Museums Journal

A cinema company is planning repeat screenings of the live broadcast of the opening of the National Gallery’s Leonardo show. 

About 4,500 people saw Leonardo Live at Picturehouse cinemas, operated by City Screen, and a further 4,000 in independent cinemas across the UK. The 8 November screenings sold out in 90% of venues.

Marc Allenby, who is responsible for film marketing and sponsorship at City Screen, said that the popularity of the screenings means the company is now planning to screen the event again over Christmas and into the new year.

Leonardo Live was organised by Sky Arts, which also showed the programme. James Hunt, the channel director of Sky Arts, said it was an expensive, risky but successful experiment. 

“What is has proved is that there is a public appetite for this type of stuff,” Hunt said. “It was amazing to see the wonders of these paintings in high definition and it has opened up a new avenue for us in terms of what we can do on a live broadcast.” 

Hunt said he thought that the format could work for other museums and galleries that have very high-profile exhibitions. Live broadcasts of cultural events in cinemas have been tried with opera and theatre. 

But John Wyver, of independent arts programme-maker Illuminations, was not entirely convinced by his experience of watching Leonardo Live at the Clapham Picture House in south London.

Writing on his blog, he said that while it was a treat to see the paintings in high definition and he learned quite a lot about the artist, he thought opera and theatre might be better suited to cinema screenings.

“At the Met or the National Theatre (two performance locations from which live culture comes to Clapham) you experience with others what’s on stage in a way that can translate to the cinema,” Wyver wrote. “Not so here, I think – there was little sense of doing something together just at that moment with the people around me.”

Visitor demand

Competition for Leonardo tickets has been fierce and the National Gallery has been trying to prevent them being sold on internet sites such as eBay and Viagogo. Tickets priced originally at £16 are being sold for as much as £400 online. 

“The resale of tickets for the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition is against the terms and conditions of their sale and this information is printed on the tickets,” said a National Gallery statement. “Our website clearly states: 'Tickets that have been resold will be cancelled without refund and admission will be refused to the bearer'. 

“We are currently contacting any companies or websites that are offering this facility in order to advise them of the above policy and request that they stop immediately.”

Demand for tickets to the Leonardo show, which brings together the largest-ever number of the artist's paintings, has been high. The National Gallery has reduced the number of people who are admitted each hour from its usual 200 to 180 in order to reduce over-crowding.

The gallery is checking Leonardo tickets to identify ones that have been resold.