The Wall Street Journal - 23.10.2019

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Wednesday, October 23, 2019 |A

LIFE & ARTS

tive for Saudi Arabia’s culture min-

istry declined to comment on the

request. (For now, the Louvre plans

to display a private Swiss collector’s

copy of the work.)

Curators rarely discuss the me-

chanics and politics of securing art

loans, but the major players know

there are tacit protocols. The ne-

gotiations operate largely on an

elaborate bartering system. Muse-

ums who lend their most popular

pieces will leverage the moment to

lay claim to something equally

prestigious in an “exchange loan”

swap. “If we loan generously, we

expect generous loans back to us,”

Heather Lemonedes Brown, deputy

director and chief curator of the

Cleveland Museum of Art. “One act

begets another.”

The first step is to check in with

the conservators. New York’s Met-

ropolitan Museum of Art lent out

roughly 1,000 works last year.

Each one was first vetted by the

museum’s conservators to make

sure the objects weren’t too fragile

to travel, says Quincy Houghton,

deputy director of exhibitions.

Panel paintings like the kind Leo-

nardo created are particularly at

risk because the wood can expand

or contract in different climates;

oil paints can fleck off if tempera-

tures change too quickly.

Some pieces are known as “im-

movables” because they’re deemed

too big or too iconic to lend, like

Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington

Crossing the Delaware” at the Met;

and Rembrandt’s “Return of the

Prodigal Son” and Henri Matisse’s

“Dance” at the Hermitage Museum.

Heavyweight insurance is usu-

ally a borrower’s biggest expense,

as museums lending works typi-

cally ask the borrowing institution

to protect a work from the mo-

ment it’s taken off a museum wall

until it’s rehung afterward. When

the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan

agreed last fall to lend its Caravag-

gio, “Supper at Emmaus,” to the

Jacquemart-André Museum in

Paris, the Pinacoteca asked the

Paris museum to insure the paint-

ing for roughly $120 million. (The

museums declined to say the exact

premium paid.) “Paintings like sta-

bility in humidity and tempera-

ture, and don’t like vibration, so

the best thing for them is to not

move,” James Bradburne, the mu-

seum’s general director. “We need

these things to exist 1,000 years

from now.”

To make their case, would-be

borrowers dangle many carrots.

Ms. Houghton at the Met said her

museum’s director writes individ-

ual, “well-crafted” letters to the

directors at the other museums.

Curators typically travel to the

sites of their wish-list works to

talk up the show’s concept, she

said, playing up the innovation be-

hind the curators’ research.

Besides insurance, museums

rarely pay any additional fees to

borrow beyond the occasional con-

servation and shipping fees. The

Smithsonian American Art Museum

charges a $200 loan-processing fee

but doesn’t consider it an important

source of revenue, said its director,

Stephanie Stebich. At Russia’s State

Hermitage Museum in St. Peters-

burg, director Mikhail Piotrovsky

said he doesn’t typically charge ma-

jor museums a fee to borrow pieces.

“It’s a secret, but everyone knows

this,” Mr. Piotrovsky said.

The Louvre is a seasoned vet-

eran in navigating such maneu-

vers, lending around 2,000 works

a year to museums the world over

and drawing in 10.2 million visi-

tors a year. Even so, its quest to

pull off the Leonardo show was

anything but straightforward.

From the moment Mr. Delieuvin

joined the Louvre as a young

paintings-department curator in

2006, he set out to restore several

of the museum’s Leonardo paint-

ings, with an eventual show in his

sights. An art historian who’d pre-

viously worked as a curator at one

of Louis XV’s royal palaces, Mr.

Delieuvin was eager to use scien-

tific analysis to uncover fresh in-

sights. In 2009, he and his col-

leagues took all of Leonardo’s

paintings off the museum’s walls

to conduct infrared X-rays and

other pigment tests.

He discovered a kindred spirit

in his colleague Mr. Frank, the

prints and drawings curator who

was retranslating Giorgio Vasari’s

1550 biography of Leonardo from

Italian to French.

Together, the two of them for-

mulated a provocative theory about

the Renaissance man: Leonardo,

they believed, saw himself first and

foremost as a painter. Far from a

peripatetic procrastinator dis-

tracted by scientific pursuits, Leo-

nardo set certain paintings aside to

conduct experiments whose discov-

eries he deemed essential for his

art, the curators believed.

But to prove it, the Louvre

needed to gather and show as

many of his paintings—and related

drawings—as possible. That realiza-

tion kicked off a multiyear plan to

pull together a landmark Leonardo

show for the 500th anniversary.

Mr. Delieuvin said he and Mr.

