Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist (Leonardo)

Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist is a lost composition attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, thought to date from the late 1470s to the middle or late 1480s and known today only through paintings produced by artists in Leonardo's circle rather than through any surviving original. It shows the Virgin Mary with outstretched arms flanked by the infant Christ embracing a lamb and the young Saint John the Baptist holding a goldfinch, a bird traditionally read as a symbol of Christ's future Passion, set against a rocky, vegetated landscape with distant architecture. A version thought to preserve Leonardo's own underdrawing is held in a private collection in Moscow, while a version in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum was attributed to Leonardo by the scholar Tancred Borenius in 1930, an attribution most specialists now doubt; further copies survive in other European collections by workshop associates such as Cesare da Sesto and possibly Marco d'Oggiono. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/