Review of the week
Brenda Atkinson
Much as Sigmund Freud’s theoretical and linguistic legacy to the Western world has slipped beneath the surface of a million conscious minds, Leonardo da Vinci’s mind- boggling contributions to the scientific and cultural workings of a millennial first world find us largely ignorant of their import.
The long-awaited and impressively publicised exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Scientist, Inventor, Artist, recently arrived at the Pretoria Art Museum, will go a long way towards educating people about the legacy of Da Vinci, the definitive Renaissance Man.
A massive exhibition that has already travelled to six countries and been viewed by over two million visitors in Europe, America, Asia and Canada, Leonardo might prove groundbreaking as a show that attracts a broader public into the rarefied halls of a major local art institution.
There was something profoundly gratifying at having to queue for entry on Sunday, even at being held back behind a closed door as a beefy guard allowed pockets of visitors to move gradually inside.
And they arrived in their droves – from tracksuited families to twentysomething camo-clad hipsters.
The show – which occupies over 4 500m2 – takes up the entire space of the museum. If you follow one of the guided tours, you proceed from an exhibit of mechanical sketches and models after the originals of the “scientist and inventor” (Da Vinci was the first to conceive ideas for the helicopter, wrist watch, parachute and motor car), and conclude in an exhibit of figurative paintings, sculpture, and landscape drawings.
For the lone-ranging visitor, the tour is punctuated with touch-sensitive computers and monitors that allow for interactive browsing of a variety of historical topics. Both the tours and the technology are useful for the strictly uninitiated: they are basic and very general, and the interactive soundbites are disappointingly brief.
In fact the show as a whole might disappoint more art-literate visitors. Because it’s largely aimed at schools – the publicity has made much of the show’s contribution to Curriculum 2005 and has leapt rather tenuously at an “African renaissance” link – the levels of presentation and address have a textbook feel underlined by the fact that all sketches are facsimiles.
There is not, as the publicity stated, a single Da Vinci original on the show – the closest an object comes to that designation is a small model of a horse and rider made for a commissioned statue and attributed to Da Vinci.
The Gothenburg Mona Lisa – the most accurate of the 61 known copies of Da Vinci’s beyond- famous work – is on show, but then she’s been done and redone by everyone from Duchamp to Zappa. And as far as I could tell, promises of the chance to play with modern replicas of Da Vinci’s extraordinary mechanical designs were squashed by large Do Not Touch signs on each podium.
But these are minor niggles considering the great breadth of the exhibition’s contents and educational facilities: the facsimiles of hundreds of Da Vinci’s obsessively detailed scientific drawings – of bodies, machines, bodies-as-machines – are as exquisite as the artworks themselves.
In the final hall, where the artworks are gathered, there is a wall lined with a compelling succession of oil Madonnas clearly influenced by Da Vinci’s work, including The Betrothal of St Catherine to the Infant Jesus, a Raphael original.
Leonardo is a satisfying exhibition that is impeccably organised and presented, enabled by a R2-million revamp of the museum that makes the show widely accessible and certainly comprehensible.
Targeted at a mass audience and strategic in its interdisciplinary focus, its aim to break through the boundaries between art and what everybody else does – and to present work by a deeply radical producer in a non-alienating way -achieves exactly what it sets out to do.
Leonardo da Vinci: Scientist, Inventor, Artist is on at the Pretoria Art Museum, corner Schoeman and Wessels Streets, Arcadia. Ends August 1. Bookings for guided tours can be made on (012) 343-2980 or (012) 343-2986.The exhibition website can be viewed at