The Virgin of the Rocks: Controversial Hydden Symbol in Da Vinci's Painting
The Virgin of the Rocks is a painting by Leonardo da Vinci — or rather, it's two paintings. Two versions exist, similar in composition but different in ways that have puzzled art historians for over a century.
Why are there two versions of the same painting? Why is this scene set in a humble cave? And what symbols is Leonardo hiding in the rocks themselves? This article works through all three.
Table of Contents
- Two Versions
- The Commission
- The Dispute
- Which Came First?
- Context
- Similarities and Differences
- Symbology
- The Hidden Symbol
Two Versions
The version generally considered the earlier of the two — unrestored, and thought of as the "prime" version — hangs in the Louvre in Paris. The other, restored, hangs in the National Gallery in London.
Although the original commission is documented, the complete histories of both paintings remain unclear, which has left the question of which came first genuinely open to debate. Most art historians consider the Louvre version the earliest, dating it to around 1483–1486. The first certain record of that painting dates only to 1625, when it appears in the French royal collection.
The London version is also attributed to Leonardo and believed to have been completed around 1508. Certain passages — the flowers, in particular — suggest the involvement of other hands, and some have speculated the whole work may not be Leonardo's. A close technical inspection during the National Gallery's 2008–2010 restoration concluded that most of the painting is indeed by Leonardo himself, though the debate hasn't fully settled.
The London painting was made for the church of San Francesco Maggiore in Milan. It was sold off by the church, likely in 1781 and certainly by 1785, when Gavin Hamilton bought it and brought it to England. After passing through several private collections, it entered the National Gallery in 1880.
The Commission
Leonardo was commissioned to paint The Virgin of the Rocks shortly after moving to Milan in the early 1480s, having already built his career in Florence. On 25 April 1483, Prior Bartolomeo Scorlione contracted him to produce panels for the new altarpiece in the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception, attached to the church of San Francesco Grande. Leonardo was named master of the project, with the brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista de Predis working as his assistants.
The commission was specific: a central panel of the Virgin Mary and the Christ child flanked by two prophets, possibly David and Isaiah, surrounded by angels, plus side panels of angelic musicians. Leonardo followed almost none of it. Only one angel appears in the finished scene, and there are no prophets at all — only the infant John the Baptist. The confraternity wasn't satisfied by the completion deadline, and Leonardo continued working on the piece for another five years. A dispute over payment followed.
The Dispute
The brotherhood initially contested the painting as unfinished, citing the breach of the original subject matter. But archival research into the legal dispute tells a more layered story. In a plea to the Duke of Milan, Leonardo and Ambrogio de Predis argued the work deserved more than the originally agreed fee, given how much more elaborate and costly the gilded, carved altarpiece had turned out to be.
They asked for an additional 100 ducats for the central painting. They were offered 25. They then proposed bringing in independent art experts to judge the work's value, or to resell it to another interested buyer if the church wouldn't pay. The dispute dragged on for years, finally closing in 1506 with a ruling that officially declared the work unfinished. Leonardo was given two more years to complete it, along with an additional allowance.
Which Came First?
There's no firm documentation on the second version — not when Leonardo began it, nor who commissioned it. A few theories try to fill the gap.
One holds that the first version was sold off to a private buyer because Leonardo needed the money, and the second was painted specifically to fulfil the church's original contract. Another suggests the first version was eventually accepted by the church, thanks to its popularity with the public, and that Leonardo was then permitted to paint a second copy for the King of France.
Under that second theory, the London version would be the earlier one — possibly finished with help from the de Predis brothers in the background and the Christ child, both of which read as slightly lower in quality than the Louvre painting. The second, more refined version would then have been made for the King of France, who would have seen the first during his occupation of Milan. That would make the Louvre painting, more complete and stylistically unified, the later work.
Context
Both paintings depict the infant John the Baptist adoring the Christ child — a scene with no direct basis in scripture, but one that became part of medieval tradition surrounding the Holy Family's flight into Egypt. According to the Gospel of Matthew, Joseph was warned in a dream that King Herod intended to kill the infant Jesus, and fled with Mary and the child to safety. Legend holds that John, meanwhile, was guided to Egypt by the Archangel Uriel and met the Holy Family along the road — the moment both paintings imagine.
