By Luisa Terzulli
There is time until 7th January 2007 to visit Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design, the exhibition inaugurated the 14th September at the Victoria & Albert Museum and dedicated to the Tuscan genius.
The exhibition is focused on the designs on paper made by Leonardo, on their complexity and precision: it is not an exhibition of his artistic production then, but of the mathematical study on the functioning of Nature and the world, but drew by the skilled hand of Leonardo they undeniably are art. And it is Leonardo the artist the motor of everything – Prof. Paolo Galluzzi explains, director of the Institute and Museum of History of Science in Florence and curator of the exhibition La mente di Leonardo. Nel laboratorio del Genio Universale – The mind of Leonardo. In the laboratory of the Universal Genius – prepared at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence – all of these principles developed by accurate studies are then actually found in his paintings. The study on the light, the shadows, the perspective of losses (according to which moving away from a figure, this changes in terms of dimension but also loses image definition) are indeed directed towards the representation of Nature. Leonardo goes so far as defining the painter as “son of Nature, and interpreter between God and Nature”. Such a concept also holds a philosophical and religious value, in the meaning that Nature and World are seen as miraculous elements: an hypothetical God can not manifest himself but in Nature. And the painter, the artist, is an interpreter because he creates, reproducing Nature or even reinventing it.
The works exhibited at the V&A Museum are models, reproductions, films and animated images from Leonardo’s drawings and his studies, to show to the visitors the function, the development and the logic-chronological sequence of the drawings at issue: the result of experience and experiment.
And it is again Prof. Galluzzi to enlighten us about the impressive production derived by the most different and disparate studies. It a universal but unitary work: for his whole life Leonardo devoted himself to the purpose of showing all the connections and the unity of things composing the reality. All these drawings represent therefore the attempt to crystallise on paper the meaning itself of Nature, of creation and continuous evolution; to do so, for this universal unitary study, Leonardo uses three reading keys: shape, movement and representation.
It is also interesting to notice, apart from the quality of the production, the quantity of works realised: we can count 25,000 to 30,000 drawings, included those that went lost, which is something unthinkable nowadays, as it is just unthinkable to meet a contemporary versatile Leonardo in a society like the present that needs and requires to individuals to get specialised.
Leonardo is surely a personality of universal fame and success, but still – despite the enormous bibliography existing about the genius from Vinci – are very few the scholars really reliable, among whom Prof. Martin Kemp curator of this exhibition – and talking with professor Galluzzi we understand why: “The price to pay to get into Leonardo’s world is prohibitive. You need to face the problems deriving from the variety of the available material, the different writings utilised, the topography… once finally understood how to use the material, but without understanding anything at all about it yet, years of study are needed to comprehend and start drawing some conclusions”. And despite the years, the studies and the researches, we still know very little, “Leonardo is an infinite port”.
Questioned about the way Dan Brown – author of the bestseller The da Vinci Code – influenced Leonardo’s fame, the curator of the exhibition Martin Kemp – and we invite the readers to have a virtual tour with him through the link at the end of this article – answers: “It is Dan Brown that has to thank Leonardo for his success, not the contrary!”.
Leonardo was a mind ruled by geometry and mathematics, but – as professor Galluzzi likes to underline – it is always the artist that governs in the dialectic between art and scientific research.
The exhibition is organised in collaboration with Universal Leonardo (University of the Arts London) and is part of the 28th Art Exhibition of the Council of Europe.
Copyright 2006 GIORGIOSTUDIO – All rights reserved |
