Leonardo. London, Hayward GalleryReview by: Richard SchofieldThe Burlington Magazine, Vol. 131, No. 1033 (Apr., 1989), pp. 306-307Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/883854 .

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Exhibition Reviews

London, Hayward Gallery Leonardo

This beautifully arranged exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue by the organ- isers, Martin Kemp and Jane Roberts, with a contribution by Philip Steadman about how Leonardo's ideas can be visual- ised with computers.* It is the largest as- semblage of drawings by Leonardo ever gathered in this country for exhibition, and they have come not only from Windsor and other English collections but also from the Institut de France, the Louvre, Madrid, the Pierpoint Morgan Library and else- where. The catalogue is prefaced by four efficient essays followed by the entries for the drawings. The latter are excellent: pains have been taken to comment on every aspect of each sheet, with thorough cross- referencing and full historical, literary or artistic secondary material which enables the reader to assess Leonardo's achieve- ment in each case. The catalogue repro- duces everything in the exhibition and in- cludes much illustrative material.

The exhibition (at the Hayward Gallery to 16th April) is unusual from several points of view. It abandons the traditional divisions by which an artist's works are shown or explained - whether chronologically, by genre or under single aspects - by tracing themes of obsession in Leonardo's wouvre, such as 'The Forces of Destruction', 'Art and Imagination', and 'The Measuring Eye', instead of, for ex-

ample, 'Anatomical drawings', 'Machines and Inventions', or 'Drawings for Projects'. So, 'The Measuring Eye' includes, as one might expect, Windsor 12603 (No.94) with the vertical and horizontal views of the head showing the layers of the skin as well as the eye-brain system, but also the map of Imola (No.98) and Windsor 12280 (No.99) with various geometrical studies. Further- more, the show makes extensive use of models based on the artist's drawings (in- cluding the stunning Guillaume-DeJonge model of a church, made after MS B for the Montreal exhibition last year; Fig.55) and also provides videos of them working and computer graphics illustrating se- quences of Leonardo's ground-plans for churches.

Kemp states that the reason for ignoring the roughly traditional divisions of knowl- edge that Leonardo himself adopted 'is a matter of exploiting the benefits of his- torical hindsight ... to reveal the under- lying structure of his vision', enabling us to see the characteristics of that vision 'through a series of visual (and, in fact, stated) analogies, concordances and con- junctions'. The exhibition demonstrates, with clarity and erudition, that this ap- proach is very fruitful for large areas of Leonardo's work.

The reason why this kind of approach has not been used before so systematically in an exhibition is that Leonardo is so 'damned various': he had an extraordi- narily wide range of interests which he pursued, sometimes to the limit of con- temporary capacities, and which require

hard study by scholars. The result is that books about Leonardo are often lop-sided: some study the paintings without knowing much about anatomy; others explain the machines, whilst not being able to com- ment on the architectural work, and so on. This split is clear if one compares Kenneth Clark's book with Zubov's, each of which is celebrated for entirely different qualities. In this country, Kemp is uniquely able to combine expertise in practically all areas of Leonardo's activities. The central mess- age of the exhibition is that because of certain underlying beliefs, Leonardo tended to regard a large number of natural and mechanical phenomena - such as the struc- ture of parts of the heart and the vaults of churches in No. 119, or the muscles of the neck and the ropes supporting the masts of ships in No. 110 - as being functionally and therefore structurally similar. The similarities that Leonardo observes between such diverse structures are expressed not merely by occasional remarks to the effect that 'X looks like Y' - for example that water looks like and performs like hair under certain circumstances (Nos.21 and 58) or that the bronchial tubes are like the branches of trees in that both, when they ramify, retain at each level a cross- section equal to that of the trunk or tube from which they spring. Nor are they expressed simply through implicit similes, such as the use of the word 'pelle' in No.61 to describe the surface of water, of'sonagli' in No.20 to describe bubbles or of 'fen- estrated' to describe aspects of the lung of a pig (?) in No.54; nor again through dif-

55.1

55. Model of a centrally planned temple with eight radiating chapels reconstructed from Leonardo's drawings byJ. Guillaume and K. deJonge. 268 by 272 cm. (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; exh. Hayward Gallery).