Similarities and Differences
Both paintings share the same subject and overall composition — strong evidence that one derives directly from the other — while diverging in colour, lighting, and handling. Both group four figures, Mary, the Christ child, the infant John, and an angel, into a triangular arrangement set against rocks and a distant landscape of mountains and water. In both, Mary forms the apex of the pyramid, one hand reaching toward John, the other raised in blessing over the Christ child, who sits toward the front of the scene supported by the angel, his right hand raised toward the kneeling John.
The differences are where it gets interesting. The London figures are all slightly larger. In the London version, the angel's right hand rests on its knee; in the Louvre version, that same hand is raised, index finger pointing directly at John. The angel's eyes are downcast and contemplative in London, but turned outward toward the viewer in the Louvre version. Forms are more sharply defined in London — the rocks rendered in meticulous detail, against a hazier, softer background in the Louvre painting, where sfumato blurs the faces and forms and the lighting reads warmer overall.
The robes differ too: the London angel wears no red at all, while the Louvre angel is dressed in bright red and green, draped differently. The London version includes traditional attributes missing from the Louvre painting — haloes, and John's traditional cruciform reed staff. Even the flowers are painted differently: botanically accurate in the Louvre version, more fancifully invented in London.
Symbology
The cave itself carries symbolic weight: read as the maternal womb, a place of rebirth and passage into the afterlife. The rock relates to Christ's earthly mission, both source and purifying force for the soul. Mary appears in her role as protector and nurse; the angel gestures toward John in prayer, messenger of the redemption to come through baptism and Christ's sacrifice, while the raised finger points toward the higher, otherworldly dimension Jesus is destined for.
Leonardo's own writings show a real fascination with caves — scientifically and geologically, but also as the interior of the earth itself, what he called the receptacle of the planet's secret, enormous movements across space and time.
The Hidden Symbol
Hidden within both paintings is a small, easily overlooked detail that, once you notice it, turns this serene nativity scene into something far stranger.
Just above Mary's right hand sits what looks like an ordinary palm tree — but its spreading fronds are shaped to echo, almost exactly, the ribs of an open scallop shell.
To understand why that matters, it helps to know where Leonardo's fascination with rock and cave imagery actually came from. Many art historians trace it to a real excursion Leonardo described in his own notebooks, in which he found himself before the mouth of a great cavern — caught, in his own words, between fear of the dark unknown inside and desire to see what marvels it might hold. Driven in by curiosity, he found a fossilised whale and a trove of ancient seashells, whose intricate spiral patterns he would later sketch in detail. The presence of oysters, corals and sea snails high on mountain summits, far from any sea, stayed with him for years: to Leonardo, it was evidence that the Alps had once lain beneath the ocean, and that the Earth was vastly older, and shaped by far more violent upheaval, than the Church of his day was prepared to accept.
Leonardo was a careful hand at embedding meaningful flora into his paintings — the primrose beneath Christ's blessing hand, for instance, was a recognised emblem of his sinlessness to contemporary viewers. Taken at face value, the palm reads as a simple nod to the palm fronds later thrown before Christ on his entry into Jerusalem. But its shape does double duty: those same radiating fronds mirror the ribs of a scallop shell, a symbol tied specifically to Mary and to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Piero della Francesca, a contemporary of Leonardo's, made that connection explicit in his so-called Brera Madonna, where a shell-shaped dome hovers over Mary while an egg, shaped like a pearl, hangs beneath it — pearls being believed, at the time, to form supernaturally from a drop of pure dew.
So where's the pearl in The Virgin of the Rocks, if the palm tree really doubles as a scallop shell? Leonardo gives us twenty of them. At the exact centre of both paintings sits a polished brooch holding Mary's cloak in place, ringed by a halo of twenty pearls. Follow the line of her cloak's hem outward from that cluster of pearls, and it leads the eye directly to the open palm of the tree.
When Leonardo revisited the composition for the second version, he replaced almost every plant from the Louvre painting with different foliage. The palm tree is the one thing he kept — simplified, more stylised, but its fronds now echoing the fluted grooves of a scallop hinge even more closely than before. Giving the infant John a cross in the London version only sharpens the point: the cross leaning against the palm quietly foreshadows the crucifixion to come.
That Leonardo built this symbol into the painting not once but twice suggests how important it was to him — a quiet, coded way of holding two truths at once: the doctrine he was commissioned to paint, and the far older, stranger nature he'd found inside a cave.
