Name: Leonardo da Vinci's Best Painting (Is Not The Mona Lisa)
Uploaded: 2026-01-28T16:58:37.000Z
Duration: 9 min 13 s
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Hey everybody, Before I start the video, I just want to tell you about something that I've been working on for the past year and a half.

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I cannot believe I'm actually saying this right now, but

I wrote a book and it'll be coming out this spring in real thick physical copies that you can hold in your hand and buy at bookstores if you can't tell.

I'm extremely excited about this and I'm also excited to show you something.

We just finished working on the book cover Introducing Escape into Meaning, a book of essays not unlike the Nerdwriter, but

in which I go more in depth about really the biggest obsessions in my life.

The pre order links are live now and you can find them in the description below.

You'll judge for your yourself when you read it, but

I think this is the best thing I've ever done and I'm so thrilled to finally tell you about it after all this time.

for now I just want to say thank you for watching and thank you for reading.

All right, the video for all his influence and prestige, Leonardo da Vinci didn't really make that many paintings of his total output, which is impossible to know exactly, only about 20 paintings survive to the modern day, and

Of these 20 or so two, the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, are arguably the most famous and second most famous paintings in the world.

But there's a less well known canvas, one that was painted around the same time as the Mona Lisa, that I think may be an even better example of Leonardo's genius.

It's called the Virgin and child with St.

it depicts the infant Jesus and a small lamb huddled with his mother, the Virgin Mary and his grandmother St.

Anne, in front of a craggy mountainous landscape.

Okay, so what's the first thing you notice in this painting?

The first thing I see is the composition of the bodies in a triangle or a pyramid, a shape that was popular for group compositions in the Renaissance, but

which was executed most spectacularly by Leonardo himself 20 years earlier in the Virgin of the Rocks, which had a major influence on other painters like Raphael, for example.

As you can see in these paintings, the pyramid is a shape of stability and strength and it unifies the figures in a greater whole.

Triangular shapes are also effective tools for getting the eye to move around the canvas.

The Viewer can't help but glance from corner, corner to corner, and

Leonardo accentuates this movement with eye lines.

Our attention naturally gets drawn to the apex of the pyramid, where St.

Anne looks with a Mona Lisa like smile at her daughter, who looks down at her son, who meets her gaze and sends you back up in the opposite direction.

The lamb, which is also on that line and which the infant Jesus grapples with aggressively, is the one point of tension in this otherwise peaceful grouping.

This sacrificial lamb symbolizes the eventual sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

Moving from the apex of the pyramid to its bottom right corner is actually a trip through time, from the past to the present to the future.

And that timeline also extends along a three dimensional axis.

The lamb is in front of Jesus, who's in front of Mary, who's in front of Anne.

But on this axis, it goes even further behind Anne.

We were launched into the geological past.

These mountains, these bones of the earth, suggest a deep time.

So deep that it conflicts with the Christian sense of the age of the world.

That reflects a larger conflict in the Renaissance between religion and a growing appreciation for natural science, which is embodied in no person more than Leonardo da Vinci, the insatiably curious polymath.

Oh, and the Z axis goes in the other direction too.

In front of the lamb, deep into the future, is you looking at the painting Leonardo made 500 years ago.

But so far I've only talked about composition and design.

One of the great joys of a Leonardo painting is seeing his extraordinary powers of representation.

He had a deep first hand knowledge of form and texture and light.

He had personally dissected human cadaver, so he knew precisely how muscle laid on bone and flesh laid on muscle.

You can see that knowledge in Mary's foot and Jesus arm.

He knew exactly how different fabrics draped and folded.

He rendered the lambswool so real, it's as if you can feel it.

He knew that in the far distance, colors become less vivid and objects become, become hazy.

I mean, just look at the detail in this pebble and now look at how small it is in relation to the whole canvas.

Leonardo's obsessiveness is one reason he produced so few works and why he failed to finish many of the ones he started, like this one.

He embarked on this painting sometime around 1500, we think as a commission from the King of France.

But he never delivered it and was still tinkering at the time of his death in 1519.

But his perfectionism also gives us something like his signature technique of Sfumato, which removes harsh outlines by blending light and dark areas across several gradations of tone and color to better reflect how our eyes actually see.

He achieved this by laying down lots of extremely thin layers of translucent glazes, each with the faintest hint of color.

Research using X ray fluorescent spectroscopy on a glaze layer in Jesus Cheek found that less than 8% of it was an earth colored pigment.

And the glaze thickness ranged from 30 to 55 micrometers in the dark areas to just a few micrometers in the light areas, never exceeding 80 micrometers altogether.

To give you a sense of that, a human hair is, on average 70 micrometers thick.

That means Leonardo applied up to 30 layers within the thickness of a hair, with each layer of glaze taking from several days to several months to dry.

Well, maybe you can see why these paintings went unfinished.

Leonardo used similar techniques to create atmospheric effects like you can see in the distant, missing misty mountains.

Anne's face beside this rock formation, I see a painter trying to unify the natural and the spiritual with his art.

I see the same when I notice these folds in the Virgin Mary's dress repeated in the earth just behind her.

Then I look at the grouping again, and the symbolism falls away.

I see a child goofing around and a mother concerned and a grandmother smiling with the wisdom of having gone through the same thing with her daughter not so long ago.

It's that smile brought to life by the delicacy of Leonardo's technique, placed at the peak of the pyramid, the top of the mountain, that suffuses the canvas, the family, and

With love, of course, that love doesn't solve the mysteries that consumed Leonardo.

It would be a few hundred years until we answered the questions he wrestled with.

Questions about optics, anatomy, engineering, and so much more.

But we are infinitely fortunate that Leonardo da Vinci was born before his time, because it was those mysteries, the incoherences of life, that drove him with such faith, fanatical energy to attain a perfect harmony in his art.

Hey, everybody, thank you so much for watching.

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