56. Muscles of the right arm, shoulder and chest, by Leonardo. c. 1510. Pen and ink with wash over black and red chalks, 28.9 by 20 cm. (Royal Collection: exh. Hayward Gallery, reproduced by gracious permission of H.M. the Queen). 56.

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EXHIBITION REVIEWS

ferent things being drawn in the same way, which can happen, of course, in all artists' work. Leonardo sometimes expressly draws analogies between things in statements which are often fragmentary and unsys- tematic but which suggest that he was groping towards general theories, usually in the form of comprehensive analogies, that could explain what he thought various forms of animals, humans, machines and natural phenomena had in common. Glimpses of such trends constantly recur: in No.32 plants are like animals, in No.51 human organs are like fruit, and in No.53 he uses a botanical analogy, and so on. The division of the catalogue into sections such as those based upon the man-earth analogy (section 4) and on the motions of fluids and solids (section 5), is therefore extremely successful.

But Leonardo's voracious response to natural phenomena was conditioned by another important factor which partially helps explain his comprehensive investi- gations into nature. Vitruvius, Alberti and others had sought to raise the public's view of the intellectual status of the architect by claiming that he should know about astronomy, geometry, geography, law, and so on. Leonardo's version of this claim was even more ambitious (section 7), for the painter, he says, is the sole imitator of all the works of nature; furthermore, paint- ing is science because only the painter can and must describe, analyse and re-describe all natural phenomena in pursuing his art. The province of the painter is therefore the whole of the observable world, and Leonardo's drawings of large parts of it are what constitute this exhibition. The authors make their case for presenting Leonardo in this way with elegance and force. The individual catalogue entries carefully record the achievements and limitations of his progress in the various fields. Leonardo's agenda was absurdly ambitious: few of his machines were dem- onstrably inventions and many of his devices and experiments were doomed to failure, not through any lack of wit but simply because the available technology could not supply the quantitative analyses needed for, say, a flying machine (sec- tion 12). Accurate measurements of the volumes of fluids and solids, speed, weight, acceleration, the tensile and shearing strengths of materials were impossible. The pleasure of this exhibition lies in see- ing an imperial intellect finding this out.

There are, conversely, occasions when suitable general theories explicitly alluded to by Leonardo are not available or rather cannot be elicited from the selection of drawings available. Kemp specifically mentions that the exhibition will illustrate not just analogies (i.e. specific statements of similarities by Leonardo), but also 'con- cordances' and 'conjunctions' (i.e. simi- larities adduced by the authors, the success of which depends on their ability to per- suade the viewer). For the vast majority of exhibits treated in this way, they succeed, and I have only a few doubts. I am not sure, for example, that No.55 (sleeve drapery) is entirely appropriate for the section about the Vortex, or that the seeds

of No.27 should be compared with the womb of No.26, or why No.96 (arms and shoulder muscles; Fig.56) is in section 8 ('The Measuring Eye') and not in, say, section 9 ('Structure and Mechanism). Occasionally I am not convinced of the relevance of the quotations to the drawings under discussion. For example, the famous text about extracting images from clouds and patchy walls is surely not illustrated by the celebrated Virgin, Child and St Anne sheet in the British Museum (No.77), since (i) if the quotation is supposed to apply to the recto alone, Leonardo is simply evolving a composition from a blank sheet; or (ii) if the quotation is intended to apply to recto and verso, then, by tracing an existing out- line through on to the other side of the sheet, Leonardo is obviating the possibility of alternative interpretations of the messy drawing on the recto. In neither case is the artist making some imaginative leap from random pre-existing forms (nor am I convinced by the conjunctions made in Nos.79 or 81).

