Leonardo at the Louvre: Too Big, Too Crowded

You have to suffer for your art.

At least, you do when you go to see Leonardo da Vinci at the Louvre in Paris, possibly the most hyped exhibition of the year. But by no means the best.

There's some astonishing art in this show, of course there is. How could there not be? Superb drawings, beautiful paintings like La Belle Ferronnière.

But, oh, the crush. We've been to crowded blockbuster shows in the past, but this was like a pre-Christmas Saturday shopping on Oxford Street. Quite a lot of it is really badly laid out. And this is not the definitive Leonardo retrospective that the curators were aiming for in this 500th anniversary year of his death. You won't, for example, see the Lady with an Ermine from Krakow, which was in the National Gallery Leonardo exhibition in London eight years ago.

Now, the Louvre may have just about the most fantastic array of art anywhere, but your visit can be almost as stress-inducing as a peak summer departure from Gatwick. It's also the world's most visited museum, and it shows. There's the queue to get through security (sadly all too necessary these days), the constant queues for the loos, the chaotic search for a free locker to store your bags and coats. And then the crowds of tour groups jostling in front of you to snap whatever their guide suggests....

Surprisingly, having allowed ourselves plenty of time, we didn't actually need to stand in line for too long to get into the Leonardo show itself late on a weekday morning, but when we came out a few hours later, the queue was snaking back all the way to the security check at the museum entrance.

And all those people were supposed to have timed tickets, by the way, and possibly weren't suspecting that once they'd shown those tickets, they'd be held in another queue before getting to see any actual art.

But let's get on to the exhibition itself. It starts off brilliantly. The centrepiece of the first room is this stupendous, expertly lit sculpture, Christ and St Thomas, by Andrea del Verrocchio, the master to whom Leonardo was apprenticed when aged about 12 in 1464.

The bronze for the church of Orsanmichele in Florence was intended to create a sense of drama and movement through the interplay of light, shade, and relief, and that's the theme of this well thought-out and wonderfully illustrated first section. We begin with the reconstruction of the method that would have been used by Renaissance artists, involving a clay understructure and then drapery soaked in clay, to model how cloth fell across the body. A magnificent array of studies displayed on the walls around the Verrocchio statue show how the young Leonardo and his master were able to recapture that sculptural effect through drawing on a flat surface.

Actually, this first space wasn't too crowded (even if the flurry of people around the statue dulled the opening impact you felt the curators had intended), but things were about to get a lot worse. We found ourselves shuffling along, if not jostling with, the throng to view the next set of pictures. And it's at this point that you start to notice works that are missing.

Tobias and the Angel from Verrochio's workshop (Leonardo is believed to have painted some elements) is in the gallery guide as exhibit 20, but it appears not to have made its way to Paris from the National Gallery in London (whose website says it's not on display there either). And Leonardo works that the Louvre hasn't been able to bring in are represented by infrared reflectograms, such as the Annunciation from the Uffizi, the artist's first painting. To be fair, this monochrome replacement shows aspects you wouldn't otherwise grasp, such as the meticulousness of the youthful Leonardo's preparatory drawing -- he made very few changes to his early paintings -- and it didn't seem to deter those determined to take masses of photos.

So it's not until exhibit 39 (out of a listed total of 179, though there weren't actually that many pictures or objects on display, and the numbering seems to go a bit haywire a quarter of the way through) that you come to your first actual Leonardo painting, the Benois Madonna from the Hermitage. Small but very lovely. This is part of a section looking at the increasing technical and intellectual freedom Leonardo brought to his work from about 1478.

And then in the next room, surely the effect the curators were hoping for: La Belle Ferronnière, The Virgin of the Rocks (Louvre version -- the National Gallery in London has built a standalone show around its example) and The Musician, from the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan.

There's a particular swarm of viewers around The Virgin of the Rocks, but it's as nothing to the scramble and jockeying for position you experience when you get to Leonardo's scientific drawings.

