Milan; Williamsburg and Boston

by CHARLES ROBERTSON

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.

The contributors to the catalogue largely shared the conviction that Leonardo’s thought and activity can be seen as coherent.1 Of course the notion that Leonardo was a universal, albeit idiosyncratic, intellectual is a cliché, but it is a useful one, probably valid and certainly necessary in this context. The exhibition was divided into twelve sections addressing various themes, from formation to legacy. The massive catalogue, with a series of essays by a wide range of scholars in the particular areas will continue to be a publication of lasting value. Although guided by a clear central conception there was great breadth of understanding and approach. It would, however, be more serviceable if an index had been included.

One of the stated aims of the exhibition was to present Leonardo’s thinking in any category within the context of the time. The foundation of this was a compelling exploration of his origins in the workshop of Verrocchio and his practice as a draughtsman. This was developed further into very thorough discussions of his relationship with sculpture, both generally and in relation to the two, or perhaps three, equestrian projects in particular. The section on technology and machines was especially convincing. The extent to which Leonardo’s approach to technical drawing conformed to common practice was striking. The inclusion of actual fifteenth-century iron building equipment (cat. nos.VI.9–11) from the Opera del Duomo in Florence gave a powerful actuality to his designs. Unfortunately this vivid impression was rather diminished by the inclusion of modern reconstructions of Leonardo’s machine projects (nos.VI.21 and 22). Architecture was strongly represented, with exhibits including the Ideal town from Urbino (no.VIII.1) and all the major architectural treatises by such luminaries as Francesco Filarete, Leon Battista Alberti and Francesco di Giorgio (nos.VIII,4–6), as well as early editions of Vitruvius (no.VIII.2 and 3). However, as Richard Schofield’s catalogue essay on Leonardo’s ideal urban projects shows, alongside an interest in complex solutions to issues of sanitation, the appearance of the buildings in a well-known series of Leonardo’s drawings in the Institut de France, Paris, not included in this exhibition, was persistently Lombard and arguably quite old-fashioned, indicating very little interest in more refined architectural theory (no.VIII.7; Fig.62).

Apart from the penultimate section on Leonardo’s followers, there was not much focus on Milan. Given the location of the exhibition this seemed a missed opportunity. Perhaps the emphasis upon the ‘universal’ Leonardo tends to privilege his Florentine formation over his Milanese career. Regrettably, Milan is often seen as provincial within the common critical understanding of the Italian Renaissance. It was also the case that the division into thematic sections tended to move emphasis away from important chronological considerations. One area that might have been explored was portraiture. The allocation to different sections of the Ambrosiana Musician (no.V.7; Fig.60) and the Louvre Belle Ferronnière (no.III. 6) meant that the question of his development as a portraitist in the context of Milan was not examined. It was striking how close the Musician is, in spirit and appearance, to Donato Bramante’s Heraclitus and Democritus (no.X.6; Fig.61), also a work of the mid-1480s.

Leonardo the intellectual probably cannot make an aesthetically pleasing exhibition: to look at a large number of his technical drawings is quite demanding. More generally, the drawings from the Royal Collection at Windsor and the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan have been prepared for very frequent exhibition and have a rather flat appearance, far from the vitality one hopes to associate with drawings. The Ambrosiana drawings, cut out to be pasted into the Codex Atlanticus and now inlaid in individual modern sheets, might seem to the untutored eye like high-quality reproductions (nos.VIII.11–15). A further disadvantage was that at Palazzo Reale the Leonardo exhibition competed with Il Principe dei Sogni, Giuseppe negli arazzi medicei di Pontormo e Bronzino and Dai Visconti agli Sforza – both, in different ways, spectacularly beautiful displays.

An exhibition that mixed drawings that are certainly entirely by Leonardo with paintings that may or may not be by him raises an important question. What was the general public to make of the authoritatively attributed works? The case that either the Dreyfus Madonna (no.I.7) or the Annunciation (no.I.18) from the predella of the Pistoia altarpiece are by Leonardo might not seem particularly compelling and, moreover, they can scarcely be by the same artist. A less dogmatic or perhaps more scrupulous approach to the issue of the attribution of paintings would have been advisable. Whether at his origins in Verrocchio’s shop or as a mature artist in Milan serving as an inspiration to many followers, Leonardo operated in contexts where collaboration was normal practice and indeed determined the nature of the finished product and the style.

Attribution was the central theme to Leonardo da Vinci and the Idea of Beauty, conceived by John T. Spike, an exhibition shown at the Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, and subsequently at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (closed 14th June). It was devoted to a selection of drawings by Leonardo or ascribed to him, principally from the Biblioteca Reale, Turin, and drawings by Michelangelo from the Casa Buonarroti.2 The rationale of the exhibition was to display spectacular examples of master drawings; however, Spike took the opportunity to sustain a series of disputed attributions to Leonardo. Again it was unclear what purpose, from the point of view of history or criticism, over-emphatic attribution serves – in short, authenticity has very little to do with attribution.

1 Catalogue: Leonardo 1452–1519. Edited by Pietro Marani and Maria Teresa Fiorio, with contributions by Carmen C. Bambach, Julia Barone, Andrea Bernadoni, Roberto Paolo Ciardi, Martin Clayton, Marzia Faietti, Frank Fehrenbach, Paolo Galluzzi, Claudio Giorgione, Martin Kemp, Rodolfo Maffeis, Furio Rinaldi, Richard Schofield, Marco Versiero and Edoardo Villata. 600 pp. incl. 500 col. ills. (Skira, Milan, 2015), €69. ISBN 978–88–572–2473–2.

2 Catalogue: Leonardo da Vinci and the Idea of Beauty. Edited by John T. Spike, with contributions from David Alan Brown and Paul Joannides. 176 pp. incl. 127 col. ills. (Centro Di, Florence, 2015), €35. ISBN 978–88–703–8533–5.