Da Vinci at work

It's always the way; you wait 76 years for a serious Leonardo da Vinci show and then along come two in the same year. I hyperbolise of course, there have been Leonardo exhibitions aplenty, but according to The Art Newspaper, one has to look as far back as 1939 to find another as ambitious as the one just opened at the Palazzo Reale in Milan. Meanwhile, Leonardo da Vinci and the idea of Beauty has just opened at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

Alas I have no plans to be in Boston, but I was in Milan for a dinner hosted by Apple to mark the arrival of the Apple watch, so I thought it churlish not to allow my iPhone to guide me to the Palazzo Reale. I could probably have found my way there anyway as the Palazzo remains where it has been for the past few hundred years, but there was something rather fitting in using technology that would have intrigued the subject of this fascinating scholarly exhibition.

One could easily spend a week walking these darkened rooms. To see, for example, the Vitruvian man and the touching Madonna, child and cat, as well as those engines of war, landscapes, anatomical drawings and pages of careful notes in that ornamental hand, is to see things that are at once familiar and being seen anew. Part of that familiarity is the way his influence has been felt down the ages. His Man Tricked by Gypsies reminds one of Hogarth; one of his female heads could have been copied by Leonor Fini; a plump little bronze of a figure on horseback brings to mind de Chirico's paintings ...

The last room offers some more literal examples of how da Vinci has influenced later generations, including a killingly funny painting from 1863 by Cesare Maccari showing La Gioconda being painted, with a pre-Raphaelite pretty boy strumming a lute, another chap with a dog on a chain and a man with a scroll who looks like he's declaiming heroic verse: given this level of distraction both artist and sitter seem to be bearing up remarkably well.

Of course La Gioconda (the Mona Lisa) remains in the Louvre, but, as a consolation prize, the French museum has loaned Leonardo's famous paintings of St John the Baptist as a rather beautiful long-haired youth and the portrait known as La Belle Ferronnière, the charm of which is all the more potent here for not being overshadowed by its famous sibling.

The exhibition seeks to bring together in one place Leonardo the inventor, the draughtsman, the military engineer, the artist, the Christian, the scientist, the inventor and so on. Seeing it all laid out is impressive in itself and the balance between his works and the contextualising work of his predecessors makes for an enriching experience. And a room full of machines about halfway round provides a well-timed change of pace.

What comes across through his work is his quest for the unity of knowledge. It is almost as if he was thinking that, if he filled enough notebooks with drawings of human limbs, esoteric contraptions or simple mechanical components (his perspective drawing of a toothed wheel is as good as anything a computer could achieve) some grand plan would become apparent. And yet at the same time this logical scientific enquiring mind was able to produce something as whimsical as a painting of Leda's children hatching from eggs.

Given this prototypical Renaissance man's mastery of every subject, it is, perhaps, comforting to learn that Leonardo was, apparently, held back in some areas by a failure to learn Latin – he made a fairly decent fist of things even so.

When and where

Leonardo 1452–1519 is at the Palazzo Reale, Milan, until 19 July 2015. Admission €12. See skiragrandimostre.it/leonardo