Leonardo is probably the best known man of culture of all times. And yet his personality, his deepest motivations, his character and even the image of his face seem to challenge any universally accepted definition.

Thus it is fitting that the voyage into the mind of Leonardo proposed by this exhibition should begin with both the severe, penetrating gaze of the Genius’ famous self-portrait, and his face seen in profile in the earliest representation in painting.

The spectacular “exploded” skull on the Weimar Sheet evokes one of the key concepts of Leonardo’s art-science: the specular relationship between the anatomical structure, on the one hand, and the expression of the motions of the soul, on the other.