For two years between 1481 and 1483, there is silence. It seems to me that in this time we may set the crowning of his early work in the Madonna of the Rocks at the Louvre and the Cartoon of St. Ann at London. The Madonna of the Rocks, Figure 153, is the logical outcome of a half dozen Adorations which we may trace through the drawings of 1478. A sheet of sketches in the Metropolitan Museum shows him turning the theme over, rejecting the established profile arrangement of Fra Filippo, and hitting on the formal pyramidal pattern which appears in the picture itself. There the pyramid is felt not merely in plane, but also in depth. The forms and faces are superbly tense without either rigidity or the fluency of Leonardo’s later work. The setting is primitive, with minutely studied textures of rock and crisp shapes of wall-flowers. Everything derives from Fra Filippo and Botticelli, but with new meaning. The romantic strangeness of the setting, the glimpses of sky and opening in the rock, the sifting in of light from the heart of the picture itself, the broad contrast of the formality of the figure arrangement with the picturesque wildness of the setting—all this is purest Leonardo and represents the culmination of many experiments. One can trace this idea of irregularly broken light and an informal screen as foil for a geometrical pattern, from the little Annunciation of the Louvre, through the unfinished St. Jerome of the Vatican. The Early Renaissance steps into the background, where it belongs. Leonardo never rejects it; he fulfils it with an exquisite sense of proportion. [Illustration: FIG. 153. Leonardo. Madonna of the Rocks.—_Louvre._ ] If the first Madonna of the Rocks was painted before 1482, in Florence, so probably was the cartoon of the Madonna with St. Ann, Figure 127, perhaps the most precious single work that Leonardo has left us. The inwardness of the relation between the two women is in the mood of the Adoration of the Kings, single motives suggest the drawings for the Madonna of the Cat. Later Leonardo was to lend to the motive greater complication and formal elegance, somewhat at the cost of emotional insight. Pictures of intense and natural feeling Leonardo does not produce after his thirtieth year. Instead we have dramatic objectivity in one phase, and in another, exquisite subtilities, a calculated graciousness sweet to morbidity.