William Cash soaks up the sights and sounds of a new immersive Leonardo da Vinci show in Amsterdam.
Following the success of such immersive art shows as David Hockney’s Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) at London’s Lightroom, and Van Gogh Alive, which toured the UK, a new blockbuster interactive show about the life of Leonardo da Vinci has opened in Amsterdam’s Design District. With a brilliant musical score composed by the British producer Sasha, a hugely successful DJ in the 1990s who has performed at festivals all over the world, from Glastonbury to Coachella – Da Vinci: Genius sets a new standard for this very modern kind of exhibition.
Leonardo’s obsession with nature, artillery, biology, 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 immersive art show that is set to tour the world.
Leonardo’s enigmatic life lends itself well to the immersive art experience. While 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 unstarted. The interactive show allows us into his imagination to soak up the frenetic social, intellectual and humanist energy of both the Italian and slightly later English Renaissance.
Da Vinci: Genius transports the visitor back to the High Renaissance on a creative journey inside the visionary mind of one of the world’s great 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 they can “talk” to the Mona Lisa herself using AI technology.
Like Shakespeare, Leonardo was an enigmatic and elusive outsider artist. Both of their middle-class families were no stranger to illegitimate births, scandal and reversals of fortune. Just as Shakespeare was described by Ben Johnson as “not for an age but all time”, so Leonardo’s contemporary, Giorgio Vasari, wrote: “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.”
The show makes the Renaissance suddenly more accessible to a new generation of exhibition-goers. In much the same way that Kenneth Clark’s 1969 series Civilisation made 15th and 16th-century Rome and Florence come alive for a new generation of TV viewers, so Da Vinci: Genius opens up the artist and his world to a young audience who are more used to acquiring knowledge via a screen than the printed page.
The show does not try to politicise Leonardo’s sexual preferences or, more importantly, hide his religion. During the recent commemorations of the 500th anniversary of his death, some academics and critics liked to claim him as both an atheist and vegan. A closer look at the sources suggests it is more likely that Leonardo was against killing animals for pleasure or sport. He was a fervent lover of nature and an environmentalist; a typical notebook entry reads: “I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand.”
Leonardo was born on 15 April 1542, in the town of Vinci, about a day’s ride west of Florence. His father was a middle-class notary and his mother a local peasant girl, and his illegitimate status made it impossible for him to follow his father’s career. Instead, he was apprenticed 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 Leonardo’s career. 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 is very 21st century, and there is a high degree of postmodern angst in the way that Leonardo takes nothing for granted or at face value – from asking how one would build a lock in Flanders to wondering why the fish in water is faster than the bird in air.
One of his many unfinished projects was the 26-foot-high equestrian statue 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, following the French capture of Milan. In 1515, Leonardo was commissioned to make the king a mechanical lion that could clank forward to reveal a cluster of lilies.
He died three years later in France, at a manor house of the king, to whom he had become 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, and obsessed with technology, which makes an interactive take on his 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 Santa 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.”
When he returned to work, he would do so feverishly. He seemed to vacillate between the two states, suggesting a possible bipolar condition or ADHD, not unlike Mozart. Freud believed Leonardo’s frenetic activity was a result of repressed gay desires, and also explained why he failed to finish so many of his works.
With Leonardo, we should be wary of using the word “genius”. Like “iconic”, it tends to get overused. Sometimes geniuses crash to earth, because of what we now call “life events”. So strained was his rivalry with Michelangelo that the latter was driven out of Rome while Leonardo went off to work for the French king. Such bitter drama can scar and humble, but also provide the artistic fuse for reinvention and new expression.
Da Vinci: 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 catalogue can never replicate.
In an age of crazy modern-art prices, it’s worth recalling that Leonardo’s 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 sold. Like many things about Leonardo, the painting remains a source of mystery. Nobody knows exactly where it is today, or even how much was by Leonardo’s own hand.
Da Vinci: Genius runs to August at Willem Fenengastraat 43, Amsterdam.
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