London
The main purpose of the exhibition “Leonardo e Venezia” now at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (until 5 July) is to display the small but very important group of Leonardo’s drawings preserved in the Accademia. It is also important because, as the coordinator of the exhibition, the Soprintendente Giovanna Nepi Sciré said, “This is the first occasion when one of Palazzo Grassi’s [owned and administered by Fiat] exhibitions has been so closely linked to Venetian public institutions. This important breakthrough gives us hope for the future”.
The drawings include the “Vitruvian Man”, perhaps the most famous single drawing he ever made, as well as sheets related to major projects such as “The Last Supper” and the “Battle of Anghiari”. Each of the Venetian drawings is accompanied by a group of related sheets, which are not only beautiful in themselves, but also provide a splendid demonstration of Leonardo’s method of working in different media and at different periods of his career.
The selection of early Adoration studies, those associated with the Anghiari commission, and a chronologically varied series of grotesque heads are particularly noteworthy. Indeed, this is the most extensive selection of Leonardo’s drawings for the “Battle of Anghiari” ever displayed together. Another welcome exhibit was the small bronze of a horse and rider from Budapest, here given to Leonardo, whose attribution has been much discussed, which certainly deserves to be better known. A special word of praise is in order too for the explanatory panels in Italian and English, which are unusually helpful and informative.
The Leonardo drawings alone would have made a fine exhibition, although not one to fill the entire first floor of Palazzo Grassi. The organisers have accordingly taken the opportunity in the last few rooms to explore a second—although only tenuously related—theme, that of the possible influence of Leonardo and Milanese art on Venice at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
This is a topic which has been the focus of some scholarly discussion, partly because Leonardo himself is known to have visited the city in 1500, but mainly because Vasari, in the second edition of the Lives, stated that Giorgione had been greatly impressed by some unspecified works of Leonardo’s which he had seen. Moreover, Venetian sculpture at this period was dominated by craftsmen from Lombardy, and a number of Lombard painters are known to have produced works for Venetian clients, among them Andrea Solario, Marco d’Oggiono, Francesco Napoletano and Giovanni Agostino da Lodi, whose panel of “Christ washing the Apostles’ feet” from the Accademia, painted in 1500, has just been restored. This may well have been produced in Venice, and it demonstrates how the idiom of Leonardo most probably became known to Venetian collectors and artists.
Unfortunately, the history of Venetian art in the first decade of the sixteenth century is still in many respects mysterious, not least in connection with Giorgione himself, whose oeuvre and development remains perhaps the most contentious single issue in the study of Italian Renaissance art. At present, therefore, it is impossible to say with any confidence whether the influence of Milan was much more than a matter of banal repetition of a few characteristic physiognomic types. To explore such a topic adequately in the context of an exhibition, given the imprecision of the phenomenon and the difficulty of obtaining the right loans to provide specific comparisons, is probably an impossible task. These difficulties have been faced with commendable honesty in the large catalogue, which includes a number of useful specialist essays, and which will certainly be the point of departure for future research in this area. But the exhibits themselves contribute relatively little to an understanding of the phenomenon. This is partly because of the presence of a remarkably heterogenous group of pictures displayed under the name of Giorgione.
Thus, the wizened old woman of “Col Tempo” from the Accademia is shown in the same room as Leonardo’s drawings of grotesque heads, to which it bears little resemblance. In another room is “Christ carrying the cross” from the Scuola di San Rocco, which was given to Titian at the Palazzo Ducale a couple of years ago, but is here assigned to Giorgione. In a third room is the so-called Broccardo portrait from Budapest, the “Three Singers” from the Pitti and the recently restored canvas from the Mattioli collection, also showing three singers, which was formerly thought to show “Samson Mocked”. It is certainly interesting for specialists to see this odd and disagreeable picture, whose attribution was upheld by Roberto Longhi, but it is difficult to detect any point of contact between it and the other exhibits assigned to Giorgione at Palazzo Grassi. Equally, there is little evidence here of a significant debt to Milanese precedents.
After the clarity of the earlier rooms the later part of the exhibition therefore comes as something of a disappointment. Visitors will at least be reminded that Venetian art in this period was not an entirely closed world, and that Giorgione’s career is far from being fully understood, but it is difficult to escape the conclusion that now is not the moment, and an exhibition of this kind is not the ideal place to explore such art-historical problems. Fortunately, even in the last rooms there are works of splendid quality, notably the pairs of heads by Tullio Lombardo from Vienna and the Ca d’Oro. Most visitors, however, will come to Palazzo Grassi to see a marvellous display of drawings by Leonardo, and they will be right to do so.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'A great small drawings show in pursuit of the unknowable'