Crossing the culture
The National Gallery’s latest exhibition, Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, invites a reappraisal of one of the least prolific and most prominent artists of all time, posing poignant questions for the modern — and postmodern — thinker.
Rachel Thorpe
It is partly due to the scarcity of Leonardo’s works that the show has attracted so much attention; the exhibition is ‘the most complete display of Leonardo’s rare surviving paintings ever held’, containing several works that have never been seen in the UK1. There is also excitement over the inclusion of the recently rediscovered ‘Salvator Mundi’. But, according to curator Luke Syson, there is a further reason why the time was right for the world to pay attention to Leonardo as a painter: ‘It was [...] important for the National Gallery to provide a sensible corrective to Dan Brown’s mystical, heretical Leonardo.’2
