[Music]
Female Speaker: Oh, I started queuing at one o’clock this morning.
Second Female Speaker: I think there were 700 when we got here. There are masses and
masses of people, but they all seem perfectly happy to queue.
Male Speaker: It’s so cold I think all of our toes have given up completely. The
ice was frozen on the fountains in Trafalgar Square. That’s how cold it is.
Second Male Speaker: I was sort of dreading the queue, but I knew that it just had to
be done, like one of those things that you have to see, because it’s not going to happen
again.
Third Female Speaker: It was worth bearing the cold, it was worth lack of sleep; it’s
a piece of history in the making.
Nicholas Penny: There are a lot of people who go to exhibitions like this almost as
a sort of pilgrimage to make contact with a genius from the past.
Luke Syson: It’s the quality of the response that’s taken me by surprise, the passion
behind the response; people coming back more than once, people feeling really that they
needed to do this, not just because of this extraordinary name, but because they were
going to experience something extraordinary.
Leonardo talks about love a great deal. He talks about the depiction of the soul. And
something in these pictures speaks soul to soul and inspires love. It’s very, very
difficult to define, but I saw it happening over and over again as I walked round the
show and watched people watching.
[Music break]
Luke Syson: It’s the end of a journey that started with conversations five years ago.
It’s been a long process and a process I suppose of learning all the way through.
Per Rumberg: For us over the last three months, living with these works together in one space,
we have learned a great deal. There’s a magic that all of a sudden happens when works
start talking to each other. One of the highlights of the exhibition was the juxtaposition of
the two versions of 'The Virgin of the Rocks'. And we’re very fortunate because until a
few months before the exhibition, we didn’t know that we would have the Louvre version
here in London.
Larry Keith: It’s really hard to convey how special the moment was when we had the
two pictures in the Gallery space. As far as we can surmise, we’ve had an opportunity
to see these two pictures together that even Leonardo didn’t have.
It was interesting to see the similarities and the differences. That’s the kind of
core of it, because you see most of a painterly career in terms of evolution of how you apply
paint, how you think about colour, how you handle light. But here you have that within
a composition that’s relatively identical.
Minna Moore Ede: As you are able to look underneath paint layers and things, obviously
there are new things to discover and so much has come out in the course of doing this exhibition.
Ashok Roy: Before this exhibition and before these studies were undertaken, quite little
was known about the actual in which Leonardo painted and now we know a great deal more.
We know that there were two phases of drawing on this picture. In fact, it went through
a radical transformation from an earlier design to the design that you now see. And we also
know a great deal about the materials, for example, the pigments he used, so we can provide
a very complete description of how this work of art was created.
Per Rumberg: And I think we have also learned a great deal about how he was working with
his workshop, how he collaborated with his students.
[Music break]
Arturo Galansino: For example, the best one, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, who was really
the most skilful follower and pupil of Leonardo during his first period in Milan, actually,
it’s a little bit of a rare discovery in the show. Now many people know something more
about this great painter from Milan.
Nicholas Penny: One painting there where the consensus is beginning to emerge that
Leonardo had the basic idea, Leonardo made perhaps one or two drawings, Boltraffio made
more drawings and then it was painted by yet another artist.
Luke Syson: I chose to exhibit Leonardo’s painting with works by assistants, pupils,
collaborators, but also with drawings.
Minna Moore Ede: This has been really a unique opportunity to bring together pretty much
all of the related drawings by Leonardo for 'The Last Supper'. One of the things we really
wanted to do was to be able to show the public, if you like, the process of Leonardo’s thinking,
the way he started with very rapid, very quick preparatory sketches and then what happens
in the final painting, which our copy shows, is Leonardo created this very choreographed,
dramatic composition.
Nicholas Penny: So many other things he was interested in, like the psychology of vision
or the nature of optics, the character of light, all of these things had an impact on
his painting. And this exhibition wants to put the painting back at the centre of things.
[Music break]
Arturo Galansino: The 'Salvator Mundi' has been an important discovery. I think it is
an important point of this exhibition in the sense that finding a new Leonardo is not something
that you can do every day.
Luke Syson: All of us at the National Gallery thought very hard indeed about including the
'Salvator Mundi' in the exhibition. Obviously, it’s a picture that’s only just been attributed
to Leonardo and it’s in private hands. We felt in the end that the case for its attribution
to Leonardo was sufficiently strong for this to be the moment where we would put it together
with other works to see how people felt.
Fourth Female Speaker: That one is pretty incredible, to see that and know that, unlike
the others that have been in museums and in collections and people have seen for hundreds
of years, this one was thought lost and it’s only now being seen. That’s a pretty neat
feeling.
[Music break]
Luke Syson: There is a lot to be learned still about Leonardo. What I’ve been amazed
by is how profound and layered and endless the viewing experience is, this process of
endless revelation whereby it’s almost as if onion layers are being peeled away and
yet you never ever quite get to the core.
I think that it’s this spiritual quality in Leonardo’s work that has raised this
exhibition to the event it’s been in the sense that it’s not just about the name;
it’s about something to do with the way in which these pictures speak to people across
time.
[Music]