Traveling Exhibits Take Leonardo da Vinci to the Hinterlands

The Mysterious Renaissance Artists and Scientist has Unending Appeal

Leonardo da Vinci is on the road again.

            As an artist who still evokes mysteries, Leonardo is a natural topic for traveling exhibits. Intrepid students of the Renaissance polymath could spend a month in Italy to see many of his paintings, drawings, and inventions, and then dash over to the Louvre in Paris to see the "Mona Lisa." The alternative is to wait for a Leonardo road show to arrive at a regional museum. At least two professional exhibition groups are making that possible.
            This year, Grande Exhibitions displayed its “Da Vinci—The Genius” in Des Moines, Iowa, and now it is in Louisville, Ky. The glowing high-tech exhibit offers replications of Leonardo’s accomplishments in science, art, and engineering. Another traveling package, “Leonardo da Vinci: Man—Inventor—Genius,” has just opened in Spokane, Wash. In this vivid display, the Exhibits Development Group showcases 60 small models of Leonardo’s inventions and life-size reproductions of 23 art works, roughly the complete set of his paintings.

            To their credit, such projects often are geared toward modest-size museums, reaching under-served populations, though in the past they have passed through over-booked places like New York and Chicago. Given the Leonardo appeal, the exhibits also travel the world, from Asia to Central America. Apart from these serious educational projects, Leonardo always lends to various blockbuster story-lines and headlines about his mysterious past, which lasted sixty-six years until he died in 1519. The current buzz in Hollywood is about a movie to be called, “The Mona Lisa Code”—the filmmaker is in search of an actress who looks exactly like Leonardo's painting.

            In his own day, Leonardo's suave looks and resonant name were enough to be an attraction. Once his talents were known, he was summoned by dukes, bishops, and kings to paint or advise on engineering. He left behind quite a paper trail—of the purported 20,000 to 30,000 pages of notes he made, 7,000 survive and now are compiled in five priceless codices (one owned by Bill Gates, for example, another by the Queen of England).

            We know the most about Leonardo from a fellow painter, Giorgio Vasari, who a generation later gathered biographical data to tell Leonardo’s story in his encyclopedic Lives of the Artists. Vasari, himself an accomplished artist, was born 500 years ago this summer. As the “first” art historian, his quincentennial legacy has been a topic of celebration. Ever the realist, Vasari passed down the observation that while Leonardo was brilliant, he dabbled in too many things. His distractions meant that he finished few of his artistic exploits.

            For the wider public, we are still recovering from the shock and awe of the Da Vinci Code, an America novel that broke publishing records in 2003. As a murder and detective story, the novel had a natural draw. Its emphasis on a purported symbolism in Leonardo’s art work—the secret “code,” that is—certainly helped book sales as well.

            The nub of the Da Vinci Code is that the symbolic composition of Leonardo’s “Last Supper” reveals that Jesus had a wife and child. Leonardo knew this because, of course, he was in the secret group that cared for that family line, down to present-day France. When a murder at the Louvre opens the story, the victim is spread eagle on the floor, mimicking the famous “Vitruvian Man” that Leonardo drew to illustrate ideal human proportions.

            It doesn’t take a novel to generate Da Vinci mysteries. Famously, Sigmund Freud claimed to have figured him out. Artists have tried to decipher the deeper meaning Leonardo gave to “proportion” and “mathematics” in art. The un-mystical Leonardo da Vinci, with his drawings of plants, anatomy, and weaponry, has become a favorite of science museums as much as art centers.

            His female model for the “Mona Lisa,” believed to be one Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, also is making headlines. First, archeologists said this year that her bones may have been found in a convent in Florence. Then another Italian scholar, as scholars will do, got her own headline by claiming that the Mona Lisa model was actually a man.

            Either way, visitors to the two traveling exhibits this summer can look at the painting reproductions up close, see cutting-edge video presentations, and enter Leonardo’s mysterious world. Like the exhibits, he too was quite a traveler. Born in the town of Vinci in Tuscany, central Italy, Leonardo was so talented that his father took him to Florence at age fourteen to study with the master painter Verrocchio. Leonardo’s opportunities rose considerably in 1482, when he was summoned by the Duke of Milan to be a painter and engineer.
            That being an age of local warfare, however, the French would eventually occupy Milan (1499), sending Leonardo on the road again for sixteen years—to Venice, Florence, and Rome—carrying his notes and paintings with him. Finally the king of France recruited him (with honors and a villa) and Leonardo died and was humbly buried in France three years later.

            Naturally, that is why five of his most famous paintings, including the “Mona Lisa,” ended up in France, now in the Louvre. His texts are spread around the world. But today in Spokane and Louisville, the wandering Leonardo is all in one place—thanks to the traveling exhibits.