“Mary’s right hand, which is on the back of John the Baptist, is very tense. Her fingers are pressing into John’s back, but the thumb is over his shoulder, and what she’s doing is holding him back!”

“Mary, in the popular theology of the time, already understood her son must one day die, and in this painting Leonardo da Vinci shows her preventing the prophet of her own son’s future death from drawing near to Christ.”

“Christ, the child at her left, accepts this future death. Indeed, he is staring at John the Baptist and he’s blessing him.”

“She’s lowering her left hand toward his head, but her hand can never reach her child’s head, because there’s a figure, an angel, kneeling behind her son, and the angel is pointing toward John the Baptist.”

“Mary, as human mother, knows her son must die, but cannot accept that. And so God sends his angel to prevent Mary’s instinctive, natural, maternal instinct from avoiding the future passion.”

“It is absolutely the most complex Madonna image of the entire Renaissance. Its complexity lies in a probing effort to understand a deep mystery, which is, how – in a woman prepared from all eternity to bear the son of God – humanity still fully expresses itself.”

– Monsignor Timothy Verdon,
art historian, speaking (at 54:56) of Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks in “Leonardo: the Disciple of Experience,” a documentary by Ken Burns