Da Vinci's Ginevra de' Benci at The National Gallery of Art

A couple of weeks ago I have explored the possibilities of making visual art accessible. Since then I put much more thought into it, and today I wanted to see how the National Gallery of Art does it. With the family we went to the Gallery, and looked at Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra de' Benci. Following the link to the title you will find the painting, which opens in a new window.

The Washington National Gallery of Art has a device for visually impaired people. It looks like an oversized cordless phone. Some pieces of art have a number displayed by them, if you enter this number on the keypad, it will describe the picture. I have yet to figure this out, but if this is meant to help blind people, how are they going to find these numbers? Especially that many pieces do not have descriptions associated to them.

I have listened to many descriptions, but there was one thing I was really curious about. It is one thing to describe a drawing, a photo or a sketch. But how do you describe something of a much greater volume, like a da Vinci picture. If you look at it, you know it is not an ordinary sketch that anybody can just throw on the canvas. But is there a way to interpret this visual experience in a description?

The Gallery does not only describe pictures. Rather, they put it into a greater context, explain the creation of the painting, give some historical background, which makes it really interesting and useful. They described da Vinci's painting in a great detail. But I was missing something that I was looking for. I missed the wow feeling that I thought I'd get. I wanted to stand there marveling the fact that I'm standing in front of a rare painting that the world talks about, which cannot be expressed in a Dollar amount, and only a few people who travel to Washington will get to see it. I believe this is the only da Vinci painting on the American continent. It is a big thing, and I wanted it to be.

If it was only the narrated description, my only take away from this would be that I had a great time with the family. I'm convinced that this piece cannot be described adequately. One has to see it to fully appreciate it.

Having said that, I do not want to devalue the Gallery's work and efforts they made to help visually impaired people to enjoy art. I think it is a great idea. Especially that it is not something that you can find in most museums. Besides, they had done a great job explaining as much as humanly possible as well as giving a great background to help appreciate art even more.