Luke Syson

Luke Syson is an English museum curator and art historian. Since 2019, he has been the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, prior to which he held positions at the British Museum (1991–2002), the Victoria and Albert Museum (2002–2003), the National Gallery (2003–2012) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015–2019). In 2011 he curated the acclaimed Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at the National Gallery: Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, which included his pivotal role in the controversial authentication by the National Gallery of da Vinci's Salvator Mundi. His first professional positions was as the curator of medals at the British Museum from 1991 to 2002. which opened in 2003. At the National Gallery, Syson led a successful effort in obtaining Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks. Syson was the curator of the Renaissance Siena: Art for a City exhibition in 2007. The exhibition centered around works from Leonardo's first Milanese period ,

Through the Leonardo exhibition and efforts prior, Syson was pivotal in the full authentication of Salvator Mundi to Leonardo da Vinci (i.e. an "autograph work"), having five Leonardo experts inspect the painting at the museum. Author Ben Lewis later suggested in The Last Leonardo: The Secret Lives of the World's Most Expensive Painting that Syson had overstated the degree of agreement among the experts, with Carmen C. Bambach expressing skepticism after the museum announced the attribution. In the 2021 documentary The Lost Leonardo, one of the other experts invited by Syson, Maria Teresa Fiorio, denied that she had ever authenticated the painting, saying: "Nobody asked me a formal opinion about this painting".

In 2019, The Art Newspaper reported that it was "surprising that Syson's entry does not at least allude to the suggestion by other scholars that parts of the picture may have been painted by assistants, even if he went on to dismiss this idea". In November 2021, the Prado in Spain formally downgraded the attribution of the painting in their da Vinci exhibition catalog from "by Leonardo" to "attributed works, workshop of authorized and supervised by Leonardo". The curator of the Louvre's 2019–20 da Vinci exhibition, Vincent Delieuvin, wrote in the Prado catalog that the painting had "details of surprisingly poor quality", and that "It is to be hoped that a future permanent display of the work will allow it to be reanalysed with greater objectivity".

Later career Syson became the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Chairman of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) in 2012.

Exhibitions Pisanello: Painter to the Renaissance Court at the National Gallery, London (2001) Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan at the National Gallery, London (2011)

Selected publications

via London, England: National Gallery