The Washington Post - 21.10.2019

C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, OCTOBER 21 , 2019

tially confirms that. He said, “The

divinity which is the science of

painting transmutes the painter’s

mind into a resemblance of the

divine mind.” How do we take

that? As a simple indication that,

when the painter is painting, his

intelligence and creativity some-

how mimic what God is said to

have done in creating the world?

Or that the painter is literally

transformed through the process

of painting into a state of intellec-

tual ecstasy that approaches the

divine? That would certainly ex-

plain why he preferred the act of

painting to the making of finished

paintings.

The Louvre curators won’t go

that far, and for the most part they

keep the exhibition closely fo-

cused on the visual data, the major

preparatory works for the great

paintings and supporting evi-

dence for lost works such as the

unfinished “Battle of Anghiari”

(represented in the show by a vital

16th-century copy displayed next

to Aristotile da Sangallo’s essen-

tial copy of Michelangelo’s lost

“Battle of Cascina”). But one can’t

gather this much of Leonardo’s

opus without explosive things

happening. And the thrilling af-

tereffect of this show is how close-

ly it entangles even skeptical visi-

tors in the persistent myth of Leo-

nardo’s superhuman intelligence.

I resisted, but I failed. The

paintings that didn’t come to Paris

are represented with infrared re-

flectography, and standing before

the large monochrome image of

his early “Adoration of the Magi,”

you see at scale the polyphonic

vortex of the unfinished painting,

which never translates in small-

scale reproduction. I’ve seen the

“Benois Madonna” at the Hermi-

tage, but under bad light and with

a crowd. Here, one sees that her

toothless smile isn’t toothless at

all, and her presence is no less

powerful than that of her better-

known cousin, the Mona Lisa.

Small allegorical drawings, about

the size of a large egg, contain fully

meaningful and realized worlds

within them, rather like the little

eggs at the feet of “Leda” contain

fully realized little human hatch-

lings (the image was based on

Leonardo’s ideas for a painting

based on the Greek myth of Leda

and the Swan).

I could go on and on, because

Leonardo went on and on, and

this exhibition manages to reflect

that incessant creativity without

abbreviation or excess. One last

image troubles me. In a room of

drawings and notes that includes

his exercises in ornithology and

architecture and studies for how

light glints off the surface of water,

is an unprepossessing sketch of a

man’s head and eyes, with the

proportions carefully annotated

with measuring lines.

If you’ve paid attention to one

of the most momentous develop-

ments in technology today, the

ability of machines to learn and

analyze the details and deviations

of facial physiognomy, you’ve seen

these lines, proportions and mea-

sures before, and you know the

daunting promise and peril of this

new science of looking. With this

tool, which extends Leonardo’s

basic ambition infinitely beyond

the scope of what he could have

done with the bare eye, we can

now diagnose diseases and moni-

tor the behavior of ordinary citi-

zens walking down the street. Its

medical potential could liberate

us from our bodily feebleness, and

its political potential could ulti-

mately subjugate the entire spe-

cies to dull, dutiful conformity.

Leonardo knew none of these

latter-day Frankenstein fears, nor

could he imagine outsourcing the

work of our eyes to an impenetra-

bly complicated machine. But he

almost certainly knew the limits

of trying to divine the meaning of

things from the surface of their

appearance, and through his life’s

work and service to potentates, he

knew the ultimate marketability

of his knowledge. He was born

and died in a world around which

the sun and planets still revolved

in their orderly, medieval fashion.

But if we love him for more than a

handful of paintings — which ex-

hibitions like this compel us to do

— it is for having pioneered his

way from ignorance to knowledge

to enlightened and enervating un-

certainty, the fundamental spirit-

ual condition of the postmodern,

post-liberal, post-democratic age.

He lived with that confusion pro-

ductively, as we must, too.

[email protected]

Leonardo da Vinci: 1452-1519 is on

view at the Louvre in Paris through

Feb. 24. For more information visit

louvre.fr.

Melzi’s iconic portrait of an elder-

ly, bearded and benignly care-

worn Leonardo, made in the last

years of the master’s life.

In between, works by contem-

poraries complicate superficial

ideas about his meteoric genius,

and small, delicate drawings teem

with an abundance of ideas —

paintings never made, thoughts

adumbrated then abandoned. Un-

der low light, these faded, wispy

clippings from the cutting-room

floor suggest a superfluity of ideas

that might have supplied a life-

time of inspiration to other artists.

All aspects of his life as an artist,

scholar, scientist, engineer, mili-

tary adviser and archaeologist are

documented in drawings.

There are, on this planet, only

about 15 extant paintings confi-

dently attributed to Leonardo da

Vinci, and if you were to mark

their locations with pins on a map,

you would have a reliable record

of several of the Western world’s

lost or fading empires.

