Madonna Litta

The Madonna Litta is a late 15th-century painting of the Madonna nursing the infant Jesus which is generally attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and is displayed in the Hermitage Museum, in Saint Petersburg. There are numerous replicas of the work by other Renaissance painters, and Leonardo's own preliminary sketch of Madonna's head in the Louvre. The Child's awkward posture, however, led some scholars to attribute parts of the painting to Leonardo's pupil Boltraffio. Other clues that contribute to the fact that Leonardo had this painting completed by one of his pupils include the harsh outlines of the Madonna and Child, as well as the plain landscape. This work was painted sometime in the 1480s for the Visconti rulers of Milan and soon passed to the Litta family, in whose possession it would remain for centuries. In 1865, Alexander II of Russia acquired it from Count Litta, quondam minister to St Petersburg, and deposited the painting in the Hermitage Museum, where it has been exhibited to this day. The museum had the painting transferred from wood to canvas. The painting was briefly featured in the 2006 film The Da Vinci Code.