Leonardo's 25-year fight over a painting he'd already abandoned

Leonardo da Vinci is probably the most famous artist in history. He's also one of the worst at finishing what he started. The story of The Virgin of the Rocks proves both points at once: a 25-year legal battle, two paintings of almost the same scene, and a hidden composition that Leonardo sketched, disliked, and buried under the one you can see today.

Why are there two versions of the same painting?

Money. Or rather, not enough of it.

On April 25, 1483, Leonardo and two Milanese painters, the brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista de Predis, signed a contract with the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in Milan. The job was an altarpiece for their chapel in the church of San Francesco Grande: Leonardo would paint the central panel, and the de Predis brothers would handle the two flanking panels of angel musicians, plus gilding and polychroming the carved wooden frame around the whole thing.

The Confraternity paid an initial 100 lire on May 1, 1483, then 40 lire per month until February 1485. Total: 800 lire. Leonardo argued that the central panel alone had cost him the entire sum and demanded 1,200 lire more. The Confraternity countered with 100.

The dispute dragged on for years. At some point (the exact timing is debated, but most scholars place it before 1490), Leonardo appears to have sold the first version to a private buyer for a better price. That painting ended up in the French royal collection. It's in the Louvre now.

The Confraternity still wanted their altarpiece. The legal wrangling continued, with Ambrogio de Predis (Evangelista had died) filing petitions and even dragging King Louis XII of France into the dispute in 1503. Leonardo eventually agreed to deliver a second version. He finished it around 1508. Twenty-five years after he signed the contract.

What's different about the two versions?

Stand them side by side and the compositions are nearly identical: the Virgin Mary kneeling in a rocky grotto with the infant Jesus, the infant John the Baptist, and an angel. The differences are small but telling.

In the Louvre version, the angel on the right looks directly out at the viewer and points toward the infant John. In the London version, the angel does neither. The pointing gesture and the outward gaze are gone, replaced by a more inward, self-contained expression. The Louvre version has a warmer, more golden palette with Leonardo's signature sfumato at its most delicate. The London version, painted on a poplar panel measuring 189.5 by 120 cm, has cooler, more metallic tones and slightly different botanical details.

For centuries, the cooler finish led scholars to assume the London version was largely painted by assistants. Leonardo sketched the design, they argued, then handed the brushes to his studio. That assumption held until the painting was cleaned.

What did the 2008 restoration reveal?

Between 2008 and 2010, conservators at the National Gallery stripped off a discolored varnish from a botched 1948 restoration. What they found underneath changed the conversation.

The surface quality was consistent with Leonardo's own hand throughout. The angel's hair showed the kind of fine, almost obsessive curling that Leonardo drew in his preparatory studies. The drapery patterns matched his known technique. The foliage, previously dismissed as stiff and un-Leonardesque, turned out to have been buried under decades of yellowed coating that flattened its depth.

Curator Luke Syson argued that the London version was likely entirely autograph, an "entirely by Leonardo" painting rather than a workshop product. The "unfinished" quality that had troubled scholars wasn't evidence of assistant hands. It was Leonardo working the way Leonardo always worked: obsessively in some areas, leaving others under-resolved, circling back over years.

What's hidden under the surface?

This is the part that gets genuinely strange.

In January 2004, National Gallery conservator Rachel Billinge ran an infrared reflectography scan and discovered that Leonardo had begun an entirely different composition on the panel before abandoning it. Further scans in 2005, using an INOA scanner brought over from Florence, sharpened the picture. But the real breakthrough came in 2019.

Using macro X-ray fluorescence (MA-XRF) scanning, researchers mapped the element zinc across the panel's surface. The drawing material Leonardo used for his first abandoned sketch contained zinc, so by tracking its distribution point by point, scientists could reconstruct lines that no human eye had seen in 500 years.

What emerged was a completely different painting. The Virgin Mary was positioned higher up on the panel, looking down. The angel held the infant Jesus in a tighter, closer embrace, at a different angle from the final version. The whole composition had a different emotional weight: more vertical, more intimate, more crowded at the top.

Leonardo looked at it, decided he didn't like it, and started over on the same panel.

The researchers also found something else: handprints. Someone had patted down the wet priming on the poplar panel to smooth it out before painting began. Whether those hands belonged to Leonardo himself or to an assistant pressing the ground flat, they're still there, invisible beneath the paint, after five centuries.

What happened to the church?

San Francesco Grande, the church that started all this trouble, doesn't exist anymore. The chapel of the Immaculate Conception was demolished in 1576. Napoleon's forces leveled what remained of the church in 1806. The altarpiece was broken apart and scattered.

Today the London version of The Virgin of the Rocks hangs in Room 66 of the National Gallery. The two angel side panels painted by de Predis ended up in the same museum, acquired in 1898. The Louvre has the earlier version, transferred from its original wood to canvas at some point in its history. The carved wooden altarpiece frame is gone.

So the Confraternity waited 25 years for a painting. Got sued, countersued, involved a king, lost their church, and the panel Leonardo finally delivered contains the ghost of a composition he rejected. Under the oil painting you see today, there's a different painting he liked less. And under that, there are handprints.

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