Five of the Best - National Galleries of Scotland

From Leonardo to the streets of Glasgow, it's all here

For anyone who is planning to go to the Edinburgh Festival this summer, a visit to the National Galleries of Scotland, which stretch across three sites in the centre of the city, is a must. It’s the perfect antidote to Festival overload, since you don’t need a ticket and you can be confident that everything is of a spectacularly high standard, neither of which can always be true about a production on the Fringe.

Yet because you will be in the midst of Fringe madness, you might not have time to go through the whole collection, and probably not all three galleries which fall under the National Galleries… headline. So I am just going to focus on five unmissable works, four of which are in the main building on the Mound, and one which is in the National Portrait Gallery. It’s quite hard to choose, frankly, because the collection is superb.

1. The Virgin and Sleeping Christ Child (1485), Sandro Botticelli

In a previous Substack I was a bit grumpy about this lovely Madonna and Child, which (unusually) shows the Christ child asleep. You might know it well, since it was the focus of a very high profile campaign to “save” it for the nation, and stop it going to a rival art gallery in Texas. Anyway, I won’t revisit my grumpiness here, not least because there is no point. You are standing in Edinburgh, not Fort Worth (where it was once destined to go). And it is a very lovely picture. Interestingly, X rays show that the original underpainting has the Christ child awake, but here he is very firmly having a nap.