Leonardo da Vinci: painter at the court of Milan

Leonardo da Vinci Exhibition, the National Gallery, December 31^st 2011

Having blogged about the theatre, it’s time to record some of the other highlights of our latest visit to London.  Chief of these was the Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery.  Given the interest in this event, we were lucky to get tickets at all – booked virtually as soon as the show was announced many months ago.  Indeed a colleague suggested that if we were to sell our tickets on eBay we could recoup the cost of our next holiday.  A more jealous colleague dismissed our trip with the words, ‘Leonardo?  He was never my favourite turtle anyway.’  So there we were, 10am, with our tickets marked 10.30, with a huge queue of hopefuls alongside the pre-booked queue.  It took me back to the 1972 Tutankhamen exhibition at the British Museum.  Fortunately we were allowed in early, and it was packed to the gunwales.  In view of Leonardo’s quirkiness, he did not complete the majority of his paintings, so the conventional ‘artworks’, e.g. the Madonna of the Rocks, were rather few and far between.  This meant that many of the works displayed were drawings, doodles, and cartoons, remarkable enough, works of genius, performed in ink, charcoal, and red chalk.  Very often these were tiny, and thus in order to get a good view, it was necessary to queue, sidling round the walls of the room until one could get to inspect the works themselves.  In the run up to the exhibition, one commentator called into question the reputation of the Mona Lisa as the greatest painting in the world, asking, ‘Is the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, called ‘The Lady with an Ermine’, the most beautiful painting in the world?’  In answer to this question, although it is many years since I have seen the Mona Lisa, I would have to answer yes, it is immeasurably beautiful.  The remarkable ermine held in the lady’s hands is spectacular in itself, but the beauty of the face of Cecilia, the 16 year old mistress of da Vinci’s patron, Ludovico Sforza, is dramatic.  She has an expression which is at once innocent and knowing, with a pretty upturn to the left edge of her mouth.  One could criticize the strange length of the left side of her neck and the hand, but the artist’s attention has clearly been lavished on her face, and it is a very beautiful face, exquisitely painted.  In a later portrait, called ‘La Belle Ferronnière’, Leonardo extended his ideas of female beauty in creating an almost photographic portrait, the face and head forming a perfect oval.  These two paintings were created in 1489 and 1493.  In fact, although this was a large exhibition, containing nearly a hundred works, I counted only ten paintings by Leonardo himself, and even then the St Jerome was left unfinished.  The exhibition was complemented by a large room in the main part of the National Gallery containing some studies for the figures in the Last Supper, and included the copy of the original made by Giampietrino in 1520.  This huge painting was made only just over 20 years after Leonardo had painted The Last Supper on the walls of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie.  It is the most complete record we have of how the original looked.  Within a few years, much of the plaster fell off or the paint ran, and Leonardo’s unwise experiment in painting with his own mix of tempera and oil onto dry plaster was a failure.  Finally, a beautiful 20 minute film about the two commissions of the Virgin of the Rocks, and the Last Supper completed the experience.  It’s worth mentioning one unique feature of the exhibition:  at the opposite ends of one of the rooms stand the two Virgins of the Rocks, painted in 1483, and from 1491 to 1508.  One is from the Louvre, the later one from the National Gallery.  It is very likely that Leonardo never had this privilege: in other words, he never saw the two works together.

On the Friday afternoon, a quick visit to the RA.  Their main exhibition, ‘Building the Revolution’ is about architecture in post revolutionary Russia.  Perhaps predictably it wasn’t packed.  I have to admit to feeling a bit confused about expressionism, modernism, and whether they are similar to art deco or not, but one can recognize the unpleasant manifestations of Le Corbusier, who seems to have been favoured to design quite a lot of Russian buildings.  A further exhibition, very small, of drawings by 20^th century Academicians, was highly enjoyable.

Lindsay’s cooking is so good that we are rare and reluctant restaurant diners.  In London, perforce, we must.  The meal at the Mezzanine restaurant at NT was excellent, and we finished off our New Year’s Eve in fine style with the tasting menu at Atul Kochar’s restaurant, Benares, in Berkeley Square.  We were only able to get a reservation at 6.30pm, so we emerged at 8.40pm and decided to drive home to Poole, rather than stay another 3 hours plus to watch the fireworks.  By the time the spectacular display (to celebrate the start of our Olympic year) began, we were comfortably in bed at home.  An exciting visit to The Smoke.

And I still haven’t written about Egypt...