the glacial lakes to which she referred, and had mistaken clumps of moss for sandstone boulders. Copies and derivations One of the earliest known direct copies of the Louvre version is actually an altar cloth called the Paliotto leonardesco (ca 1487-90) housed in the Museo Baroffio, and the other is a painting (ca 1494-8) located in the Cheramy Collection, believed by Carlo Pedretti to be created by Leonardo's own hand. In her 1967 book (published in English in 1985) Angela Ottino della Chiesa identifies four paintings derived to some degree from The Virgin of the Rocks: the Holy Family and St. John by Bernardino Luini in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, the Thuelin Madonna by Marco d'Oggiono in the Thuelin collection in Paris and the Holy Infants Embracing by Joos van Cleve in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. This image was much copied by Flemish artists including Joos van Cleve and Quentin Matsys – there is a small painting in Chatsworth by the latter. There is also a smaller copy of The Virgin of the Rocks (oil on wood) possibly by Joos van Cleve or his circle (private collection Berlin). There is a 16th-century copy in the Royal Collection, given as a birthday present to Queen Victoria in 1847 by her husband Prince Albert. In popular culture, in 1968 the American TV series It Takes Thief based the episode "The Illegal Angel" around the theft of a fictional Leonardo painting titled The Sorrowful Angel, which is actually a close-up of the angel's face on the right of Virgin of the Rocks. The plot of the episode involves an art forger having to make a copy of Sorrowful Angel as part of a plan to trap a criminal by fooling him into thinking he has purchased a genuine Leonardo. References Bibliography Louvre Official Website, Virgin of the Rocks, accessed 2011-12-11 National Gallery, London Website, Virgin of the Rocks, accessed 2012-02-06 Rachel Billinge, Luke Syson and Marika Spring, Altered Angels: Two Panels from the Immaculate Conception Altarpiece once in San Francesco Grande, Milan, accessed 2012-01-05 Pizzorusso, Ann, Leonardo's Geology: The Authenticity of the "Virgin of the Rocks, Leonardo, Vol. 29, No. 3 (1996), pp. 197–200, The MIT Press, JSTOR Tamsyn Taylor, (2011) Leonardo da Vinci and the "Virgin of the Rocks" , accessed 2012-02-06 [The chapter "The Graphic Works" is by Frank Zollner & Johannes Nathan]. External links Official page from