Leonardo is IBM compatible. The exhi- bition's use of computer graphics is a bril- liant notion, since they replicate a way of drawing that Leonardo used, or rather aspired to use (see especially No.96; Fig.56): the difference is that when, for example, Leonardo draws an icosahedron which he then truncates to make an icosidodeka- hedron, or a progressive series of centralised ground-plans, then all the individual images in the sequence survive for study, while the computer obliterates each one as it proceeds; conversely, the computer, which can presumably be stopped in mid- flow, is able repeatedly to give the viewer every view-point of a given object in a short space of time. My only quibble is with a couple of aspects of the graphics developed for the churches in MS B; they do not include exterior articulation (pil- asters, windows, etc.) and the colours make them look like animated blancmanges.

The quality of reproduction in the cata- logue is extremely high and there are very few slips of any kind. I mention only one: in No.68 the lower left drawing of the bottom part of the famous armoured car, which looks like an armadillo on wheels, is surely not upside down. The statement on p.32 about the Madonna of the rocks that 'the documentary evidence concern- ing this commission is far from straight- forward' may strike some as English understatement carried to an extreme.

This is an impeccable performance by authors, organisers and sponsors who are to be congratulated on an exhibition that has both utilitas and venustas. The authors have sought to make a case and they suc- ceed.

RICHARD SCHOFIELD

University of Nottingham

*Leonardo da Vinci. By Martin Kemp and Jane Roberts with Philip Steadman. Introduction by E.H. Gom- brich. 246 pp. + 180 col. pis. + 40 b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press in association with the South Bank Centre, London, 1989), ?30 HB; ?12.95 PB. ISBN 0-300-04508-5; 0-300-04509-3 (PB).

London, Christie's The Anglo-Dutch Garden in the Age of William and Mary

Given the pathetic nature of England's recognition of the tercentenary of 1688, a political event laden with cultural signifi- cance and ideally suited to exhibition, it was an immense pleasure that (with a suit- able sense of timing) an extremely choice small collection of pictures and artefacts celebrating the Anglo-Dutch garden was shown at Christie's earlier this year (3rd January to 3rd February, having been at Het Loo last November). Was it a deliberate ploy of the private sector to demonstrate the impoverishment of the national institutions? Or was it a more subtle pointer to the fact that it was only in the early part of 1689 that William and Mary, following the election of the Con- vention Parliament in January 1689 and before their coronation in April, began to consider ideas for the refurbishment and modernisation of Hampton Court?

Whatever the circumstances which led to the staging of this exhibition, it was a model of its kind. It was successfully ac- commodated into Christie's two main gal- leries by discreet, and not overpowering, design, allowing for a complex enjoyment of different types of artefact in contrast- ing spaces. It provided exactly the right number of works of art to appreciate in a relatively short space of time, but at the same time enough to map out unfamiliar territory and to provide plenty of ques- tions for further investigation. It worked both at an academic level as an exploration of a difficult and understudied theme and at a semi-popular level as an assembly of enjoyable pictures, which, when I was there, were provoking excessively enthusi- astic comments from the visiting gentry.

If the exhibition worked well as a soph- isticated appetiser for its subject, then the exhibition catalogue* was at hand to pro- vide a much more substantial and scholarly exposition of its themes. It begins with a short introductory essay on 'The building works and court style of William and Mary' by Professor J.R. Jones of the University of East Anglia (one of my few minor criti- cisms is that the authorship of the essays is not credited on the title page). This is an unusually successful example of a historian engaging with the question of the impli- cations of palace-building, using his ex- tensive knowledge of the political history of the period to interpret William's motives in building Hampton Court. The problem with this section is that it is locked into the conventional interpretation of Hampton Court as a non-flamboyant example of its genre, whereas it needs to be remembered that Wren was contending with the very difficult circumstances of adapting an existing building, and that, within these constraints, he succeeded in providing a very grandiose fagade to the park, with its pediment sculpture by Caius Gabriel Cibber depicting the triumph of Hercules over Envy.

The second introductory essay' "Nether- landish Hesperides" Garden Art in the period of William and Mary 1650-1702'

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