The Leonardo da Vinci Exhibit You Haven’t Seen Before

Louis Frank, one of the organizers of the show and a curator of drawings at the Louvre, says the exhibition grew from “a need to understand who Leonardo was and to understand his work.” Leonardo’s artistic contributions marked the entry into modernity, the moment someone had surpassed the achievements of the ancient world. He was an artist who had “the capacity to imitate not only the exteriority of form but the interiority of life itself,” Frank says.

The show marks the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death—in France, where he was a court painter to Francis I. It makes the case that Leonardo was, first and foremost, a painter, and it brings together more Leonardo works than have been shown together in the same place since the 1950s—from the Louvre, the Vatican, the Hermitage, the National Gallery in Edinburgh, Queen Elizabeth II’s royal collection. For all his achievements, and his far-ranging mind, he completed fewer than 20 paintings, and many of them are here.

Read: The many, many theories about Leonardo da Vinci

There’s Leonardo’s unfinished Saint Jerome, on loan from the Vatican Museums—a lion at his feet in the wilderness, a turtle inside the curl of the lion’s tail. There’s the Benois Madonna from the Hermitage, where Mary is laughing and in the background, just above baby Jesus’s head, a window looks out onto an infinite sky. There’s La Belle Ferronnière, a portrait of a woman who looks out to her left, aglow against a black background, as if she were about to speak, a woman on the verge of something.

Before the Leonardo show happened, there were tensions between Italy, home of Leonardo, and France, where Leonardo died. Before it fell in August, Italy’s populist government had put up nationalist resistance to loaning works. After a low point in Franco-Italian relations, President Emmanuel Macron invited Italian President Sergio Mattarella to France, and the two visited Leonardo’s grave in the Loire Valley. After a last-minute court wrangle, Vitruvian Man did arrive from Venice’s Accademia Gallery and is on view here through mid-December—his arms touching the edges of the circle that encloses him, a paragon of symmetry, and now also of cultural diplomacy.

What is left to say about Leonardo after all the biographies, the novels, the conspiracy theories? This show features radiographic images of many of the paintings, which reveal the artist’s constant revisions. But more than that, it offers a chance to feel. When I arrived at The Virgin and Child With Saint Anne, in which Jesus, a pudgy toddler, is holding on to a little gray curly-haired lamb, and Mary, in her blue robe, is sitting on her mother’s lap and lovingly reaching across to hold the baby’s soft belly, I stopped short and remembered the first time I’d seen this painting. I was 13 and my mother, an art historian, had taken me to Europe for the first time. It was June, light outside well past 10 p.m., and we spent hours in the Louvre, a full immersion in the history of art and iconography. That lamb prefigures what happens later in the story, my mother explained, when Jesus becomes the lamb of God, sacrificed on the cross.