What lies behind a Leonardo masterpiece?
‘The Virgin of the Rocks’ is the subject of a new immersive show at London’s National Gallery
One of the skills of the curator is knowing how much explanation, if any, should accompany the objects or artworks placed in front of the viewer. Ask people to plough through too much textual information and you risk losing their attention or straying into academia. Say too little and rudderless visitors can come away feeling uninformed or, worse, short-changed.
A show which dedicates five large gallery rooms to celebrating a single work of art — Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece “The Virgin of the Rocks” — was always likely to fall into the first trap. But in fact, it leaves itself far more vulnerable to the latter criticism.
This stunning painting, one of the best known works in the National Gallery collection, has been given a three-month exhibition — or “immersive experience” in the gallery’s on-trend phrase — to mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death.
Commissioned in 1483 to adorn a chapel in the church of San Francesco Grande in Milan, the large-scale painting was acknowledged on its completion as a triumph, a revolutionary work that brought together many of the Italian master’s advances and preoccupations in science, technique and artistry over the 25 years he took to paint it (in two versions, the other of which is in the Louvre).
It shows the Virgin Mary, draped in lustrous blue cloth with her face radiant under a single overhead source of light. Beside her are the infant St John the Baptist, a kneeling angel and Christ as a plump and healthy baby. Set in a verdant, primordial scene, with rocky outcrops fading into the distance (Leonardo counted geology among his interests) and flowers tumbling over assorted greenery, this graceful quartet communicate a sense of harmony to one another as well as to the viewer.
Acquired by the National Gallery in 1880, the painting is now deemed too fragile to be loaned. And so, with the Louvre and the Royal Collection staging blockbuster Leonardo exhibitions that were years in the planning, the National Gallery opted for the radical approach of focusing on this single work and marshalling interactive and visual aids as well as lighting and sound techniques to explore it. As partners in its departure from gallery tradition, the curators brought in the theatrical company 59 Productions, with a CV that includes the National Theatre’s War Horse and a record-breaking David Bowie show at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
One room — the most successful of the show — presents an artist’s studio cum conservation laboratory filled with paraphernalia such as easels, paints and crusty palettes alongside modern scientific equipment. The centre of attention is a large easel on which an animated projection looping over several minutes shows how Leonardo built his painting up layer by layer to achieve his innovative effects. A voiceover by two of the gallery’s conservators explores the high-tech analysis that revealed the secrets hidden beneath the surface.
Like many artists, Leonardo sometimes altered his compositions in the course of a commission, either for aesthetic reasons or after discussions with those paying the bill. In 2005, an entirely different composition was discovered lying beneath “The Virgin of the Rocks”, and this year scientists using the latest macro X-ray fluorescence (XRF) technology revealed the zinc pencil lines of an earlier design for the angel and baby Christ. Analysis of the paint layers also showed how the artist had pared back the shoulder of the Virgin’s cape, painting background brown over the blue folds of the cape.
Leonardo’s intense interest in the science of optics is the subject of another room. Included in the glorious eclecticism of his notebooks are experiments and diagrams on how the position and intensity of light created different effects; the anatomy and function of the eye; and the use of perspective and colour tones to create the impression of depth. In this room, viewers can use levers and dials to alter the position of light on objects, including a model posed in the manner of the Virgin.
As fun as this is, the lack of any explanatory text — bar a couple of terse sentences at the room’s entrance — leaves viewers helpless to understand the connections between the exhibits and Leonardo’s scientific thinking or the painting that awaits them at the culmination of the show. A spotlight swings like a pendulum against a perfectly black wall, each pass of the beam illuminating a different “object” hanging from the surface. Why is it here? What does it have to do with Leonardo? Since no explanation is offered, we can only guess.
In the final room, the show’s denouement finds Leonardo’s work surrounded by an imagined version of the highly decorated and sculpted altarpiece that would originally have housed it in the chapel at San Francesco Grande. Little is known about what this looked like, so the curators used other work by the sculptor Giacomo del Maino to come up with a well-researched guess, projected as a digital animation around Leonardo’s painting. It is a clever idea, but it comes with the downside that the viewer’s attention is constantly switching between the ever-changing imagery of the altarpiece and quiet contemplation of what was surely intended as the star of the show — the painting itself.
The flaws in a show that contains some bold ideas are frustrating. The communications gap is particularly tantalising, not least because the gallery has already done the work of explaining the painting’s meaning and significance in admirably clear prose on an accompanying website. For an institution sometimes accused of conservatism, the gallery’s willingness to experiment with new ways of engaging people should be applauded. But visitors should not be surprised to find their thirst for knowledge unquenched.