Several friends have asked me about this vast Leonardo da Vinci show going on here to celebrate 500 years since the artist’s death, and which opened just Thursday. It’s by “advance reservations only” so of course Jacques and I have dutifully reserved our tickets for two future visits in November.
But Saturday, just to pass some time, as we do once or twice a week, we were at the Louvre to take some shots elsewhere and to have a coffee. I suddenly had an instinct. What would happen if, armed simply with our various cards – Amis du Louvre, Carte Culture, Maison des Artistes – we just joined the line and tried our luck to get in, without reservations? Well, Miracle of Miracles, despite all the media hype, with my best and most charming smile, within seconds we found ourselves personally ushered by the fast lane into the midst of the latest “blockbuster” show in Paris, for free. Talk about feeling lucky!
The show is grand, and immense, and I do want to write and post more about it another time. But for today, here’s how it felt, being face to face with these miraculous pieces – drawings, sketches, notebooks, so many grandly framed and handsomely exposed paintings – some which I saw that day for the first time, some which have always seemed to me like dear friends since childhood: the experience left me without words, voiceless, moved to introspection and silent reverence in the presence of Leonardo’s genius. On this occasion mere photos of an exhibition suddenly seemed vain to me, powerless to transmit either the impact or the essence of the visual and emotional experience.
“The question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces, to thinking of the foundation of things.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tolstoy declared that a real work of art destroys the separation between the viewer and the artist.
The always inspiring Iris Murdoch says that Beauty is “an occasion for ‘unselfing.’” She writes that Beauty has the capacity to strip down the ego, for example when we are in communion with nature, or when we contemplate great art.
I’m grateful for these moments.
