LEONARDO DA VINCI exhibitions risk being a little like the Chelsea Flower Show: the individual plants are marvellous but the show gardens can be deplorable. Conceptual frameworks, devised for display, do not always do justice to the prodigious quality of what they contain. To create a comprehensive exhibition devoted to Leonardo is a great challenge because the complexity of his thought and the diversity of his activities as an artist defy any simple presentation. Fortunately the thoughtfully conceived exhibition Leonardo 1452–1519 at the Palazzo Reale, Milan (closed 25th July), a very ambitious project which sought to integrate Leonardo’s activity in painting and sculpture with his other intellectual pursuits, avoided potential pitfalls. It was organised around a limited range of paintings, a copious selection of drawings and a very wide and rich selection of comparative material.

WHEN THE JOURNAL of René Gimpel was first published in Paris in 1963, Gaston-Louis Vuitton (1883–1970), Gimpel’s second cousin and the president of the famous Vuitton luggage enterprise, was initially in ‘a state of euphoria’. On closer reading, however, his reaction was less sympathetic: ‘you must have edited it, and you did well to do so. I would even say that you did not go far enough’, he wrote in a letter to the dead author’s youngest son, Jean Gimpel.1 Vuitton was correct on one point at least.