National Gallery Unveils Its Tribute to Columbus

Like a party-goer arriving early, the National Gallery of Art unwrapped its tribute to Christopher Columbus this weekend with a spectacular exhibition of cultural jewels dating to his arrival in America nearly five centuries ago.

The three-month show, “Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration,” opened in the gallery’s modernistic East Building on Saturday, a full year before the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ landing in the New World.

The Columbus show’s scope is doubtless the most far-reaching in the gallery’s 50-year history.

Curators gathered nearly 600 works from public museums and private collections in 33 countries, from China to Czechoslovakia.

The show fills 30 rooms on two entire floors of the East Building. J. Carter Brown, director of the gallery, called it “our voyage around the world,” a survey of the cultures of East and West during “a narrow band of time that changed the world.”

The treasures include paintings, drawings, sculptures, tapestries, ancient books and maps, early navigational instruments, rare gold ornaments and Aztec statues from the Americas, 15th-Century ink paintings by Chinese master Shen Zhou and a suit of armor made for the future King Charles V of Spain.

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II donated no fewer than 15 drawings by Leonardo da Vinci from the royal library at Windsor Castle.

Two of the masterpieces have never been seen in the United States.

One is “Portrait of a Lady With an Ermine,” painted in 1490. One of only three surviving Leonardo portraits of women, it was loaned by the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, Poland.

The other is Leonardo’s famed “Study of Human Proportion in the Manner of Vitruvius,” a drawing also completed in 1490 that was donated by a gallery in Venice, Italy.