s popularity did not occur in his lifetime. On the contrary, he rarely managed to realize his ambitious projects and was almost forgotten after his death. The concept of a misunderstood genius with unrealized ambition became prominent only in the era of Romanticism. Since then, the myth of da Vinci only expanded and developed into a cult we know today.
10. Salvator Mundi: The Controversial Work Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci
In 2017, this work set a record for the most expensive painting, sold for $450.3 million to a Saudi Arabian prince. A rather simple composition depicting the figure of Jesus Christ was presented as a groundbreaking discovery of the forgotten da Vinci’s work. However, today, the majority of art historians believe that the work was made by a so-called Leonardesque—one of da Vinci’s many students—and was restored so many times that it started to appear of better quality than it actually was. The majority of da Vinci’s followers mostly repeated the master’s key artistic features that were popular at the time, such as sfumato or some compositional choices, but hardly ever achieved any degree of outstanding. In that sense, Salvator Mundi lacks something very important that every proven work by Leonardo had: a technical and compositional challenge that was exciting for the master to solve.
