Why I doubt Leonardo Da Vinci painted this picture (thisislondon - Oil Portrait Painting)

 We have only to consider the first few months of this year — the great Leonardo show at the National Gallery, old Zoffanys and brave new Hockneys at the Royal Academy, a melancholy farewell to Freud at the National Portrait Gallery, Picasso at Tate Britain and the British Museum, Damien Hirst at Tate Modern, Mondrian at the Courtauld, Canaletto in Greenwich, Indian drawings in Dulwich, Turner and Claude replacing Leonardo in Trafalgar Square and Leonardo reappearing as an anatomist at Buckingham Palace — to realise how rich and fortunate we are to experience so much and such variety.

Oil Portrait Painting

By the time these close they may well have been seen by millions of visitors, parting with not only many millions of pounds for their tickets and catalogues, but for their tea and crumpets, lunches and even dinners and breakfasts now that overwhelmingly popular exhibitions are sometimes open through the night. Add to these their bus and train fares, the costs of parking and congestion charges, and any other random pleasures attached to the event, and it is clear that they are not only important for the economy of the museums and galleries involved, but the national economy too.

But what is the purpose of an exhibition? With Hockney it was to see what new lunacies the old boy has embraced, with Hirst to review and assess all that he has done since his student years, with Freud to remind us of how long ago he began and how differently he ended, with Picasso to see how wide his influence was in Britain and to some extent still is, and with Turner to realise how, in depending so much on Claude two centuries before, he greatly misunderstood and underrated that old master.

Oil Portrait Painting

With Leonardo, however, there was another purpose. With Leonardo we could not just stand in awe of a genius known even in his own day as “the most outstanding painter of our lifetime … his works quite perfect”, and now as “the most universal genius of all time” (Oxford Companion to the Mind) and as “supernaturally beautiful in youth and supernaturally wise in old age” (Michael Levey, former Director of the National Gallery). Many of us did precisely that, overwhelmed to be in the presence of the master’s masterpieces, but for others this was an unprecedented opportunity to make comparisons between paintings from Paris, Krakow and Leningrad gathered for a few weeks conveniently under one London roof.