AMSTERDAM – Following the success of such immersive art shows as David Hockney’s Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) at London’s Lightroom, and the Van Gogh show – now touring UK – a new blockbuster interactive show about the life of Leonardo da Vinci has just opened in Amsterdam’s Design District. With a brilliant musical score composed by British musician DJ Sasha – a veteran pioneer of electronic music who has performed at festivals all over the world, from Glastonbury to Coachella – the show sets a new global standard for this most exciting new cultural exhibition genre.
Leonardo’s obsession with nature, artillery, biology, botany, human dissection and pushing the boundaries of knowledge, science, astrology and art has long made him a subject of fascination to art historians, biographers and filmmakers. Now his life and visionary mind is the subject of an acclaimed immersive art show that is set to tour the world.
Leonardo’s enigmatic life lends itself well to the immersive art experience. Whilst everybody has heard of him, he’s not an easy figure to understand as he was so ahead of his time and – maddeningly – left so many works unfinished or un-started. The interactive show allows us into his mind, imagination and to soak up and absorb the frenetic social, intellectual and humanist energy of both the Italian and slightly later English Renaissance.
Yes, of course, there are hundreds of dissertations, books and films about the great Italian artist. I was at a house the other day of a wealthy art collector where Frank Zollner’s huge Taschen coffee table book on Leonardo was displayed on an ottoman in the drawing room. When I picked it up, the pages were so large it was all but impossible to read. Indeed, it was not designed to be read but to be a designer ornament. The Da Vinci: Genius show is the opposite experience in that the show transports the visitor back to the High Renaissance on a creative journey inside the visionary mind of one of the world’s greatest artists and intellectual pioneers.
Visitors can witness The Last Supper – one of about 20 or so surviving masterpieces he finished – through an interactive dimension that brings the harrowing emotion of Judas’s betrayal horribly alive; and you can talk to the Mona Lisa through the latest boundary-pushing AI technology.
Like Shakespeare, Da Vinci was an enigmatic and elusive outsider artist. Both of their middle-class families were no stranger to illegitimate births, scandal and reversal of fortunes. Just as Shakespeare was described by Ben Johnson as “not for an age but all time”, so the same was said of Leonardo by his near contemporary Giorgio Vasari, author of The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, published in 1550. “So great was his genius… the fame of his name so increased, that not only in his lifetime was he held in esteem, but his reputation became even greater among posterity after his death,” he wrote.
But while Vasari’s book title doesn’t do justice to Leonardo’s polymath range of Renaissance Man skills, this dynamic’s interactive show is perfectly suited to do justice to Leonardo’s eclectic oeuvre. Visitors can talk to the Mona Lisa via IG Chat or compare his aeronautical notebook designs with that of modern racing car technology. You can even touch the walls of the show and experience the bursting colours of his art exploding in your hand.
The result is a show that is important because it makes the Renaissance suddenly more accessible to a new generation of museum and exhibition goers. Just as in 1969, Kenneth Clark made 16th and 15th century Rome and Florence come alive to a new generation of TV viewers – globally – with his iconic Civilization BBC TV series, so Da Vinci Genius does the same for a new audience who are more used to acquiring knowledge by screen than the printed page, or books.
As Scott Rudmann, executive producer at Phoenix Immersive, the London-based firm backing the show, said at the official opening: ‘Our mission with Phoenix is to make history and ideas more relevant in the modern age,” he says. “With Genius, global exhibitors around the world can create their own show without having to ship expensive paintings around the world. We bring alive the story of da Vinci and his multiple layers of genius and make it relevant for young people in today’s audience.”
Rudmann is the founder of Nectar Capital, a leading private equity company in the media, creative and sports space. His business portfolio also includes the British electronic music label Renaissance Recordings, which he bought in 2019. Raised in California, and educated at Oxford and Harvard, he began working in the 1990s at McKinsey & Company in Los Angeles, later working for them for several years McKinsey & Company in California , Argentina and Brazil. His clients included a major Hollywood motion picture studio, two American symphony orchestras and the US government. The show’s co-executive producer is Bert van der Ryd who was also production director at the show’s earlier pilot incarnation in Berlin.
An alternative title for the show could have been ‘Da Vinci, Our Contemporary’. Leigh Sachwitz, the Glasgow architecturally trained creative director of the show, was drawn to Leonardo as a universal figure because so much of what fascinated him still resonates with us today and remains relevant. For example, he made an ingenious plan – collaborating with his contemporary Niccolo Machiavelli – for diverting the River Arno that not even 20th century technology could match.
