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.
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
Rescuing his reputation
Now infamous, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is the best-selling book of the 21st century to date. It has inspired a riot of comment, particularly from Christian publications: in 2006 alone EN ran six articles with the words ‘Da Vinci Code’ in the title, each trying to help sort the fact from the fiction. The Da Vinci Code contained worrying inaccuracies about the gospel, and also about Leonardo; so much so that evangelical author Nancy Pearcey has sought to rescue the reputation of both in her latest book, Saving Leonardo.3
