‘Have you seen Leonardo?’ has become almost a catchphrase since early last November. The torrent of media publicity combined with the universal allure of the name have made Leonardo da Vinci. Painter at the Court of Milan at the National Gallery perhaps the most talked-about exhibition for many years.1 The show is difficult to get into, with advanced tickets sold out and long queues for on-the-day admissions; and the Gallery has forecast record sales for the catalogue.

There are only a very few artists who could cause this public stampede – Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Monet are the names that immediately spring to mind. Just one of them in an exhibition’s title, even if works by the artist are comparatively few in the show, guarantees huge attendance. But Leonardo as a painter is comparatively unknown to the general public who see him as scientist, inventor, draughtsman and Renaissance superman. It is not the reassurance of familiarity that draws the crowds. It could also be said that the somewhat aloof effect of his striving after an ideal is not the most immediate quality that recommends his paintings to today’s audiences. Warmer and more immediate relations have been established with, for example, Caravaggio or Rembrandt, Velázquez or Turner, their long arm of posthumous influence stretching to the present.

As one might expect, Leonardo studies figure in the Burlington from its foundation. Scholarship on the artist, if not in its infancy, was in a period of troubled teenage years, with romantic myth-making at war with more scientific and investigative approaches. There are articles in the earlier years that still hold up well – for example, H. Ochenkowski in 1919 on the Lady with an ermine, which is cited in the catalogue to the present show – as do several cool demolitions of newly attributed Leonardos. A mild sensation was caused in 1909 – in Italy, at least – by a new Leonardo, a painting based on the Chantilly cartoon of the so-called nude Mona Lisa, a drawing still then given to Leonardo. In one page, this repellent object (Fig.I), a ‘weak and flabby claimant’, was shot out of the water by Herbert Cook. A good number of other articles exhibit a desperate desire to believe in a particular attribution. No one bothered too much about puffing works in private collections or inventing provenances with long-defunct grand Italian families. The Burlington published its share of these but also maintained a platform for dissenting voices. Eric Maclagan is politely but firmly dismissive of the claims made by Sir Theodore Cook (rowing blue, fencer and writer on art; no relation to Herbert) for a stucco relief of the Virgin and Child as being by Leonardo (a work then in the possession of Mr Dibbloe, the Bursar of All Souls). In 1930 the Magazine’s Editor, R.R. Tatlock, urged that X-ray photographs should be taken of a panel in Henry Harris’s collection published as a Leonardo by Tancred Borenius; Tatlock presumably hoped that the possible revelations of such photographs would make up for the work’s almost complete lack of provenance. In the same year, a review by Charles Holmes of the famous exhibition of Italian art at the Royal Academy laments the fact that there was no painting by Leonardo on view but adds that the show’s ‘astonishing example of international generosity’ might lead one day to the two versions of the Virgin of the rocks being shown together. As everyone now knows, that wish has been miraculously fulfilled in the current exhibition, eighty-one years later. Reviewing the drawings in the Royal Academy show, Kenneth Clark, in his first contribution to the Magazine, found the magnificent wall of Leonardos ‘perhaps the most completely satisfactory part of the whole exhibition’. The young Clark was here on safe ground for he was then in the midst of cataloguing the Leonardo drawings in the Royal Collection. This bore fruit in his next contribution (1933), a consideration of the preparatory studies for an Adoration of the shepherds. In later years Clark counted his work on the Windsor drawings as his one true contribution to scholarship. His last appearance in the Burlington on Leonardo was the text of his lecture on the Mona Lisa (1973), a suave and compact, post-Civilization discussion of the ‘submarine goddess of the Louvre’.

With notable exceptions, such as Jennifer Fletcher on Ber­nardo Bembo and Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci or Luke Syson and Rachel Billinge on the underdrawing of the Virgin of the rocks, more recent articles and reviews in the Burlington have tended to bypass new discoveries and concentrated on readjustment and refinement, although speculative interpretation has never disappeared. If a series of anthologies of the Magazine’s writings on particular artists were to be undertaken, then one on Leonardo would incontestably be the most richly rewarding.

1    The exhibition, which runs to 5th February, will be reviewed in a future issue.