The Burlington House Cartoon

Mary sits on her mother Anne’s lap while the infant Christ reaches towards John the Baptist. Anne looks at Mary and points upwards. The four figures seem to turn around one another through a chain of glances, hands and overlapping bodies. Leonardo da Vinci made this large drawing around 1506–08, probably to present the design of a proposed painting. In art, a cartoon is a full-scale preparatory drawing. This one appears to have been intended for viewing, rather than simply for transferring outlines onto another surface. Compare the dense shading of the faces with Anne’s lightly sketched pointing hand. Some forms seem solid enough to touch, while others remain unfinished suggestions. The joined sheets of paper also remind us how large an undertaking the drawing was. Its familiar name comes from Burlington House in London, where it was once kept. No completed painting that exactly follows this design survives. The drawing lets us study both a resolved group of figures and the marks through which Leonardo brought that group into being.