This year is the five-hundredth anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, and the museum world has not been slow to celebrate the career of this most remarkable—and marketable—of Renaissance artists. Of the many exhibitions being held this year, the two most significant were forecast to be shows in London and Paris presenting sizeable tranches of, respectively, Leonardo’s surviving drawings and his paintings. In London, the Royal Collection Trust has placed in Buckingham Palace the Queen’s matchless collection of Leonardo’s drawings (May 24 through October 13, 2019), while the Louvre will host the most comprehensive viewing of his paintings—fourteen of fewer than twenty surviving works—ever brought together in a single place (October 24, 2019 through February 24, 2020). Crowd-control measures—the Louvre received more than ten million visitors last year, up to fifty thousand per day—are already in place.

Discerning art lovers wishing to understand Leonardo “in the process of growth” (the mode of understanding recommended by Aristotle) would have been better advised to take in a recently concluded exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, the core of which is to travel to Washington, D.C., this month.1

For the last dozen or so years, the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi has been organizing what are, from a scholarly and connoisseurial point of view, the finest art shows in Italy. The Fondazione was formed in 2006 with the aim of sidestepping the roadblocks of bureaucracy and politics that so often surround the great national collections. Its formula was