This photogravure was created by Baldus from an original da Vinci drawing owned by Émile Galichon, editor of the Gazette de Beaux Arts. It is the only one of Baldus’s gravures to appear in this journal. The reproduction matches the original drawing’s scale, necessitating it be bound into the journal folded in half. The image is printed in two tones: warm gray for the background and black for da Vinci’s lines. In some areas, the lines have an iridescent quality due to ink pooling in grooves etched too widely by the acid bath. Baldus manually added lines not present in the original drawing, using a burin to represent the shading (or perhaps the smudge) on the Madonna’s cheek, for instance. The reproduction appears entirely fresh, as though age had never touched it, whereas the original shows widespread foxing.

A technical limitation of Baldus’s process—the insensitivity of his gelatin emulsion to the red end of the color spectrum—was advantageous in this instance. The most intriguing alteration to the original is in the bottom-right corner, where the foot of the rightmost magus dangles below the rest of the image area, outside the frame. Baldus had to shorten da Vinci’s sheet to fit the requisite Gazette-style caption and credits underneath the image. As a result, there was no room for the foot—the bottommost element in the drawing—within the picture proper. It hangs beside Baldus’s name and credit: “Baldus sculp.” Across from these, on the left-hand side, are da Vinci’s: “Léonard da Vinci del.” There is no text on the print to identify it as a photogravure or Baldus as the responsible photograveur. Galichon did not wish to emphasize the photographic aspect of Baldus’s process, even as he implicitly promoted its suitability for publicizing his drawing. [1]

The Gazette des Beaux Arts, a luxury publication, aimed to encourage print connoisseurship and collecting. Every issue featured etchings by and after leading artists. Its plates served to illustrate articles and provide its well-to-do subscribers with material for their collections. The journal was founded in part to support and celebrate reproductive engraving and etching at a time when photographic reproduction, seen as a threat to traditional methods, was on the rise. It played an essential role in the etching revival of the 1860s. [2]