Reviews
Leonardo: Painter at the Court of Milan
Pat Harvey
National Gallery
Until 5 February
The long queues, a black market in tickets and broadsheet
reviews full of superlatives suggest that this is no ordinary
exhibition, but a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to come
face-to-face with the works of the world's template Renaissance
Man. Nine of Leonardo's 15 surviving paintings are on show
here.
The superlatives started with Georgio Vasari, the first great
art historian, in 1550: 'whatever he does..., he distances all
other men and clearly displays how his genius is the gift of God'.
But what is the reality about the 15th-century Florentine who came
to achieve semi-divine status not unlike that of his own
creations?
Like all aspiring artists Leonardo learned his craft in the
Hollywood-like studio system of the day where, apprenticed at 17 to
the painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrochio, he learned to grind
pigments, paint bits of the anatomy, or even, as in the case of an
angel in Verrochio's 'Baptism of Christ', whole figures. This may
have contributed to his downfall as, accused of a homosexual
relationship with a fellow apprentice, on whose long, flowing locks
the angel was perhaps based, he left Florence under a cloud.
Dreamily visionary (he often failed to complete commissions on
time, if at all), he was unsuited to commercial work. Fortunately,
his own guardian angel stepped in in the shape of Lorenzo de'
Medici, the statesman and patron, who noticed him and introduced
him to Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan.
Leonardo gave him a silver lyre in the shape of a horses' skull,
and a sales pitch as a designer of military defences and weapons to
assuage Ludovico's political insecurity. It worked. So began a
20-year period which was the making of him, honing his
extraordinary gifts and culminating in the instantly-recognisable
masterpieces we know today.
In 1483, Leonardo was had his first Milan commission, for a
painting of the Virgin and child for the altarpiece of a chapel,
'The Virgin of the Rocks', though it was never used because of a
dispute over payment. The painting exemplifies Leonardo's view of
himself as a 'scientist-painter' and is the fruit of his studies of
botany, geology and optics, as seen in his notebooks full of
drawings not meant to evoke emotion in response to beauty,
but to aid understanding. For Leonardo at this moment in his
career, understanding nature is the same as understanding and
loving God.
Leonardo also brought a new subtlety thanks to the medium of
oils, pioneered in the Netherlands, with its richly glazed
layers, and its capacity for rilievo, the portrayal of light and
shade, and sfumato, Leonardo's signature smoky transitions from one
plane to another.
When Cecilia Gallerani became Ludovico's mistress, Leonardo
incorporated all these discoveries in the first modern portrait:
'The Lady With an Ermine'. It is incontestably the star of the
exhibition, as anyone who has stood in front of its cool and gentle
gaze will testify.
In 1490, more politically secure, Ludovico at last employed
Leonardo as his court painter, and a fertile few years ensued in
which he found the freedom to experiment and his fame grew. A
long-term Aristotelian, the well-read Leonardo became convinced
that this hard-headed approach to nature could be combined with the
more mystical outlook of Neo-Platonism, where all natural objects
are a shadow of the divine. Hence, his two great paintings of the
time, 'The Last Supper', on the wall of the Duke's refectory, an
early copy of which is in this exhibition; and the second version
of 'The Virgin of the Rocks'. This painting is infinitely more
breathtaking than the first, with its soft, glowing colours and
mysterious shadows, and is displayed for the first time here
opposite its predecessor. In 1508 Leonardo finally received payment
for it - 25 years after it was commissioned.
Leonardo left Milan amid more financial disputes, his reputation
transformed but living from day to day. In a final burst of
activity, he embarked on a group of paintings which, in their
monumentality, humanity and tenderness, have come to symbolise the
Leonardo we know today. Set in vast, panoramic landscapes, and
bathed in sfumato, with understated facial expressions whose smiles
reach their eyes, are 'St John the Baptist', 'The Virgin and Child
with St Anne'; and one Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine silk
merchant - better known as Mona Lisa.
Yes, she is missing from the National Gallery show. But no
matter. In Luke Syson's words, 'Never was the human form so central
to a vision of God's universe'. The question is: is it God's, where
natural and supernatural combine in one reality, or Plato's where
all we see is but a shadow of the real?