Exhibition on Screen, Leonardo: The Works (Review) https://exhibitiononscreen.com/films/leonardo-the-works/
I’m usually a great fan of these EOS films. It allows you to see the paintings close up & in detail and this film gives the same excellent service. The director bases it on Martin Kemp’s latest Leonardo book (my old review here) and, given the latter’s penchant for evidence-based practice, it sticks close to the evidence for each of its selected works, which are each introduced through the portal of their host institution and curators, or Kemp himself, followed by a blank screen that gradually reveals the title, dimensions and placement in written details.
It is all self-consciously scholarly. And the film as a whole suffers from that I think. One feels that one is being allowed access but only at the price of veneration of the art-historical institutions and discourses. Of course, some nuggets stand out such as the beautiful assessment of Salvator Mundi (which and where is it exactly?), which alone of the assessments misses out the arguments about who painted it. Perhaps it is because Kemp is definitive about this already in his book, although we know not everyone is convinced. For me, however, the painting as shown , seen and discoursed upon in this film is sufficient in itself and beautiful in my eyes, though that may be because I do not have the benefit of being an art historian. There is something deeply attractive about ‘Leonardo’s’ use of smoky boundaries to objects and persons (sfumato) that appeals to those who are suspicious of over-definite boundaries and definitions.
And that is surely true too of Leonardo’s treatment of the sexed/gendered body, whose boundaries remain permanently fluid – so that issues of the number, gender and other boundaries between bodies are always questionable. But no such speculation is allowed in this film, which turns up its nose at creative interpretation. Sometimes this is wilfully exclusive. Luke Sysos tells us at one point that Leonardo was ‘probably homosexual’ ( a category that didn’t exist until the end of the nineteenth century)but that we know very little of his life. Thereafter no queer reading touches Leonardo’s ambivalent and queer bodies, faces, smiles, clothing and magical settings.
Sysos goes on to speculate what it is unknown what went on in the coteries of intellectual and other young men surrounding Leonardo. You feel a bit dirty after listening to such hinted supposition. It’s prurient and unhelpful in understanding either art or queer politics and categories. It forgets that, according to Louis Compton, Leonardo used, it is believed, Salai (‘a graceful and beautiful youth.., in which Leonardo greatly delighted’ and thief according to Vasari) as model for both John the Baptist and other anatomically fuller studies. He praised Florence for ‘such practices and fleeing the volubility of women, there have issued forth so many rare spirits in the arts’. [1]
Leonardo is a great case study in Renaissance sexual politics as is Michelangelo and Raphael. The cases are less dramatic than in Titian and the later Baroque (Tiepolo I’m thinking of) but they therefore pay more study. You aren’t invited into any questions of reading much in this film, except where the issues are theological and therefore to do with well-trodden themes in art history.
And, of course, this film is an introduction. See it and
love the imagery and the flow of the camera over that imagery in its wholes or
details then.
[1] Crompton, Louis (2003) Homosexuality and Civilization Cambridge, MA & London, Harvard University Pres, pp.267f.
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