‘Immersive’ Leonardo all smoke and mirrors
Let me say from the off that I admire, even applaud, the thinking behind the National Gallery’s new “immersive” exhibition,
Leonardo: Experience a Masterpiece,
which focuses, in depth, upon the Renaissance artist’s The Virgin of the
Rocks (the earlier, so-called “prime” version can be seen at the Louvre).
Museums can be intimidating places, especially those, like the National Gallery, housed in grand buildings. And no gallery filled with Old Masters should become so fusty, ossified, or out of touch that it can no longer connect with successive generations of the public.
This “Experience” (as the gallery calls it, with a capital “E”), then, which is designed explicitly to appeal to a younger, 18- to 35-year-old crowd, ideally luring many first-time visitors through the doors, is a bold, courageous move.
But it is also a gamble – and one that, in my view, fails spectacularly, though I should add at once that I’m hardly the show’s target audience. To gauge the tone of this project, I refer you to page 10 of the catalogue, where, in answer to the question “Who was Leonardo?”, we discover that he was “the possessor of a great pair of legs (a bonus at a time when men wore tights and short tunics)”.
What, though, do we see inside the show? Thankfully, there is some art on display: The Virgin of the Rocks, presented as the exhibition’s climax, yet inexplicably tucked out of sight around a corner. The rest is a series of quasi-theatrical tableaux and displays, providing the “Experience” of the show’s title. These are meant to contextualise Leonardo’s masterpiece, marking the 500th anniversary of his death.
The first room invites visitors to enter the artist’s mind. Inside a sculptural installation consisting of scores of stacked metal cubes like safety deposit boxes, we find reproductions of quotes from the artist’s notebooks, presented in reverse, in imitation of his famous mirror writing. Difficult to read, they appear against glossy, brightly backlit photographs of the sort that might grace a travel magazine, featuring a mountainous vista vaguely evocative of the landscape in the painting’s background.
From here, we proceed into a darkened room arranged with a stage set representing both Leonardo’s studio and – following a dramatic switch of lights – the working space of a modern-day conservator. Someone has had a lot of fun gathering together the various props, and the initial effect is, admittedly, effective. On a screen matching the painting’s shape, presented on an easel, we witness the various stages of the creation of
The Virgin of the Rocks (or, at least, an animator’s guess of them), before everything disappears in a puff of smoke (or was that a “mysterious” swirl of cloud or paint?), and shots of technical analysis – infrared reflectograms, X-ray fluorescence scans, and the like – appear instead. This is all perfectly enjoyable – and informative.
But then, it’s on, into an “imagined chapel”, supposedly recreating the original setting for Leonardo’s work. Here, The Virgin of the Rocks is incorporated into a mock-up of a lavish altarpiece. Aggressively loud period music booms out in the manner of a schlocky television film soundtrack, urging us to understand that we are in the presence of a “masterpiece”. “Bow down and worship at the altar of Leonardo!” it seemingly demands – but who wants to be told what to think? It’s so screechy and oppressive. Meanwhile, further projections of light and shadow, evoking sunlight streaming into the chapel, pass distractingly across the painting’s surface. It’s just… terrible. Manipulative, intrusive, over the top.
The trouble, here, isn’t the underlying ambition, but the execution. 59 Productions, the company tasked with realising the National Gallery’s bright idea of taking a risk and trying to do something radically different, has succumbed to every cliché in the book, when it comes to dramatising the creation of well-known works of art.
The lowest point is a vast, mostly empty gallery, where visitors are invited to twiddle switches altering the angles of light cast onto a series of objects, including a model of a human head. Supposedly, this exercise provides insight into Leonardo’s signature use of “chiaroscuro”. But, as “experiences” go, it’s remarkably basic and boring. And this is meant to impress millennials?
So much inane “spectacle”, such little insight: ultimately, all the smoke and mirrors obscures rather than enhances the painting. It’s sad, because I suspect this debacle will dissuade the gallery from taking similar risks in the future. I’d invite them, though, to try again. What’s the worst that could happen? They could only fail better.