Exhibition of the week Leonardo da Vinci
Musée du Louvre, Paris (+331 4020 5317, louvre.fr). Until 24 February
After all the “hullabaloo”, the Louvre’s Leonardo da Vinci retrospective “should be the visual equivalent of a 21-gun salute and a trumpet and trombone choir”, said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. Marking 500 years since the artist’s death, in 1519, this remarkable blockbuster exhibition has been ten years in the planning – and was almost derailed last year, when Italy’s populist coalition cancelled a loan deal that had been negotiated with the previous government. “Leonardo is Italian; he only died in France,” sniffed a junior arts minister. With the exchange only finally agreed with the formation of a new government in September, the show now brings together around 160 works, including nine of Leonardo’s 15 to 20 surviving paintings, tracing his career from teenage apprentice to wizened polymath. Focusing on his sublime draughtsmanship as well as his scientific investigations, it is an “excellent, deeply considered” exploration of his genius.
At its best, the show is “scintillating”, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. In its course, we encounter masterpiece after masterpiece – from the extremely fragile and now rarely exhibited 1490 drawing Vitruvian Man
(a loan that was only confirmed three weeks ago, when a legal attempt to block its export was rejected) to the “spellbinding” portrait known as La Belle Ferronnière (c.1490). In a “show of this scope, everyone will leave with a different impression of Leonardo”, but I was struck in particular by his “heart-stopping” drawings of “mothers watching over distracted infants... Even after five centuries, his tenderness still skewers the heart.”
Yet I couldn’t help but find the show a bit “disappointing”, said Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times. There are some notable omissions, including the Salvator
Mundi, which sold in 2017 for $450m – though its attribution is disputed. (Its current whereabouts are a mystery, but it is rumoured to be on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s superyacht.) As for the
Mona Lisa, though it belongs to the Louvre it is represented only by a digital facsimile. Overall, this feels like a “missed opportunity”. I completely disagree, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Examining Leonardo’s “attempts to reconcile science and art”, the show contains some of the greatest drawings ever made. Among the highlights are studies for the unfinished The Battle of Anghiari and some “stunning” depictions of birds taking flight. Best of all, though, is a sketchbook in which he detailed his engineering ideas, including a “design for a helicopter that works like a giant screw drilling upward through the air”: it left me “whooping with delight”. This “blockbuster with a brain” shows why we “never tire” of Leonardo.