Italy livid about deal to loan Leonardo works to Louvre
So versatile were Leonardo da Vinci’s talents in art and science and so boundless his visionary imagination, he is known to the world as the universal genius.
But not to Italy’s nationalist-tilting government, which is livid about plans by the Louvre in Paris for a blockbuster exhibit next year with as many Leonardo masterpieces as possible loaned from Italian museums to mark the 500th anniversary of the Renaissance artist’s death.
“It’s unfair, a mistaken deal,” Italian Culture Ministry undersecretary Lucia Borgonzoni said of a 2017 agreement between a previous government and the Louvre. “Leonardo is an Italian genius,” she said this week.
Borgonzoni is a senator from the League, the “Italians-first” sovereignty-championing party in the nearly six-month-old populist government. She was elaborating on comments earlier this month, in Italian daily Corriere Della Sera, in which she said of Leonardo: “In France, all he did was die.”
Leonardo was born in 1452 in the Tuscan town of Vinci, Italy, and died in Amboise, France, in 1519.
Borgonzoni criticised how as part of the 2017 arrangement, Italy also pledged to programme its own exhibits so they won’t compete with the Louvre megashow. The Louvre declined to comment on Italy’s objections, or to say which artworks it requested from Italy, noting it’s nearly a year before the four-months-long exhibition opens on Oct 24, 2019.
Exhibition curator Vincent Delieuvin, part of the Louvre’s staff, also serves on the Italian Culture Ministry’s committee which evaluated proposals from museums worldwide for the celebrations. He didn’t reply to an emailed request for comment.
“While respecting the autonomy of museums, national interests can’t be put in second place,” Borgonzoni told Corriere. “The French can’t have everything.”
And it appears they won’t get all they want.
The Uffizi Gallery in Florence is considering loaning the Louvre several Leonardo drawings. But director Eike D. Schmidt said his museum is nixing the Louvre’s request for its stellar trio of Leonardo paintings because, “simply, these works are so extremely fragile. No museum in the world would ever lend them”.
Last summer, when the three Leonardos were moved one flight up in the Uffizi so they would have a room all to themselves, the transfer required preparations “like it was an expedition to Mount Everest, or a space trip to the Moon”, Schmidt said in a phone interview. One of the three paintings, Adoration Of The Magi, only came back to the Uffizi last year, after five years of restoration work in Florence.
Anniversary committee head Paolo Galluzzi, who directs the Galileo Museum in Florence, insisted that nationalism wasn’t a factor in evaluating anniversary proposals.
“Many could claim him. He was born in Vinci, trained in Florence, and developed in Milan,” Galluzzi said by telephone. “Politicians have different optics,” but in the “world of culture and science we don’t bother with these things”.
Ultimately, he said, what is being celebrated next year is a “universal genius”.