"The Lady With an Ermine" on display in “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan” at the National Gallery in London

"The Lady With an Ermine" is one of the works on display in “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan” at the National Gallery in London (9 Nov 2011 - 5 Feb 2012)

• Exhibition focuses on Leonardo’s years as court painter to Ludovico Maria Sforza, the duke of Milan, in the 1480s and 1490s. 
• Because the works are so fragile, the show cannot travel and is on view only through Feb. 5.
• Only 500 tickets are available each day

The advance tickets, which went on sale online in May, sold out the first week the show opened, prompting box-office Web sites to start scalping $25 tickets for up to $400. Luke Syson, the exhibition’s curator, said he knew the show would be a hit, but he was still amazed by the public’s response. “I am struck by how we invent this figure for the 21st century,” he said one recent morning, sipping a cappuccino in the National Gallery’s cafeteria. “These pictures communicate something that’s just out of reach. There’s always more than meets the eye.”

On view are 7 of Leonardo’s 14 extant paintings, along with works by artists in the school of Leonardo da Vinci as well as Giampietrino’s reproduction of “The Last Supper,” on loan from the Royal Academy in London. There are also 60 Leonardo drawings, 33 of which are from the Royal Collection. (About 10 of the show’s drawings relate to the apostles depicted in “The Last Supper.”)

Five years in the making, the exhibition is not only a feat of scholarship but also of diplomacy, with loans from museums in St. Petersburg, Krakow, Paris, New York, Rome and Milan.

Only 500 tickets are available each day

Even though the exhibition has been billed as a once-in-a-lifetime event and has received rave reviews, Mr. Syson said he “wanted to make sure this wouldn’t be a Marx Brothers moment where we tried to cram as many people into the show as possible.” Adamant that there be crowd control so people can actually see the works properly, officials have limited the visitors admitted to 180 every half-hour, although people may stay as long as they like. That figure is under the 230-person maximum capacity of the galleries.

Taking a page from the Met, the National Gallery has extended the show’s hours. It now stays open until 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays (it generally closes at 6 p.m.) and two more hours on Sundays, now closing at 7. For the show’s last two weeks the museum will be open until 10 every night, Michelle Gonsalves, a National Gallery spokeswoman, said. And for the first time ever it will be open on New Year’s Day.

“We advised people to book early,” Ms. Gonsalves said. And while the museum is aware of the frenzy to get the remaining tickets, it was surprised to learn that they were being scalped. She said the National Gallery’s security officers could tell if tickets had been scalped, and that visitors found with such tickets would not be allowed into the show. “We can’t say how we can tell, but we are doing spot checks,” she explained.

Despite all the madness Mr. Syson, who is leaving the National Gallery to become curator of European sculpture and decorative arts at the Met in January, has a message he hopes the exhibition is delivering: Realizing that Leonardo has recently been prized more as a scientist than as an artist, he wants the public to see how painting was actually central to the master’s way of thinking. Judging by the show’s popularity, that point is getting across.

“I don’t mean to sound like a mystical priest, but on some level these paintings communicate soul to soul,” he said. “Great art does work on people in mysterious ways.”

Mona Lisa

Mona Lisa (also known as La Gioconda or La Joconde, or Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo) is a portrait by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. It is a painting in oil on a poplar panel, completed circa 1503–1519. Property of the French State, it is on permanent display at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

Scientists Unlock Dreamy Mystery of 'Mona Lisa'

It's one of the things about the "Mona Lisa" that's long baffled art historians and viewers alike -- how Leonardo da Vinci used rudimentary pigments in the year 1503 to create such subtle shadows and light on the mysterious woman's face.
And it's taken scientists more than 400 years to come up with technology to figure out how.

Now French researchers are using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, a noninvasive technique, to isolate and study each ultra-thin layer of paint and glaze da Vinci used on the "Mona Lisa" and six other paintings at Paris' Louvre Museum. Scientists from the Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France brought their high-tech machine into the museum while it was closed, and zeroed in on faces depicted in the paintings, which have a dreamy, hazy quality about them.

Specialists from the Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France found that Leonardo da Vinci painted up to 30 layers of paint on his works to meet his standards of subtlety.

Da Vinci used a renaissance painting technique called "sfumato," mixing thin layers of pigment, glaze and oil intricately to yield the appearance of lifelike shadows and light. The technique is well known and has been employed by other artists over the years. But only now have scientists been able to analyze just how intricate da Vinci's layers are.

They believe da Vinci used up to 30 layers of paint on his works. But altogether they only add up to a thickness of less than 40 micrometers of paint -- about half the width of a human hair. Details were reported Friday by several news agencies.

The scientists were able to beam X-ray technology at the paintings without even removing them from the museum wall.

"This will help us to understand how da Vinci made his materials... the amount of oil that was mixed with pigments, the nature of the organic materials," senior scientist Philippe Walter told CNN. "It will help art historians."

The new analysis also shows that da Vinci was constantly trying out new mixes and methods. In the "Mona Lisa," he mixed manganese oxide with his paints, but in others he used copper, Walter also told The Associated Press. Da Vinci used glazes in some paintings but omitted them altogether in others, he added.

"We realize when glazed over, for instance on the 'Mona Lisa,' that he managed to place layers as thin as one or two micrometers, which means one or two thousandths of a millimeter," Walter told EuroNews. "By super-imposing the layers very progressively and slowly, he managed to create the effect he was seeking."

The research was published in Wednesday's issue of a chemistry journal, Angewandte Chemie International Edition. In addition to the 'Mona Lisa,' scientists also studied Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks, Saint John the Baptist, Annunciation, Bacchus, Belle Ferronniere, Saint Anne and the Virgin and the Child, Agence France-Presse reported.

While this research solves one mystery about the "Mona Lisa," others persist, like who the enigmatic woman is, and why she holds that subtle half-smile. Many experts believe she's Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a prominent merchant from Florence. Da Vinci is believed to have started the painting in 1503, and worked on it for four years.