Why I doubt Leonardo Da Vinci painted this picture

Londoners interested in the visual arts are fortunate enough to live in a constant whirl of exhibitions. We have only to consider the first few months of this year — the great Leonardo show at the National Gallery, old Zoffanys and brave new Hockneys at the Royal Academy, a melancholy farewell to Freud at the National Portrait Gallery, Picasso at Tate Britain and the British Museum, Damien Hirst at Tate Modern, Mondrian at the Courtauld, Canaletto in Greenwich, Indian drawings in Dulwich, Turner and Claude replacing Leonardo in Trafalgar Square and Leonardo reappearing as an anatomist at Buckingham Palace — to realise how rich and fortunate we are to experience so much and such variety.

By the time these close they may well have been seen by millions of visitors, parting with not only many millions of pounds for their tickets and catalogues, but for their tea and crumpets, lunches and even dinners and breakfasts now that overwhelmingly popular exhibitions are sometimes open through the night. Add to these their bus and train fares, the costs of parking and congestion charges, and any other random pleasures attached to the event, and it is clear that they are not only important for the economy of the museums and galleries involved, but the national economy too.

But what is the purpose of an exhibition? With Hockney it was to see what new lunacies the old boy has embraced, with Hirst to review and assess all that he has done since his student years, with Freud to remind us of how long ago he began and how differently he ended, with Picasso to see how wide his influence was in Britain and to some extent still is, and with Turner to realise how, in depending so much on Claude two centuries before, he greatly misunderstood and underrated that old master.

With Leonardo, however, there was another purpose. With Leonardo we could not just stand in awe of a genius known even in his own day as “the most outstanding painter of our lifetime … his works quite perfect”, and now as “the most universal genius of all time” (Oxford Companion to the Mind) and as “supernaturally beautiful in youth and supernaturally wise in old age” (Michael Levey, former Director of the National Gallery). Many of us did precisely that, overwhelmed to be in the presence of the master’s masterpieces, but for others this was an unprecedented opportunity to make comparisons between paintings from Paris, Krakow and Leningrad gathered for a few weeks conveniently under one London roof.

Most reviewers responded immediately with enthusiasm — as did I. Luke Syson, the exhibition’s curator, had achieved a miracle — he had brought together the two versions of The Virgin of the Rocks, great paintings that for five full centuries had not been in the same room, enabling us as never before to discern their significant differences, to compare their condition, the one obscured by the dirt of generations, the other perhaps a shade too bright and sharp. With these we were on firm documented ground and knew what must be considered, but with other paintings of great reputation the ground was far from firm and began to shift.

The Madonna from Leningrad was lent on condition that its authenticity was not questioned, and the catalogue entry (written by its Russian curator) repeats the assertion that it is “the Hermitage’s most valuable treasure”, dismissing as illogical any suggestion that Leonardo had little, if any, hand in it. The painting would not have come to London without the National Gallery’s agreement to this condition and that would have been a great loss, stifling debate, but of this the visiting public was not made aware and will, supported by the catalogue, always recall it as an authentic Leonardo.

I accepted without reservation the authenticity of Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (The Lady with an Ermine), from Krakow, which I had seen only once before, under uneasy circumstances while the Russians were still dominating Poland. Seeing it in the company of other paintings by Leonardo, a niggling doubt took root. I could not find a sequence into which it comfortably fits — it is in too many respects different. Then a zoologist informed me that the ermine is an albino marten, a much larger animal, and if this is so, then the argument that it is a punning reference to the girl’s surname in that the Greek for ermine sounds like the beginning of Gallerani no longer holds; nor do the supposed symbolisms of virginity and fecundity embodied in that animal. If the painting is not by Leonardo, the master of proportion, then the assertive disproportion of the hand is perhaps explained.

If this portrait is not by Leonardo, then the next question must be: by whom? The first step in reaching an answer is to separate it from the canon of undoubted works, remove the clutter of a hundred years of history (for only for a century has it been attributed to Leonardo), and start again. The fact that this beautiful painting was used all over London as a poster for the exhibition matters not at all — it matters only that it served its purpose well.

More compellingly than any other of this year’s exhibitions, the National Gallery’s of Leonardo made the point that we were there to do more than just stand in front of paintings, ticking them off with half a minute of dutiful but mindless contemplation. We were there to dismantle them, compare their landscapes, their figures, expressions, eyes, fingers, clothes and whatever else we chose, with other paintings, and decide how different and how much the same they are. We were to be provoked into reason and dispute, to use our eyes, see for ourselves and not merely accept authority.

We are all capable of judgment, some more informed than others, and should not be in thrall to the reputations of paintings, painters or art historians, nor be influenced by monetary value. The purpose of an exhibition is to expose its subject for better or worse, to question the exhibited work and our responds to it, even to worry it like a Jack Russell with a rat. To look, think and look again leads to seeing, and seeing leads to the truth — and truth must be the prime purpose of every exhibition.