9 November 2011 - 5 February 2012

Sainsbury Wing

This autumn the National Gallery will present a landmark exhibition, Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan examining Leonardo’s extraordinary observation, imagination and technique. The exhibition concentrates on his career as a court painter in Milan, working for the city’s ruler Ludovico Maria Sforza, il Moro (‘the Moor’) in the 1480s and 1490s. Bringing together the largest ever number of Leonardo’s rare surviving paintings, it will include international loans never before seen in the UK. Private and institutional lenders have proved exceptionally generous, taking full and proper account of the serious scholarly ambition of this project.

While numerous exhibitions have looked at Leonardo da Vinci as an inventor, scientist or draughtsman, this is the first exhibition to be dedicated to his aims and ambitions as a painter. ‘Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan’ will display more than 60 paintings and drawings by the great artist, as well as pictures by some of his closest collaborators. Nearly every surviving picture that he painted in Milan during this period will be exhibited. These include the Portrait of a Musician (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan), the Saint Jerome (Vatican, Rome), The Lady with an Ermine (Czartoryski Foundation, Cracow), the Belle Ferronnière (Musée du Louvre, Paris) and the National Gallery’s own recently restored Virgin of the Rocks. These pictures show how Leonardo, benefiting from his salaried position, used his artistic freedom to find new ways of perceiving and recording the natural world - focusing especially on the human anatomy, soul and emotions. These investigations could take on their own life, but they also fed into the meanings and evolution of his paintings.

Leonardo da Vinci’s time in Milan was the making of him – both as an artist and as a public figure. It was in Milan that Leonardo executed his two profoundly different versions of the mysterious Virgin of the Rocks, as well as the almost uncannily perfect wall-painting of The Last Supper. This work will be represented in the exhibition by a near-contemporary, full-scale copy by his pupil Giampietrino (1500-1550),lent by the Royal Academy. Leonardo also painted a trio of portraits that were to revolutionalise the genre - pictures that will be seen together in London for the first time. Leonardo, a musician himself, worked closely with other musicians, designing musical instruments and devising settings for courtly entertainments. It was during this time that he painted his only portrait of a man – The Portrait of a Musician. The highly idealised Belle Ferronnière may be a portrait of Ludovico il Moro’s duchess or of one of his mistresses. But the most justly celebrated of the three is the exquisite portrait of Il Moro’s mistress Cecilia Gallerani, The Lady with an Ermine, arguably his greatest masterpiece of these years.

The portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, painted in 1488-90 has been acclaimed as the first truly modern portrait. The sitter's twisting pose and nuanced expression convey her inner life, mind, soul - and what we would now call psychology. Cecilia was renowned for her beauty, wit, scholarship, and poetry. Still in her teens in 1489 when she became Ludovico’s mistress, the painting of her portrait allowed Leonardo to demonstrate how a painter could capture a beauty that time would destroy. He portrayed Cecilia holding a white ermine, an enigmatic feature that has multiple meanings. It may be a visual pun on her surname since the Greek for ermine or weasel is galay . It could also stand for her lover, Ludovico Sforza, since he had been awarded the order of the ermine by the King of Naples and was known as ‘l'Ermellino’ as a result. The ermine was also written about by Leonardo as a traditional symbol of purity and honour.

More than 50 drawings relating to the paintings will be exhibited for the first time. Highlights include 33 sketches and studies from the Royal Collection. The many Leonardo drawings owned by Her Majesty the Queen were probably purchased during the reign of Charles II but were rediscovered by chance only in 1778, when writer, Charles Rogers wrote: ‘Mr Dalton fortunately discovered the album of drawings at the bottom of a chest at the beginning of the reign of his present Majesty [George III]’. UK collections are rich in drawings by Leonardo – and other graphic masterpieces will be lent by the British Museum, the Courtauld Gallery, the Fitzwillam and Ashmolean Museums and the National Galleries of Scotland. From further afield come drawings from Paris, Florence, Venice and New York. The exhibition will include all the surviving drawings which are connected to the Last Supper and the Madonna Litta, which will be lent by the Hermitage, St Petersburg.

About the artist: LEONARDO da Vinci, 1452–1519, Italian.