The “Benois Madonna,” from

St. Petersburg, was bought by Czar

Nicholas II for what was then a

record price in 1914, only four

years before he and his family

were gunned down in a basement

room far from their former palac-

es. There is an early portrait of

Ginevra de’ Benci, in Washington,

which was for a long time the only

Leonardo painting outside Eu-

rope when the National Gallery of

Art acquired it in 1967 at the

height of the space race (it never

travels and isn’t in the Paris show).

And the United Kingdom has “The

Virgin of the Rocks,” which it ac-

quired in the 18th century.

In his lifetime, Leonardo was a

cultural export, from Florence un-

der the Medicis to the upstart

court of Milan, and a cultural

import, from Milan to France. His

paintings used to be tools of cul-

tural diplomacy. The Mona Lisa

visited the United States in 1963,

when France briefly admired

America under its young presi-

dent, John F. Kennedy.

But Leonardos are likely to

travel less in the future, as mu-

seums depend on them to validate

the touristic-spiritual yearnings

of their millions of visitors, and as

nations hold them more closely,

ossified symbols of national pres-

tige in an age of resurgent nation-

alism.

So a Leonardo exhibition with-

out the major paintings is simply a

sign of the times. But every exhibi-

tion devoted to Leonardo must

grapple with the basic question:

Why did a man who lived into his

late 60s — a man who was cease-

lessly inventive, who left thou-

sands of pages of meticulous

drawings and notes, whose per-

sonal beauty, intelligence and dis-

course charmed everyone with

what we would now call star pow-

er and celebrity — leave behind so

few finished works? Was he undis-

ciplined and distracted, or

thwarted by his own perfection-

ism? Did his ambition entice him

to draft the basic lines of paintings

he could never realize in paint?

Did he intentionally withhold his

genius from a public he consid-

ered unworthy?

Beginning in the 19th century,

the most common answer has had

to do with his pursuit of science.

His interest in painting was only

an extension of his deeper interest

in the material world. He thought

through the visual world by anal-

ogy, looking for affinities between

the way hair curled and water

eddied, between human anatomy

and the life of trees and animals,

and the structure of the Earth and

heavens. But as he became in-

creasingly preoccupied with sci-

entific questions, he got lost in the

process of looking into the world.

The exhibition’s curators, Vin-

cent Delieuvin and Louis Frank,

argue with that conclusion. It may

seem, says a wall text, that science

was “an endless, multifaceted lab-

yrinth in which the painter...

ultimately lost his way.” But, “this

disappearance is illusory.” Rather,

it was the process of looking, ob-

serving and working out prob-

lems in myriad ways (in diagrams

on paper, with paint on wood, in

his writings and in his head) that

mattered to Leonardo. His ener-

gies and endeavors were part of

one holistic enterprise.

Leonardo’s own writing par-

the great masterpiece of his teach-

er, Andrea del Verrocchio’s monu-

mental bronze “Christ and Saint

Thomas” (as overwhelming as

anything else in the show), and are

sent home with the memory of a

work by one of his most talented

and devoted pupils, Francesco

the story of the enormous bronze

equestrian statue made for his

patron Ludovico Sforza, the clay

model of which was supposedly

blown apart by French soldiers

after they stormed Milan in 1499.

But the rest of his life is fully

present. Visitors are greeted by

circle and a square), wasn’t yet on

the wall after a last-minute legal

battle over its departure from Ita-

ly. But the unattached label was

leaning against the blank panel on

which it will be hung.

Only one major episode of Leo-

nardo’s life isn’t covered in depth:

that it was a once-in-a-lifetime
pairing “unlikely ever to be re-
peated.”
So Leonardo completists who
come to Paris with a checklist may
be disappointed. But take one step
past the fame of the Mona Lisa
(which is on view at the Louvre in
another gallery) and a wholly dif-
ferent and more interesting Leo-
nardo emerges. That Leonardo is
well represented in all his bril-
liance and richness.
Many of the artist’s most impor-
tant drawings and sketches are in
the show, including the large for-
mat and emotionally incandes-
cent Burlington House cartoon
(depicting the Virgin, Saint Anne,
and the infant Christ and John the
Baptist), the rigorous perspective
drawing for the unfinished “Ado-
ration of the Magi” and the stun-
ning painted drapery sketches
made in the earliest years of his
career. The most famous drawing
of them all, the Vitruvian Man (a
naked male figure inscribed in a

EXHIBIT REVIEW FROM C1

A deeper look at Leonardo da Vinci’s incessant creativity

PHOTOS BY ANTOINE MONGODIN/MUSÉE DU LOUVRE

Many of da Vinci’s important drawings and sketches are in the exhibition, as well as small, delicate drawings that document his many roles.

The

Reliable

Source

Helena Andrews-Dyer and Emily Heil

have moved on to new assignments at

The Post. A search is underway for a

new Reliable Source columnist. The

column will return.

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