Frank started early. More than

three years ago, they approached

Britain’s Royal Collection Trust for

a loan of some drawings of Leo-

nardo’s masterpiece, “The Last

Supper.” As they couldn’t show the

crumbling mural itself, they needed

the drawings. Martin Clayton, head

of prints and drawings for the

Trust, said the Louvre was among

the earliest of 20 museums that

eventually came seeking loans for

Leonardo works in the run-up to

the anniversary. Even though the

Trust was already planning its own

series of 14 Leonardo exhibitions in

Italy presented the biggest chal-

lenge, but it was key because two

of Leonardo’s earliest works are in

Florence’s Uffizi Museum. Mr. De-

lieuvin and his team began laying

the groundwork years ago. When

Italy held its own major Leonardo

show in 2015—the Milan Expo—

the Louvre lent three of its Leo-

nardo paintings to the effort. Ma-

ria Teresa Fiorio, co-curator of the

Milan show, said the Louvre was

“really generous.”

For the Louvre’s exhibit, Mr. De-

lieuvin held off on making any re-

quests to Italian institutions until

after the Milan Expo closed. When

Italy’s cultural ministry formed an

international committee to evalu-

ate loan proposals ahead of the big

Leonardo anniversary, Mr. Delieu-

vin joined it—giving him network-

ing opportunities and insider clues

about which institutions might be

seeking Leonardos. He knew better

than to ask the Uffizi for its big

“Adoration of the Magi,” knowing

that conservators deem it too frag-

ile to move.

“As a curator, you’re a fool—you

want everything you can borrow—

but we knew what we needed to

tell the story,” he said.

The curators’ work laid the foun-

dation for higher-level negotiations

between political leaders, kick-start-

ing with a 2017 agreement signed in

Lyon, France, between the culture

ministers of Italy and France. The

French cultural minister persuaded

his Italian counterpart to lend some

of Italy’s Leonardo works in ex-

change for the Louvre sending some

rare Raphael works to Italy for a se-

ries of shows in 2020, according to

a spokeswoman for the French cul-

ture ministry.

But that agreement fell apart

last year. Italy’s centrist govern-

ment, which brokered the original

deal, was for a few months re-

placed by a populist government

that balked at lending out Leo-

nardo works during his big anni-

versary year. Talks between the

culture ministers resumed this

winter. In May, French President

Macron aided the efforts by invit-

ing Italian President Sergio Mat-

tarella to tour the château in Am-

boise where Leonardo lived the

last three years of his life.

By late September, Italy’s politi-

cal leadership had shifted again.

The original art accord was re-

vived. But Italy hit pause hit once

more a couple of weeks ago, when

an Italian heritage group peti-

tioned a Venice court to weigh the

risks of sending out works includ-

ing Leonardo’s famous drawing of

an encircled “Vitruvian Man.” Fi-

nally last Wednesday, the court

ruled the works could go to Paris.

Back in the Louvre’s book-lined

paintings department overlooking

the Tuileries Garden, Mr. Delieu-

vin’s relief is palpable. But ironi-

cally, the exhibit won’t officially

include the most famous Leonardo

of them all—the “Mona Lisa.” She

has to stay put in her newly reno-

vated gallery in the Louvre, lo-

cated up one flight and down a

hallway from the Leonardo show.

Mr. Delieuvin said he didn’t

even ask to borrow her, deferring

to museum administrators like

Vincent Pomarède, who oversees

crowd control. Mr. Pomarède said

the exhibition galleries for “Leo-

nardo da Vinci” can comfortably

sweep in up to 7,000 people a day,

but the artist’s masterpiece por-

trait? “On a regular day, she gets

30,000 people,” he said. She, too,

is immovable.

The Louvre’s

Leonardo

Loan Hunt

Inside the secret negotiations to mount the

biggest Leonardo da Vinci show ever

the U.K., the Louvre’s request for

24 drawings was approved.

The pair managed another suc-

cess in the U.K. at London’s Na-

tional Gallery—this time by calling

in a favor from years earlier. In

2011, the Louvre had lent the Na-

tional Gallery its version of Leo-

nardo’s “Virgin of the Rocks” for a

show exploring the artist’s years in

Milan. Now, the National Gallery re-

turned the favor, lending the Lou-

vre Leonardo’s elaborate drawing,

“St. Anne, the Virgin and Child.”

Mr. Delieuvin hit a roadblock in

the U.S. when his request to bor-

row the portrait of “Ginevra de

Benci” from Washington’s National

Gallery of Art was turned down.

