Leonardo Da Vinci: Painter At The Court Of Milan

The National Gallery gives visitors a rare chance to see a comprehensive collection of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings in Leonardo Da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan. "We are never likely to see so many of Leonardo's paintings bought together in our lifetimes," writes Adrian Searle in The Guardian. Of the twenty of so paintings that Leonardo produced - which are "in varying states of incompletion, over-restoration and decay" (The Guardian) - nine are on display in this significant National Gallery exhibition, which puts his years in Milan under the spotlight. Works from this period include a trio of portraits that were to revolutionalise the genre - 'The Portrait of a Musician', 'Belle Ferronniere' and his most prized portrait, 'The Lady with an Ermine', depicting Il Moro's mistress Cecilia Gallerani. Also on display are two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks - one, a 1485 altarpiece from the Louvre, faces the other, taken from the National Gallery's own collection. More than 50 drawings are exhibited alongside the paintings including 33 sketches and studies from the Royal Collection, and all the surviving drawings connected to the 'Last Supper'. While Leonardo's 1492-8 Last Supper mural, his most famous painting of the 1490s, cannot be moved from the walls of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie near Milan onto which it was painted, his pupil Giampietrino's 1520 scale copy of the work is as close as we'll get and that too is displayed in this must-see exhibition.