The subject of the Madonna and Child with St Anne occupied Leonardo intermittently for the last two decades of his life. The original commission may have come from the French king, Louis XII, and Leonardo evolved three separate compositions, culminating in the painting now in the Louvre, Paris. The painting was probably worked on slowly from around 1508 onwards, and Leonardo made studies for the painting as work on the panel proceeded. As an older woman St Anne was required to have a covered head, and thus Leonardo could not indulge in his taste for decorative hairstyles. Instead he lavished his attention on an elaborately folded and twisted headdress, which dwarfs both in scale and complexity the conventionally demure features of the saint.