And he had to tap dance to se-

cure the Hermitage’s “Benois Ma-

donna,” a religious painting that

the Russian museum had already

pledged to lend earlier this year to

a pair of Italian museums. The

Hermitage’s director, Mr. Pi-

otrovsky, said he sent the work to

the Umbria National Gallery in Pe-

rugia first and then to another

museum 40 miles away. The Her-

mitage had planned to ship it

home afterward—until Mr. Delieu-

vin and his superiors at the Louvre

asked one more time if the Her-

mitage might be willing to let the

“Madonna” make one additional

stop. The tactic worked. “It was al-

ready in Italy, so we let France

have her,” Mr. Piotrovsky said.

Paris

V

incent Delieuvin, a
star curator at
Paris’s Louvre Mu-
seum, has spent the
past decade working
on a major Leonardo
da Vinci exhibit that’s set to open
Thursday. But until a few days ago,
Mr. Delieuvin didn’t know exactly
what he could display.
Mr. Delieuvin’s last-minute un-
certainty stemmed from a series of
high-stakes—and highly unpredict-
able—negotiations for artworks he
needed to borrow from other mu-
seums. The goal: to mount a block-
buster exhibit coinciding with the
500th anniversary of the Renais-
sance master’s death. Of the
roughly 160 works on display in
the show, the Louvre itself only
owns 32.
His efforts to gather the big-
gest-ever collection of Leonardo
da Vinci works provide a rare
glimpse into the secretive bargain-
ing between museums over art
loans. When museums want to
mount an ambitious show, they
rarely own all the art they want to
display. So they must convince
their peers to lend out their prized
possessions. This international
web of curatorial relationships
quietly directs the behind-the-
scenes flow of artistic treasures to
exhibits around the world—but ne-
gotiations are often tricky.
“The loans were our biggest
nightmare,” says Mr. Delieuvin.
The 41-year-old teamed up on the
project with the museum’s draw-
ings and prints curator, Louis
Frank. Even last week, the pair
were still rejiggering their plans
for the show. “We have solution
one, solution two, solution three.”

Getting other museums to part
with rare pieces by the Renais-
sance artist proved challenging in
a year when dozens of institutions
wanted to organize shows. In their
hunt, Messrs. Delieuvin and Frank
visited at least 20 museums in
more than a dozen countries, stra-
tegically timing their loan re-
quests, and calling in favors from
peers they’d lent Louvre works to
years before.
But even then, high-level political
tensions between France and Italy
over the past year threatened to de-
rail their efforts at the last minute,
bringing a diplomatic intervention
by French President Emmanuel Ma-
cron this spring and a tussle in an
Italian court last week.
“People think this world is so
genteel, but it takes a ton of
horse-trading and convincing and
last-minute panicking to pull off
these shows,” says Martin Kemp, a
University of Oxford art-history
professor who just published a
book on Leonardo’s paintings,
“Leonardo by Leonardo.”
Even today, Mr. Delieuvin is still
awaiting word on one final request
to borrow the “Salvator Mundi,” the
image of Christ that Saudi Arabia’s
crown prince bought at auction for
$450 million two years ago. The
work hasn’t been exhibited since it
was sold at Christie’s. A representa-

BYKELLYCROW

Louvre curators Vincent Delieuvin
(above) and Louis Frank teamed up.

Borrowing Leonardo

Of the approximately 160 works in its upcoming da Vinci exhibit, the Louvre itself only owns 32.

Here’s where it got the rest.

Artwork lent to the Louvre

Britain’s Royal Collection Trust

in Windsor lent Leonardo’s

‘A Study of a Woman’s Hands’

Note: Loans within Paris aren’t shown.

Photos: Clockwise from left: The North Carolina Museum of Art; Royal Collection Trust/Her

Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; Scala/Art Resource, NY; Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana

Source: The Louvre

1 work 2-5 6-11 more than 12

TOTALLOANS

Ellie Zhu/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Russia’s State

Hermitage Museum

in St. Petersburgrg

lent Leonardo’sdo’s

‘Benois Madonna’no nna’

U.S. museums lent 12 works, including

the North Carolina Museum of Art’s

‘Portrait of a Young Girl Crowned

with Flowers’by Leonardo apprentice

Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio

Italy’s BiblioteItaly’s Bibotecaecaca

Ambrosiana in Mimbro nn Milan

lent Leonardo’stLe ‘Portrait‘PPortrait

of a Musician’ofaM

FROM TOP: SCALA/ART RESOURCE, NY; LOUVRE MUSEUM (2)

The Louvre used persistence and strategically timed requests to persuade

Russia’s Hermitage to lend its ‘Benois Madonna’ out for the Leonardo exhibit.