[2] Towards the end of his tenure, he served as co-curator for the Pisanello: Painter to the Renaissance Court exhibition in 2001[2] and co-created a new permanent gallery: "Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century",[3] which opened in 2003.
[4] In 2011, Syson was the head curator for the National Gallery's controversial Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan exhibition, which was a major success.
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.
[1] 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".
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".