The show thankfully does not try to politicise Leonardo’s well known sexual preferences or – more importantly – hide his religion. During the recent 500th anniversary of his death, many academics and critics liked to claim him as both an atheist and vegan, although the term wasn’t coined until 1944. A closer look at the original 16th-century source for this claim suggests it is more likely that Leonardo was against killing animals for pleasure or sport, making him an early animal rights activist. He was a fervent lover of nature and an environmentalist 500 years before the climate change movement. A typical notebook entry reads: “I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand.”
Leonardo’s sexuality is another example of his contemporary relevance. His notebooks include an entry reminding himself to “Go every Saturday night to the hot bath where you will see naked men” – although of course he was an artist who particularly studied the human form. His inclinations and sexually experimental tastes have parallels, notes Sachwitz. “There’s a kind of joy and fun playing with Leonardo’s concept of sexuality. Not only the Mona Lisa but other paintings. If you start to look at them, there’s a genderless and non-binary aspect which connects with our world today.”
Leonardo was born on 15 April 1542, in the town of Vinci, about a day’s ride west of Florence. His illegitimate status made it impossible for him to follow his father’s career. His father was a middle-class notary and his mother a local peasant girl. Being an outsider would have made Leonardo something of a maverick or misfit in Renaissance Florence. In Florence, Leonardo began as an apprentice to Andrea del Verrocchio, a leading Florentine artist who was also an engineer, goldsmith, sculptor, leather worker and metalsmith. This multi-disciplinary approach was to become the model of his own career.
Kenneth Clark hailed Leonardo as one of the true giants of Western thought and science. ‘He was the most relentlessly curious man in history. He can’t leave anything alone… he re-worries it, re-states it.”
This neurosis with questioning everything is very 21st century. There is a high degree of postmodern angst in the way that Leonardo takes nothing for granted or at face value – from asking how you build a lock in Flanders to asking why the fish in water is faster than the bird in air. He was also ambitious as well as flawed which only makes him more interesting. One of his many unfinished projects was the monumental equestrian statue – to have stood 26 ft high – of his patron’s father, Francesco Sforza. He was well known for missing deadlines. His patron, Pope Leo X, reputedly said: “This man will never accomplish anything – he thinks of the end before the beginning.”
Although he lived to the age of 67, Leonardo never married. Whether this was because of his sexual leanings, obsession with work or fear of domestic captivity and marital responsibility, we don’t know.
One of his last commissions was for King Francis I after the French captured Milan. In 1515, Leonardo was commissioned to make the king a mechanical lion that could clank along forward to reveal a cluster of lilies. He died three years later at a manor house close to the king with whom he became close. According to Vasari, as he lay ill, he “repented” his sins with a priest after asking to have himself “diligently informed of the teaching of the Catholic faith”.
Leonardo was a flawed genius and creative disruptor, obsessed with technology which makes an interactive take on his visionary mind both bold and relevant. He seemed to live in his own world half the time, much to the frustration of his patrons. Vasari reports how the prior at Sante Maria delle Grazie “kept pressing Leonardo, in a most importunate manner, to finish the work; for it seemed strange to him to see Leonardo sometimes stand half a day at a time, lost in contemplation”.
Then, when he returned to work, he would do so feverishly. He seemed to vacillate between the two, suggesting a possible bipolar condition, or ADHD, not unlike Mozart; Freud believed that Leonardo’s frenetic activity was as a result of repressed gay desires, and also explained why he failed to finish so many works.
“Leonardo was interested in astrology and aeronautics way before any kind of technological revolution,” says Sachwitz. “His obsession was to go somewhere, to transport himself, and we explore this in the show with visitors being able shoot a basketball with da Vinci’s catapult, or fly in his flying machine, or play pinball with his cannon.”
But we must be wary of employing the word “genius”. Like “iconic”, it can become overused. Sometimes they crash to earth, due to what we now call life events. So severely strained was his artistic rivalry with Michelangelo that the latter was driven out of Rome while Leonardo went off to work for the King of France. Such bitter dramas can scar and humble, but also provide the artistic fuse for reinvention and brilliant new expression. Genius is a show that allows the visitor to make up their own mind about Leonardo, a man who defies labelling.
Two of his most famous religious paintings, The Last Supper and Salvator Mundi feature interactively in the show in a way that a two dimensional art catalogue can never replicate. In an age of crazy modern art prices, it’s worth recalling that Leonardo’s explicitly religious painting Salvator Mundi, depicting a secular Christ in a blue tunic, was sold for $450.3 million a few years ago, smashing the world record for any art object ever sold. Like many things about Leonardo, the painting remains a source of mystery. Nobody knows exactly where it is today, or even whether it was wholly by Leonardo’s own hand.
Da Vinci Genius opened in Amsterdam on November 30th. For more information: davinciamsterdam.com
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