Paintings that make you go “ooh”: da Vinci, BBC 1, 9pm, 30/10/11
Cecilia Gallerani, “The Lady with an Ermine”
What a fantastic programme on BBC1 tonight, and it had nothing to do with watching the quite wonderful Fiona Bruce in a yellow summer dress drinking white wine in Florence. It was more to do with an even more beautiful woman, da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine” Cecilia Gallerani, who is starring in an exhibition at the National Gallery from November.
I remember seeing the “Lady” in Krakow in 2004. The fact that I didn’t know the city was home to the most stunning da Vinci of them all shows just how little I knew at the time of the history of what I thought was a provincial capital. It was my first visit to Poland, and had a profound effect on me because I realised that my father’s homeland wasn’t some far off, uncultured backwater that was only worth fighting over for coal and farmland, as school history books had always led me to believe: it was the very Heart of Europe.
The Lady was housed in the The Czartoryskis Museum, a tiny place compared to the great museums of Paris or London or Rome. And, as it was November, the museum was pretty much deserted. So my time with her was relatively intimate, and she utterly dazzled me. It’s one of only two paintings that have made me breathlessly weak at the knees and given me heart palpitations: the other, Caravaggio’s “The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist” in St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, is the type of painting that bludgeons you with its audacious use of empty space, its utter inhumanity and its sheer bloody size. The “Lady” is different: tiny, elegant, seductive. I love her. I can’t wait to see her again. I’ve booked my ticket.
There will be other da Vinci delights, including the newly rediscovered “Salvator Mundi” featured in the programme. It looks ethereal, odd, wonderful. I’d like to see the Oxford copy of the Last Supper too. It’s going to be a ground breaking event because never before have so many da Vincis been under one roof together. And I’m going to be there and, despite the crowds, I’m going to say a little private hello to Cecilia and hope she remembers me. I’m odd that way…
What a wonderful programme Da Vinci The lost Treasure was. I have just finished an Art History degree with the Open University specialising in the Renaissance and absolutely adore Leonardo Da Vinci. I watched this programme spectically looking for something to disagree with but found it all excellent and Fiona Bruce’s commentary and presentation was faultlessly reverential. I should like to thank her for making the programme so interesting. The experts she met certainly knew their stuff. I was in heaven watching this programme. Please can we have more art programmes as they are still few and far between and there is not much else on t.v that so stimulating and not trivial.
[...] already written about Cecelia Gallerani, the “Lady with Ermine”, and I spent a lovely half hour in her company today. Other jostling art bibbers were a bit [...]
I think that this provided a very nice trip for Ms. Bruce, I just kept waiting to hear about this “lost treasure” — you know, ordinary things like scientific results of pigments, the original condition of the work, what was done to “conserve” it and what percentage of the painting was actually created by the conservator. I got the feeling that the motivation to have something worth millions did make people skip a lot of these steps.
In my opinion (I am an artist and also was an appraiser for 30 years) this is not a Leonardo. The eyelids are wrong, the shading is wrong, there is no bone structure in the chest, the drapery is appallingly wrong, the eyes are too far apart, and it just doesn’t look right. That is my opinion but I would think the wood should have been carbon dated, as well as the pigments, the pigments compared to what Leonardo used, and so on. There would also be brush stroke analysis and other forensic techniques.
To show a program with all these things and go where the science takes us would have made an interesting and informative show.
Instead we got a watered down tourist journey telling what most of us who are interested in art already know already. BBC I think did not do well in this endeavor which must have been rather a costly travelogue.