A beautiful face in the crowd
On Tuesday I was one of what felt like thousands of people who attended the Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan exhibition at the National Gallery. I am always slightly sceptical about blockbuster exhibitions, especially ones so hyped as the Leonardo, but had determined to go with an open mind, and plenty of energy to combat the crowds.
The gallery have tried to do something similar themselves, by minimising wall text, and instead giving the visitor all the painting labels in a fat exhibition booklet, and putting more emphasis on the audioguide. I have discussed (read ranted about?) audioguides here before, so needless to say I did not get one. It seems ridiculous to me to make visitors pay an extra £4 or £5 to get the information required for an exhibition for which they have already bought a ticket. The effect of the guides was, of course, to make most visitors crawl slowly around the walls of each gallery in a long queue, staring absently at a picture while being told about it. This exacerbated the effect of the crowds, but if you were prepared to dip in and out against the crowd actually afforded the possibility for some close-up scrutiny of the works.
This was eminently necessary to follow the narrative of the exhibition, which looks at the development of a selection of da Vinci’s works while at the Milanese court, through preparatory drawings, paintings, and works by his pupils and associates. There are some beautiful things here. His Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (The Lady with an Ermine), loaned from the Czartoryski Museum in Cracow being a notable example, whose serene expression belies the scrum in front of her. There is also a stunning selection of drapery studies. However, the overall effect of the hang is to make the drawings appear dingy and uninteresting in comparison to the paintings, and make the quality of the da Vincis eminently visible against his associates. Both, therefore, appear to be largely exhibition filler, which is a shame for the drawings. Given the work which the labels did to connect the works, I was also sad to see few of the audioguidees looking from one to another. Perhaps the pressure of the perimeter queue made moving against the crowd too daunting.
It was wonderful to see the two versions of The Virgin of the Rocks in one room, and to look closely at the changes between the two, in the context of the surrounding drawings. The curators have also added a fascinating seventh room (which, being up in the Sunley Room in the main gallery rather than the Sainsbury Wing space, was much quieter so sadly seemed to have eluded many visitors) pulling together the drawings for da Vinci’s famous The Last Supper. However, the surprise of this extra room, made clear to me how much National Gallery exhibitions now seem to follow a formula from masterpiece to filler, and how this overwhelmed rather than enhanced the undeniably beautiful faces amongst the crowd.