Leonardo was born in or near Vinci in Tuscany and was trained in Florence by the sculptor-painter Andrea del Verrocchio. In about 1482-3 he moved to Milan, slightly later finding work as a court artist for the ruling Sforza family. He remained there until just after the city was invaded by the French in 1499. He may have visited Venice before returning to Florence in 1500. A second period in Milan lasted from 1506 until 1513, and it was then that he finished the London Virgin of the Rocks; this was followed by three years based in Rome. In 1517, at the invitation of the French king, Leonardo moved to the Château de Cloux, near Amboise in France, where he died in 1519.

There are two works by Leonardo da Vinci in the National Gallery’s permanent collection: The Virgin of the Rocks (about 1491–1508), and The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist (also known as The Burlington House Cartoon) of about 1499–1500. The Virgin of the Rocks was bought in 1880 by the National Gallery.

ORGANISATION

This exhibition has been conceived and organised by The National Gallery. Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan is curated by Luke Syson, Curator of Italian Paintings before 1500 and Head of Research at The National Gallery. Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan is sponsored by Credit Suisse.

Publication - National Gallery Catalogue

Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan

By Luke Syson with Larry Keith and Antonio Mazzotta, Minna Moore Ede, Scott Nethersole, Arturo Galansino and Per Rumberg

Paperback £25.00 (304 pages)

Hardback £40.00 (304 pages)

Due to the high public demand of the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition, visitors are advised to

BOOK EARLY and/or online to ensure that they can view the exhibition and avoid disappointment.

DATES AND OPENING HOURS

Press view: Tuesday 8th November 2011 

Open to public: 9th November 2011 

Daily 10am–6pm (last admission 5pm)

Fridays and Saturdays until 10pm (last admission 9pm)

Sunday 10am-7pm (last admission 6pm)

Open until 10pm for the last 2 weeks

Open New Year’s Day 10am – 7pm

For advance tickets to ‘Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan’ please call 0844 248 5097 (booking fee) or visit www.nationalgallery.org.uk (booking fees). You can also book tickets by post and in person from the Gallery.

Let’s look at what happens in America, where deaccessioning happens all the time. The great majority of disposals are handled well, and the funds used go towards buying more interesting pictures. But, in my day job as an art dealer, I quite often come across paintings that are mistakenly deaccessioned as copies or with the wrong attribution.

Picture: Philip Mould Ltd

Here's an example. The above illustration shows a painting by George Romney that was sold by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, at auction as ‘after George Romney’. The subject was identified as a copy after one of Romney’s most important full-lengths in the Frick Collection, Henrietta, Countess of Warwick and her Children (below). The estimate was £4-6,000. 

Picture: Frick Collection

We (Philip Mould Ltd) thought the Virginia Museum's picture was a bit better than a copy, and bought it. Cleaning and conservation revealed that it had been substantially over-painted, probably in the early twentieth century, and beneath lay Romney's first study or compositional arrangement for the Frick painting.

Picture: Philip Mould Ltd

As you can see in the cleaned picture above there is an extra male hand in the bottom right hand corner, and a tiny sketch of a man in a brown coat. It appears that the original picture was to have included Lord Warwick, but this was then changed by Romney, and the young boy was moved further apart from his sister. The later restorer, when confronted by so many hands, had decided to turn Romney’s study into a less visually confusing ‘finished’ picture, and so added in the column and shrubbery, and made it appear as if the boy was holding his sister’s hand. There aren't many Romney studies like this that survive, and it's quite an important picture.

That is why at tomorrow's conference I shall suggest again that we need to have some sort of central panel of experts to help manage deaccessioning in the UK. The sad fact is that in some regional museums there is a dearth of specialist knowledge – the job of a curator is nowadays more about administration than scholarship. 

The panel could be formed along the lines of the government’s reviewing committee on the export of works of art and the acceptance in lieu panel. These are made up of a range experts and call in others with specialist knowledge depending on the nature of the case they are looking at. The panel would help prevent items being mistakenly sold off, and ensure that the full value of a work was realised. The committee can also help manage the disposal process nationally, for, thanks to Fred Hohler and the invaluable Public Catalogue Foundation, we now have the ability to consider individual museum collections as part of our national collection of art. 

The committee need not require legislation. It could operate rather like the Spoliation Advisory Panel, who’s decisions are not legally binding, but are by convention adhered to. Or, you could even go down a 'Big Society' route, and form a less formal, more voluntary body.