Met Museum Quietly Hangs a Leonardo da Vinci Painting, On Loan from Ken Griffin: ‘A Little Picture, Of Large-Scale Importance’

Get ready for Leonardo da Vinci fever at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the curators, without so much as a press release, hung a painting this spring by the Renaissance master. On a Monday visit, the work wasn’t gaining any particularly high level of attention as it hung in gallery 609, on the second floor in the European paintings department. The small painting hangs between giant ones by Francesco Francia and Andrea Solario.

Madonna of the Yarnwinder (ca. 1505 per a wall label, ca. 1501 per the museum’s website), attributed on a wall label to the master and his studio, comes from the collection of billionaire hedge funder and ARTnews Top 200 collector Kenneth C. Griffin. (Griffin’s office did not immediately answer an email requesting information on when he acquired the painting.)

Some artworks become known by the name of their past owners; this Leonardo panel is also known as the Lansdowne Madonna, having once belonged to the Marchioness of Lansdowne, in whose collection it was first recorded, in the 19th century, per the wall label. The painting was created for one Florimond Robertet, a French official.

The museum has played the new arrival, the only one by Leonardo on view in its galleries, very close to the vest; it’s been there since spring, but a public-facing museum employee told ARTnews that they heard about it not from the institution but from a friend. This weekend, New York art dealer Evan Beard posted about it on Instagram, which is how ARTnews learned of it; the eagle-eyed reporter Judith Dobrzysnki actually beat him to the punch, posting about it on April 5. The museum has not yet sent information about the painting in response to multiple emails from ARTnews.

“Who just hangs a Leonardo on the wall like it’s no big deal?” Beard said in a message to ARTnews. “The Met, I guess.” 

It is, to say the least, uncommon to see Leonardo in North America. Most of his paintings hang in the Louvre or Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., owns his Ginevra de’ Benci (ca. 1474/1478), the only Da Vinci on permanent exhibition in the Americas. It was purchased for a record $5 million in 1967, about $50.8 million in today’s dollars. 

Those figures are still pocket change compared to the $450.3 million brought by his Salvator Mundi (ca. 1500) at Christie’s in 2017, the record for a painting at auction and believed to be the most ever paid for an artwork.

In the Lansdowne Madonna, measuring about 20 inches high, a large Christ child sits on the rocks next to the Virgin Mary, holding and staring at a yarnwinder, a cross-shaped tool (the wall label refers to it as a “niddy-noddy”) used to shape loose skeins of yarn into neat packages; here, it serves to foreshadow the Crucifixion. Another version of it is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland. (That painting was stolen from Drumlanrig Castle, home of its owner, the Duke of Buccleuch, in 2003, at which time it was estimated to be worth £40 million; it remained missing for four years before it was recovered.)

In a 1501 letter to famed Renaissance patron Isabella d’Este, quoted in the wall label, Fra Pietro da Novarellara, head of the Carmelites in Florence, wrote that the artist was working on “a Madonna seated as if she were about to spin yarn. The Child has placed his foot on the basket of yarns and has grasped the yarnwinder and gazes attentively at the four spokes that are in the form of a cross. As if desirous of the cross he smiles and holds it firm, and is unwilling to yield it to his mother who seems to want to take it away from him.”

“No one had previously depicted the Virgin and Child in quite this way,” wrote scholar Martin Kemp in a 2011 catalogue for a National Gallery of Scotland exhibition, “Leonardo da Vinci: The Mystery of the Madonna of the Yarnwinder,” focused on the Buccleuch version. Of the Madonna, he writes that he sees “a clear sense of unease—even of premonition—in her anxious gaze and hovering hand.” Of the symbolism of the cross, he writes, “Leonardo has integrated the meaning of the symbol into the physical and psychological narrative of the painting in a highly innovatory manner,” adding, “This new type of dynamic symbolism was to have a profound effect on the development of High Renaissance art in Florence.” 

The painting would soon become widely known in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, Kemp writes, proving “incredibly popular.” At the time of the 2011 exhibition, the painting was noted to reside in a private collection in New York. Both it and the Buccleuch version, he wrote, have been described as the original. Kemp described the painting hanging at the Met as “one of the two best versions of the Madonna made for Robertet.” It has been variously attributed over the years, he noted, as a copy by a follower, a studio replica, a studio work with “substantial intervention” by Leonardo, and as the original picture. The background is “archteypally Leonardesque,” matching that in other canvases; he identified a bridge in the middle ground as “virtually identical to that on the right of the Mona Lisa.”

In 2011, Kemp wrote that he was “not inclined to recognise Leonardo’s personal touch in the relatively free handling of the landscape, and the forms of the rocks and the mountains seem to lack the rhythmic structuring of his autograph backgrounds.” He went on, however, “At present I prefer to regard the New York picture as completed in the master’s studio rather later than the Buccleuch painting—but executed directly under his control, with his active participation in its design and perhaps also in the actual execution of the figure group.” 

But, he said in a phone interview with ARTnews, he said he has since modified his assessment: “It’s Leonardo and studio.”

“There’s been further technical examination that has shown that it is a picture of complex origins,” said Kemp. “There are Leonardo underdrawings in both pictures, one almost certainly intended for the King of France and the other for a court officer. Leonardo started a composition and then decided to make two paintings on the same theme.”

The painting went on view in the 2011 exhibition “Kings, Queens, and Courtiers: Art in Early Renaissance France” at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Louvre in its 2019–20 blockbuster exhibition devoted to the artist, marking the 500-year anniversary of his death.

A prodigious collector, Griffin also recently sent 10 of his Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings to the Pérez Art Museum Miami, including the untitled 1982 canvas for which he paid a record-breaking $110.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2017.

“I’m delighted it’s come out into public view, because for a long time it was held pretty tightly to the chest by its owner,” Kemp told ARTnews. “It’s a little picture but of large-scale importance.”