Being Leonardo
- sofiapbaker
- Dec 1, 2019
- 1 min read
One thing you have to say about Leonardo da Vinci is that he really packs them in. The last major Leonardo exhibition, at London’s National Gallery in 2011–12 (“Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan”), counted 323,897 visitors, a record for Leonardo. This year, the five-hundredth anniversary of the artist’s death, that record will be easily broken. At least half a million people in the United Kingdom have seen a selection of two hundred Leonardo drawings, owned by the Royal Collection Trust, that were dispersed among twelve museums in the country during the first half of this year before being brought together in The Queen’s Gallery in May. (A selection, fifty of the two hundred drawings, is on display at the Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, from November 22, 2019–March 15, 2020.)
The Louvre’s exhibition “Léonard de Vinci” has proved to be a blockbuster as well. On the opening day in October, it was announced that over 220,000 tickets had already been sold, and total sales are predicted to exceed half a million before the show closes in February. A decade in the making, it is the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work ever mounted, including two-thirds of his surviving paintings and well over a hundred drawings…