Leonardo almost certainly made these spontaneous sketches of a naked infant from the life. The study on the right-hand side of the sheet, of an infant leaning forward with an outstretched arm, captures the child’s effort to balance as he unsteadily gets up. These may be exploratory studies for the Christ Child or Baptist in one of Leonardo’s compositions, though they do not correspond closely with any of the versions. The aim here was to capture lifelike and spontaneous poses and gestures, with little concern as to how they might be integrated in a multi-figure composition. Melzi's number 202.

This drawing has commonly been associated with Leonardo's painting of the Madonna and Child with St Anne. This subject, with either a lamb or the infant St John the Baptist, occupied Leonardo for the last two decades of his life. The original commission possibly came from the French king Louis XII after his invasion of Milan in 1499. In addition to compositional sketches, Leonardo drew a full-size cartoon around 1506 (London, National Gallery) and began a painting (Paris, Louvre) around 1508, working on that painting to the end of his life.

Text adapted from Leonardo da Vinci: A life in drawing, London, 2018