The Dating and Patronage of Leonardo's Burlington House Cartoon

* I would like to offer my deep thanks to a number of friends and colleagues who have helped me in various ways in my work on this article: Professor Frederick Hartt, Mr. Cecil Gould, Mr. John Gere, Mrs. A. Scott-Elliott, Professor H. W. Janson, Dr. Wolfram Prinz, Dr. Katherine Posner, and Dr. Ursula Nilgen. The study was made possible by a research grant from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and by a grant from the Penrose Fund of the American Philosophical Society.

Abstract

The dating of Leonardo da Vinci's Burlington House Cartoon in the National Gallery in London, representing the Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John (Fig. 1),¹ was not an acute problem thirty years ago. The only really divisive issue was whether it was executed in Milan before 1500 or in Florence just afterwards. The authority for the first theory came from Padre Sebastiano Resta, noted in the seventeenth century as an art collector. In a letter to Giovanni Pietro Bellori, he alluded to an unfinished cartoon of a Virgin and Child with St. Anne that Leonardo had made in Milan in 1499 for Louis XII of France.² The authority for the second theory was a reference by Vasari to a cartoon of this subject that Leonardo had begun immediately after his return to Florence, supposedly in 1500.³ The weight of scholarship was on the side of a Milanese parentage for the Burlington House Cartoon, although both views had their distinguished advocates. To be sure, there was within each of the two camps a certain elasticity of argument: a number of scholars dated the cartoon to the mid-1490′s and earlier, while at least one other scholar brought it forward to 1503. But the majority of opinions tended to favor a dating around 1498–99 or around 1500. Scarcely anyone seemed to believe in the patronage of Louis XII.