Leonardo da Vinci Paints the Virgin and Child with St. Anne

He was an artist long before he was a scientist; in fact it was not until about 1483, when he was over thirty, that he began to ask questions and make notes of the answers. But in his earliest drawings his mind is already at work on one of the problems which were to occupy him throughout his life, what I may call the problem of pentup energy. It appears first in a series of enchanting studies, rapid and apparently spontaneous, of a mother with a child on her knee, struggling with a cat. All three pull in different directions yet all are combined within a simple form, so that the group could be modelled and turned round like a piece of sculpture. There, in relatively simple terms, is one germ of the St Anne.

What about the other, her inward turning smile? That, too, one can find in Leonardo's early work, and most significantly in the first figure which seems to come from the depths of his imagination, the angel in the Louvre Virgin of the Rocks. That angel is quite different from the obedient, decorative angels of the fifteenth-century. It knows a secret and this has made it smile, gently, almost humanly compared with the St Anne, but with the same air of complicity. And this kinship reminds me that Leonardo, like Blake, developed peculiar ideas about angels, seeing them not as guardians, but as intermediaries who, in order to warn man that his reason is finite, stand at his elbow and propound unanswerable riddles.

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/L/leonardo/st_...