The Renaissance of Leonardo da Vinci

Works by the ultimate creative genius go on show in Paris.

Detail from Portrait of a Young Woman of the Court of Milan is on display at the Louvre in Paris as part of the blockbuster Leonardo da Vinci exhibition.

Few exhibitions in recent years have created such anticipation as the Leonardo da Vinci show that opens at the Louvre in Paris on Thursday. It is, after all, the quincentenary year of the original Renaissance man, born in the little town of Vinci, near Florence, in 1452, and who died in Amboise, France, 500 years ago.

Opportunities to see a large body of Leonardo’s paintings, drawings and designs in a single exhibition are rare, as his major works are dispersed across different institutions, and a handful are held by a few very wealthy individuals. So the heightened interest in the Louvre exhibition is not only about the works on display but also about the ones that are likely to be absent.

The world’s most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, is at the Louvre but will not be in the exhibition — it will remain in its sole-occupancy gallery in the Denon wing, while the exhibition is held downstairs in the temporary exhibitions hall, under IM Pei’s Pyramid. The Mona Lisa will be represented in the exhibition with a virtual reality exploration of the painting that explains how Leonardo achieved its enigmatic smile.

The world’s most expensive painting, the Salvator Mundi, an image of Christ as saviour of the world, almost certainly will not be in the exhibition. Sold in 2017 for a record $US450.3m to, it’s rumoured, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, the picture has not been seen since. It may be the new owner does not want the expensive painting exposed to institutional and public scrutiny, given its attribu­tion to Leonardo is not universally accepted. In its place is another version of Salvator Mundi, known as the De Ganay version, attributed as a studio work.

And the world’s best-known anatomical study, Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, may yet be in the exhibition when it opens on Thursday. A months-long diplomatic dispute between France and Italy — the drawing is held in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice — and a last-minute legal attempt to stop its journey to Paris have cast doubt on whether Vitruvian Man will be in attendance. As late as last Friday, when select visitors were invited to the Louvre for previews, Vitruvian Man had an allocated space in the installation but the drawing was not yet there.

These questions aside, the exhibition will have an impressive display of works by Leonardo and his followers, including from the Louvre’s own collection of five paintings, the largest assembly anywhere, and important loans from the Vatican, the Royal Collection in Britain, the Hermitage in St Petersburg and other institutions. There are 70 works on paper — most spectacularly, the St Anne cartoon from the National Gallery in London — and another 40 pages from Leonardo’s codices or notebooks.

“You have the impression that you know so much about Leonardo da Vinci, he has been so much talked about,” says Jacques Le Roux, an art historian and lecturer who conducts tours at the Louvre.

“But when you see the works of art, and they are put in the context of Leonardo’s way of thinking, it’s very impressive.”

Le Roux will be in Sydney next month for a series of three art-history lectures under the title Da Vinci Talks, where he will discuss the Leonardo exhibition. He says the Louvre’s curators, Vincent Delieuvin and Louis Frank, have devised the show to tell the story of Leonardo as a modern man, driven by an insatiable curiosity to discover the secrets of life and the universe. It helps explain why his paintings are concerned not only with human subjects — all of his extant paintings are portraits or religious themes — but also with natural phenomena, such as atmospheric effects, water, plants and dramatic landscapes, as in the Louvre’s Virgin and Child with St Anne.

“This is about mathematics, about plants, about rocks, about clouds in the sky … all of this is his observation,” Le Roux says. “To try to understand how the universe works, he had to study all of its components. It was like trying to crack a code — I am not talking about the Da Vinci Code or anything like that, but there is a mathematical code that is structuring the universe. He thought this was very fragile, you had to appreciate it, and there was always a risk that the code would crack, and that means chaos.”

Leonardo was born in 1452 just outside Vinci, about 25km west of Florence, where his father Piero was a notary. His mother was an unmarried peasant girl named Caterina, and Leonardo was brought up in both his father’s and his mother’s households. When he was about 14, his father arranged for him to be apprenticed to Andrea del Verrocchio, the master of one of Florence’s leading art ­studios.

The Louvre exhibition presents work from different periods of Leonardo’s life, starting with a bronze sculpture of Jesus and the incredulous Thomas by Verrocchio. While Leonardo was too young to have had a hand in making it, Le Roux says he was captivated by the sculpture’s dynamic folds of drapery and the dramatic interaction of the two figures.

One of Leonardo’s earliest paintings, the Madonna and Child, known as the Benois Madonna, dated circa 1478, has been lent by the Hermitage. Other significant loans are the Vatican’s unfinished St Jerome, and Portrait of a Musician from the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan. Paintings from other collections that were not available for the Louvre exhibition — such as the Lady with an Ermine from Cracow — are represented with infra-red reflect­ography images, which show the underdrawing of the paintings and give an insight into Leonardo’s thinking about composition.

The paintings are accompanied by a substantial assembly of notebooks and works on paper in which Leonardo recorded his observations of human anatomy, botany, natural phenomena and machines. The drawings include a head study, on loan from Budapest, of a warrior from Leonardo’s lost mural, the Battle of Angiari, and the tempestuous Deluge, from the Royal Collection in Britain.

Leonardo spent the last years of his life in France’s Loire Valley at the invitation of King Francis I. He died there in May 1519 at age 67; Vasari records that the king embraced him on his deathbed.

“So Leonardo has a story with France as well,” Le Roux says. “And his paintings that are in the Louvre were acquired by Francis I himself. So there is a historical link in the later years between Leonardo and France.”

In the Da Vinci Talks, Le Roux will discuss Leonardo in the context of the Renaissance along with Michelangelo and Raphael, and also the Notre Dame Cathedral.

Few paintings by Leonardo have survived — no more than 19 — and among them are paintings that Leonardo left unfinished.

Le Roux says the Louvre curators argue that his incomplete paintings, such as St Jerome, should not be seen as indecision or impatience on Leonardo’s part but as a sign of a perennially questing intellect.

“A lot of paintings by Leonardo were not finished, and this has troubled historians for centuries,” Le Roux says.

“He had an idea that nothing was permanent, so it was difficult for him to finish a painting because then it would be a finished product that would not change. He was never satisfied with what he had done because he knew that everything in life was constantly changing … the world is not finished.”

Jacques Le Roux presents the Da Vinci Talks, a series of three lectures, at the National Art School, Sydney, November 26-28. Matthew Westwood will conduct a Q&A with Le Roux at the conclusion of each talk.