Debate: Can Lady with an Ermine really take down Mona Lisa in the battle of the Leonardo blockbusters?
Prize fight … Lady with an Ermine.
Forget the Olympics and tuition fee demos. If reports are to be believed, the National Gallery's Leonardo exhibition is going to generate the sort of collective mania that will take riot police and water cannons to contain.
Remember Monet at the Royal Academy a few years back? Remember what a complete Mongolian goatpoke it was, with those lines of mooching, slackmouthed waterlily-fanciers backed halfway up the street? Well, this will be worse. I blame Dan Brown, who – despite apparently thinking Da Vinci was his surname – has convinced millions that Leonardo's work is the key to the greatest evil secret ever.
The National Gallery has already announced that to prevent "gallery rage", it will issue only 180 tickets for each half-hour slot, rather than the 230 its licence allows. This will cost it £10,000 a day in potential revenue, but will greatly reduce the risk of anyone being assassinated by a 9ft-tall albino assassin from Opus Dei.
Well, good, obviously. Had a way with a brush did that Leonardo. But it does show up how blockbusterish the museum culture now is. These days, we report fine art shows like prizefights. They are stories told in statistics: visitor numbers, speed at which tickets sell out, number of paintings never before displayed together, cost of insurance measured in GDPs of medium-sized African countries, etc.
The pre-show hype for the November exhibition really goes to town in this respect. Rather than announce something as boring as a gallery full of nice pictures folk might like to see, it is also being touted as some kind of celebrity death-match, thanks to the inclusion of a rarely seen masterpiece: will history be made and a new Most Famous Leonardo Painting be crowned?
In the red corner, the defending champion: weighing in, according to the insurance valuation, at a cool half-a-billion pounds, boasting a look of quiet confidence and that enigmatic smile, it's . . . the Mona Lisa! And in the blue corner, the challenger! From Krakow, Poland, she's lean and hungry, 10 years younger, half the square footage and a good few quid less to insure. She has man's hands and a weird hairnet. She has a giant, bald stoat and she's not afraid to use it. It's … Lady With an Ermine!
According to her trainer, Count Adam Zamoyski (the art historian whose Polish family foundation owns the painting), Cecilia Gallerani, as she is also known, has travelled 800 miles against doctor's (well, conservator's) orders for this shot at the title. The count's already trash-talking the other side. He says his Cecilia is "unquestionably" better and "will replace the Mona Lisa as the icon for Leonardo. As simple as that." Mona Lisa, in other words, is going dahn. The Times, media partners for the show, has launched an online poll; so far, dismayingly for the incumbent, nearly four in five prefer Cecilia.
It's probably not quite how Ruskin would have approached the presentation of two masterworks, but I find this candid vulgarity appealing. Why not try it with other artists? A five-round icon-off betweensoup cans and Marilyn for pre-eminence in the Warhol canon, say; or a quick scrap in the basement of the Tate between Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed and The Fighting Temeraire. Postmodern, too, to make iconic-ness, the art-historical equivalent of celebrity, the important issue.
As for the pictures in contention, I'm leaning towards the four-out-of-five in the poll. OK, Leonardo's definitely made more of an effort with colouring in the background on the Mona Lisa, and Cecilia has done that annoying thing that blights all my holiday snaps: looking away at just the wrong moment. Then there's that hand and the thing she's cuddling; it takes a while to clock that Lady With an Ermine isn't so titled because she's wearing fur. It's an actual bleeding ermine, wearing its own fur coat, and very ugly it is, too. Who'd have their picture taken cuddling a stoat?
But there's a bit of torque in the composition that the Mona Lisa lacks. Give the painting a really good, close look and you'll see she really does have the very breath of life in her. You find yourself absorbed by the curves of cheek, shoulder, jaw and necklace angling off from her chin. You see a sitter, maybe 16 years old, just distracted by a noise, caught in a living moment more than five centuries ago. And you find yourself awestruck.
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