Benois Madonna

The " Benois Madonna " is one of the most famous paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and the Italian Renaissance.

Image data

Painted between 1475 - 1478

Oil on canvas, 49.5 x 31 cm

Saint Petersburg - Hermitage

Inv: 2773

Acquired in 1914 from the M. Benois collection in Petrograd

Informative

The " Madonna with the flower " after its previous owner last commonly referred to as " Benois Madonna ". The picture in 1909, when it was shown without attribution to a particular artist at an exhibition of masterpieces of Russian private property in St. Petersburg was known. Organizers of the exhibition was the magazine " Starye Gody " ( The early years). There was the board of Baron Ernst von Liphart, archivist of all Imperial Russian museums, discovered that they still published the same year as an autograph work of Leonardo da Vinci. Despite some minor flaws - the blank window in the background, the high, almost bald like forehead, wrinkled neck or only weakly applied, barely visible teeth - which are probably due to the fact that the image was not quite completed, the write-up was generally recognition.

As a possible preparatory work, the drawings are " Madonna offers the child a fruit bowl" in the Louvre in Paris and " The Madonna and Child hugging a cat " at the British Museum in London.

The " Benois Madonna " is considered a possible candidate for one of the two images that Leonardo has mentioned in 1478 in a note ("... mbre 1478 incominicia le due Vergini Marie " - " ... mber 1478 I began the two portraits of young women Maria ").

The image was probably already at the beginning of the 19th century Russia, where it was already in 1824 by his old image carrier, a wooden panel, released and transferred to canvas. Successively it was in the collections of the generals Korsakov and Kurakin before it passed into the possession of the Russian wife of the French-born painter Léon Benois. From her acquired it in 1914, the Russian Tsar Nicholas II for the Hermitage at a price equivalent to about 1.5 million U.S. dollars. Thus it was the painting until then the most expensive sold.