These drawings and many more by Leonardo belong to the Queen and will be passed on to her successors, right down to baby George and beyond. Why, except as a gross display of inherited wealth, do they need them?

It is unjustifiable, even if you love the monarchy, for the Queen to own so much work by the greatest artist who ever lived. This excessive act of possession adds nothing to the prestige of royalty. Worse, it gets in the way of public appreciation of some of the world's supreme art.

I've tried, for years, to suppress my mystification at why the Queen hangs on to art that would obviously be better used by a public museum. I have met curators of the Royal Collection and admired their knowledge; I've also been lucky enough to study Leonardo's drawings in the Royal Library at Windsor. In many ways, the Royal Collection is well run. But that changes nothing. Windsor Castle is simply not the right place for our most precious art heritage to be held.

Royalty is a silk sheet that covers and veils art, swathing it in pointless luxury. The Queen runs two public art galleries, in London and Edinburgh, and they are both rum affairs with cloying decor and all the paraphernalia of monarchy. That's fine for tourists, but it does not make for serious art viewing. It breaks my heart if Leonardo, of all artists, is made to look irrelevant – but that is what exhibitions by the Royal Collection achieve.

When the National Gallery put on a Leonardo da Vinci exhibition in 2011, it was a stupendous success that drew serious and fascinated crowds. A few months after it closed, an exhibition of Leonardo's anatomical drawings opened at the Queen's Gallery in London – but the excitement did not follow Leonardo across Green Park. There's something about a gallery attached to Buckingham Palace (or Holyroodhouse) that predefines what happens there as fluffy royal heritage. It's not a cool date, is it, "let's go to the Queen's Gallery".

It obviously would have been better to include a show of these marvellous drawings at the National Gallery, as part of its Leonardo epic. Instead, the Royal Collection went into competion with the NG – and lost.

But the real losers are the people. We should be able to look at Leonardo's drawings in our public collections. They should be given to the nation.

I'd like to say in support of the Queen's Gallery, I attended a very informative talk by Kate Heard, Curator of Prints and Drawings there in February...'Drawing in the Northern Renaissance'. Not only were the slides relevant and interestingly described but we had the opportunity to have a very nice cup of tea and biscuits after the talk...how very unexpected, and how very civilised! The Head of Learning, Lucie Amos, is doing a brilliant job.   

And if you buy a ticket and get it stamped and signed, you have free entry to all other exhibitions there for a year....a one year pass. I think that is a generous gesture. The staff were most welcoming and the rooms (it was my first visit) I felt were small and this made for a more intimate experience with the art.  I like to get close to the pictures and examine them.  I loved the Northern Renaissance exhibition.  And I plan to go to the The Art of Tudor and Stuart Fashion when I get some free time.

I agree that art needs to be accessible but if everything is always available, always on display, doesn't that somehow make it 'less'...it's good to wait sometimes.  The trouble with the internet today is that we are coming to expect everything on tap 24/7 wherever we may be...I prefer a few mysteries in life and to practice patience.  It makes the joy of discovery so much sweeter.

The Royal Collection could help soften this debate by waving scholarly reproduction fees.

[Jones] mentions the bigger blockbuster type of shows as being more conducive to looking seriously at art.  My experience of them is that they are too often absolutely crammed to the gills with visitors displaying varying levels of interest, not just with wall-to-wall connoisseurs. In the end it mostly means that looking seriously is the one thing that is hampered as you peer over a dozen heads then push in for a look for 30 seconds. Rather than risk a culture-vulture rigger scrum in front of some loaned pictures by Vermeer, I'd much rather prefer to look at paintings in the relatively quieter and unmolested confines of the Royal collections surrounded by a few wandering Japanese -whether or not the wallpaper is unfashionable to a metropolitan journalist.

 If the National did get the drawings anyway, then where on earth would they show them? There are hundreds. Would they all be seen together permanently in the bright light of a display gallery? It would necessitate a very large new annexe for that methinks.. and who will pay for that? The taxpayer? Where would it be built? Much more likely that they would have to be stored and brought out for a the odd smaller exhibition and loan scheme. But that is exactly what is beginning to happen now courtesy of the Royal collection. And you won't have to don your rugger shirt either.

I would like to see the most important paintings and sculptures in the Royal Collection on long-term loan to public galleries. I'm thinking of the likes of Bruegel's Massace of the Innocents, which is more representative of his work than the small panel in the National Gallery, or the St Jerome by Georges de La Tour who isn't represented in Trafalgar Square at all, as we know from a previous post of yours. How good would it be to see Artemisia Gentileschi's self-portrait in the National Gallery's Italian Baroque rooms (she being an artist missing from the collection who's of huge interest to the public), or Lotto's portrait of Andrea Odoni alongside the Lady as Lucretia? The Scottish National Gallery now has a bit of a gap when Titian's poesie aren't on display there, and Cardiff's pre-18th century collection is a little patchy. I'm not opposed to the paintings still legally being part of the Royal Collection, as is the case with Gentile da Fabriano's Quaratesi Madonna (a de facto permanent fixture at the National Gallery), and they could still appear in the thematic exhibitions in the Queen's Galleries. The Royal Collection as a reserve national collection; something for a future king and queen with art-historical educations to think about...

With the Leonardo drawings, though, I think Jonathan Jones has picked the wrong fight. It does seem as if they get displayed in public as much as anyone could reasonably hope for given their fragility, across a pretty wide geographical range. In the past few years I've seen selections of the drawings in Bristol and Edinburgh as well as those which were part of the Painter at the Court of Milan exhibition in London, and to judge from the comments on Jones's piece some have also travelled to Stirling and Hull recently. (A good suggestion made in that comments section: why not have a third Queen's Gallery in Lancaster Castle, as the Queen is Duke of Lancaster?)

On Royal Collection nonsense, I found Windsor to be one of the very best and most accessible print rooms. JJ[ones] should try the Ufizzi. 

At the Holburne we have benefited hugely from the generosity of Her Majesty (and the Royal Collection staff)  in lending us some of their finest paintings for our wonderful exhibition "Rembrandt and his Contemporaries: Paintings from the Royal Collection".  The twenty-three works on show are drawn entirely from the Royal Collection, mostly from among acquisitions made by George IV.  Since opening on 22 May, it has attracted 8,000 visitors, making it the Holburne's most successful exhibition ever.