Many of the best things in this section are from the British Royal Collection, and this summer's superb show, Leonardo: A Life in Drawing, at the Queen's Gallery in London displayed about 200 drawings brilliantly, coherently and in a way that made for pretty easy viewing. In the Louvre, by contrast, you're struggling through two-way traffic and having to bend over lots of glass cases that take up a fair amount of the limited floor space. It's a bit dispiriting, to be honest, as well as exhausting.

They've got some cracking stuff, mind you: the Vitruvian Man from the Accademia in Venice, showing the perfect proportions of the human body within a circle and a square, as described by the Roman architect Vitruvius. This small work is so fragile that it's not on permanent display in Venice, yet it's so familiar -- its image is used on Italy's one-euro coins. Amazing to be able to look at it, close up, once you've slowly worked your way to the front, of course....

This section of the show isn't made easier by the fact that it's below a 5.7-metre-wide copy of The Last Supper, by Leonardo's pupil Marco d'Oggiono, which many visitors are trying to take photos of. The painting is a documentary record on canvas of Leonardo's fresco in Milan, which began to deteriorate as soon as it was painted because of its unsuitable technique. It gives an idea of how colourful the master's work would have been.

You get the general feeling that the curators have tried to cram too much into the space, and there are just too many people in there at the same time. Obviously, the Louvre was unable to bring in several of the paintings it was after, and instead, the exhibition appears to have been plumped up with lots of very small-scale (and sometimes not particularly clear) drawings that could have been judiciously pruned. Quite often, less is more.

There were still some fine things to come, including though we were starting to flag at this point. This Leda from the Uffizi by a collaborator of Leonardo reproduces his lost late composition on the theme of the queen who was seduced by the god Zeus in the shape of a swan and later hatched two sets of twins.

We reeled out at the end, exhausted, after about 3 1/2 hours. And, frankly, we felt we got more of an insight into the many aspects of Leonardo's creativity and interests from the Royal Collection drawings show than from this exhibition. 

Sorry if this sounds all a bit of a whinge. There's some wonderful things here, there really are, but going to an exhibition should be more of a pleasure than a chore, surely. We've just been to see four shows in Paris, and sadly, we found the Leonardo the least satisfying.

And while you're in the Louvre....

You'll want to see the Mona Lisa, won't you? They haven't put it in the exhibition itself, possibly because there might have been a riot, given that it would have been inaccessible to most of the 30,000-plus people who visit the Louvre every day. Anyway, follow the signs, and join the snaking queue.

You can't get very close to the world's most famous painting, in any case, but you can always turn round and enjoy Paolo Veronese's enormous and sumptuous Wedding Feast at Cana on the wall opposite. It's arguably a lot more entertaining. 

Practicalities

Leonardo da Vinci continues at the Louvre until February 24. It's open every day except Tuesday from 0900 to 1800, with lates on Wednesdays and Fridays until 2145. Full-price tickets to the Louvre, which include the exhibition, cost 17 euros, but you have to book a timeslot in advance here, and there aren't many dates left available. Perhaps the best way to get to the Louvre during the winter is to take the Metro to Palais Royal Musée du Louvre on lines 1 and 7 and then use the entrance through the Carrousel du Louvre shopping mall. The queues are likely to be horrendous, but at least you'll stay warm and dry.

Images

Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of a Lady from the Court of Milan, known as La Belle Ferronnière, c. 1490-97, Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/Michel Urtado
View of queue to get into the Leonardo exhibition
Andrea del Verrocchio, Christ and St Thomas, 1467-83, Chiesa e Museo di Orsanmichele, Florence
Leonardo da Vinci, Saint-Morys Drapery Study for a Seated Figure, c. 1475-82, Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/Michel Urtado
Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Musical Score, known as The Musician, c. 1483-90, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan. © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana
View of crowd in front of Leonardo's Vitruvian Man
Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci, Leda, c. 1505-10, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
View of crowd in front of Leonardo's Mona Lisa