Madonna of the Rocks 2

This is Leonardo's second Virgin of the Rocks, made years after the first - the Louvre version elsewhere in this collection - to settle a long quarrel with the confraternity that ordered it. The grouping repeats: Virgin, the infant Baptist, the Christ Child, and an angel in a shadowed grotto. But here the figures wear haloes, John carries his identifying reed cross, and the angel no longer points; the light is cooler and harder, the finish more crystalline, with more workshop hands at work. Compare the two and Leonardo's restless reworking of his own inventions comes clear.