I went to a Leonardo HD Live screening earlier at the Skirball Center. As you may remember, I had made plans to go to London to see the Leonardo show before I heard about the Challenge.
After I bought my ticket, I got an email saying that Luke Syson, the curator for the show, would be available for a talk and Q&A before the screening, so I went for it. NYU was really nice in providing free drinks and crackers and cheese. Syson stressed that the National Gallery is interested in organizing
scholarly shows that illuminate the subject matter rather than purely
blockbuster shows. Syson recently joined the Met and has a very long title, so I'd better not bungle it. It was interesting to hear Syson. The show took five years to put together. How the artwork came together had already been reported elsewhere in the press, but the coups were obviously Lady with an Ermine from Poland and the Louvre's version of Virgin of the Rocks. The Louvre will host its own Leonardo exhibit showcasing the newly restored Virgin and Child with St Anne in a month, and the National Gallery will lend its so-called Burlington Cartoon, a related huge drawing that has never been used as a cartoon (that is, used to transfer a drawing onto canvas with pins).
During the Q&A session, I thanked Syson for organizing an amazing show, and I asked him about attribution, which I thought was a safer subject to discuss than conservation and cleaning, and in particular about Salvator Mundi and Madonna Litta. Syson was remarkably forthright about Madonna Litta, saying that it was probably painted by Marco d'Oggiono rather than Boltraffio. I was a little perplexed by this; I think all the drawings related to Madonna Litta in the show were by Leonardo or Boltraffio. His comments on Leonardo's ermine as a "super-ermine" or "ur-mine" were really funny -- an ermine doesn't really look like this, he said, and Leonardo's version is super-muscular.
In the prescreening (which came with the show), the audience was treated to a bunch of multiple choice questions projected on the screen. Some were downright silly -- do we really need a question on whether Leonardo worked during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution? But I did find out that he was a vegetarian and that his notebooks were hard to read because he wrote in a dialect.
The screening itself was entertaining, but in a slightly silly way. I guess there always seems to be a need to dumb things down when it comes to culture. This was obviously no substitute for seeing the show in person, but still I found myself uncovering new details or wishing that I had spent more time with certain works, such as the Burlington Cartoon. The initial screening was live and took place during a private viewing for cultural illuminati the night before the show opened. Some of them were asked to opine on the paintings. I recognized only two: Michael Craig-Martin, a British artist who taught at Goldsmiths and nurtured the YBAs (including Hirst) and actress Fiona Shaw, whose Medea from years ago made an indelible impression.
Following the screening was another Q&A with Robert Simon, the art historian who was instrumental in researching Salvator Mundi, the newly attributed Leonardo. I'd have liked to stay for the entire session, but it's been brutal for me in terms of getting enough sleep, so I left after a few minutes.
Roberta Smith's NYT review on the HD screening is right on the mark; it's a poor substitute for the real thing. Elsewhere I've heard Luke Syson say that one should spend a minimum of ten minutes with each painting. Years ago I'd have been bewildered by this statement. But in the intervening years, I've definitely learned that reproductions are never accurate enough -- Michael Craig-Martin makes the same points about color, depth and scale and that even seeing paintings side by side deepens one's knowledge of them.
Critics have been universal in their praise of this show. The chief art critic of the Times of London, Rachel Campbell-Johnston, writes that "It is the single most amazing show I have ever seen -- or felt." The HD screening uses superlatives over and over. As it drew to a close and snippets of wildly positive reviews were flashed one after the other, I once again felt that I was really fortunate to have seen it.
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