Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, The National Gallery, 9 November 2011 – 5 February 2012

If you call up ‘Leonardo’ on Google, the first name that appears on the list is Leonardo Dicaprio. Leonardo da Vinci only comes second. But it is that second Leonardo who is creating mass hysteria in Britain at present, with nine of his fifteen surviving paintings on show at the National Gallery.

It is a unique occasion, and the Gallery has used superb diplomatic skills to borrow some of these pictures from the galleries where they usually hang. The public has responded en masse. The pre-booked tickets for the whole three-month run were swiftly sold out, and hundreds of people are queuing from before dawn to buy on-the-day tickets. They usually have to wait about three hours.

Booked visitors are given a time slot and admitted in tranches so that the exhibition does not get too full. Nevertheless it is very crowded. Slow herds move from room to room, very silently because so many of them are listening to audio guides. They look like pilgrims going round the Stations of the Cross in a church. Often they are looking over many heads to see a picture. I heard one man at the back say ‘It’s only an ugly face’ and move on. In fact, the picture he had been straining to see was a beautiful drawing of two hands, with one of the thumbs looking rather like a nose. It is not an ideal way to look at pictures. Nevertheless, with patience one can see all one wants to see. And what is there to see?

Numerous preliminary sketches by Leonardo surround the paintings he and his studio assistants produced in Milan between 1482 and 1499. To my mind, four powerful pictures dominate the show.

The first two, both in one room, are paintings of women. One is of an unknown woman, called La Belle Ferronière because she may have been an ironmaster’s daughter who became the mistress of Ludovico Sforza, then duke of Milan. The other, The Lady with an Ermine, was definitely one of Sforza’s mistresses, Cecilia Gallerani.

They rule imperiously over the room, each of them placed by Leonardo against a dark background with her exquisite coiffure, superb but restrained dress, and what we now think of as classic figure. But is this classic beauty not rather cold? Look at their faces, and though they are wonderfully modelled with light and shade, they tell you nothing. In the reverent silence I heard one woman – in a rather less classic, loose yellow dress – say of the unknown woman, ‘She knows something you don’t!’

It was a true perception. These women give nothing away. They are cool enigmas, just as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa in the Louvre has always been seen. Though they are in richly coloured paintings, they seem more like marble sculptures.

The gallery’s commentary says that their beauty was based on Leonardo’s idea of ‘divine geometry’ – and certainly Leonardo seems to have painted in a searchingly religious spirit. But to modern unbelievers, what can ‘divine beauty’ possibly mean?

We have to say that the formal shape of these pictures of women may respond to some deep, mysterious liking in human nature for a certain kind of harmony and balance. But that is a rather abstract satisfaction, not touched by emotion. On a human level, we get, for example, far richer rewards – profoundly emotional – from seeing the young Bacchus sweeping towards the half-fearful, half-joyous Ariadne, in Titian’s painting of the scene in the Gallery, or from an old woman painted by Rembrandt with her whole life of joys and pains encrusted in her features and stance.

The other two paintings I spent a long time looking at were two versions by Leonardo of The Virgin of the Rocks, one painted several years after the other. They are outstanding works. They face each other at the end of a long room with many other paintings and drawings in it, and they reign over it just as the two women do in their room.

There has been much dispute over their respective merits, however. Each shows the Virgin seated in a rocky landscape, with an angel and a very young baby Christ sitting on her left, and John the Baptist on her right with Mary’s protective hand on his shoulder.

Both paintings are formally very beautiful. It feels, as you look at them, as if every detail of the pyramidal group of figures is in its right place. Of the two, I prefer the later version, now in the National Gallery, to the earlier one that belongs to the Louvre. This, as I see it, is because the expression of emotion in the later painting is more interesting and touching. John the Baptist leans forward towards Jesus, while Jesus raises his hand in blessing towards John. But in the later picture, there appears a greater eagerness in John to be with his tiny friend – even a hint of the eagerness, one might think, of Bacchus to be with Ariadne. Jesus, too, is more interesting in the later work. In the earlier picture he is very young indeed, as if he is just lifting his hand because his mother has told him to. The later Jesus looks slightly older, and his face seems to express recognition that there is something important and significant in what he is doing, without his knowing exactly what. That is very attractive.

As for the Virgin, in the first picture she is presiding with a calm benevolence over the group, happy perhaps, though not showing it very clearly. In the later picture, which is altogether darker, with taller, grimmer rocks behind her, she seems to be looking past her son, lost in disturbing thoughts, which one takes to be her foreknowledge of his fate.

Other writers have spoken of the second painting in much the same terms as the comment I quoted from the gallery commentary on the women. They see it as an attempt by Leonardo to create an ideal picture in imitation of the way in which God Himself created the world, filling it with ‘divine grace’. Again, there is reason to believe that Leonardo thought about it in that way. He painted it with immense attention to every detail, both of naturalism and harmonious design.

We cannot but be awe-struck by that. Yet it might be compared with the awe that we feel – or should feel – when we contemplate the construction of something as intricate and powerful as a Rolls-Royce engine for an aeroplane, and indeed the design of the plane itself. As the inventor of a weapon very like a modern tank, Leonardo would not, I believe, have been offended by the comparison.

I cannot help wondering, though, what the silent visitors were feeling as they left the National Gallery. I think that many of them were probably asking themselves what I was asking myself. Have I been impressed by the majestic mind and skills of Leonardo? Yes, immensely. Was I really moved by his  paintings? No, not very much.

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