The irresistible drawof Da Vinci
A gay, vegetarian pacifist, Leonardo was certainly an enigma, but the expert behind a major new exhibition of his drawings reckons they give us a far greater insight into the man than his Mona Lisa ever could
WITHOUT THE DRAWINGS WE WOULDN’T KNOW HIM
He was the genius behind some of the world’s most famous paintings, but he remains as enigmatic as the figure in his best-known masterpiece, the Mona Lisa.
Only about 20 of Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings survive. As well as the mysterious Mona Lisa – which was given extra street cred last year when it starred in a Beyoncé and Jay-Z video that’s been viewed over 150 million times online – he also painted The Last Supper and the world’s most expensive piece of art ever sold, the Salvator Mundi, which fetched $450million at auction in 2017 in New York.
Although he was a respected sculptor and architect, no sculpture or buildings survive, and many were not even finished, while his ingenious inventions never came to fruition and his scientific findings were never published. So it’s only through his extraordinary drawings and manuscripts that you can get close to the man, claims Martin Clayton, head of prints and drawings at the Royal Collection Trust.
‘Without these drawings we wouldn’t know him,’ he says, surrounded by the burgundy box files in which the Collection’s approximately 600 Leonardo drawings are stored in climate-controlled rooms inside Windsor Castle. ‘We don’t need the paintings to understand how great Leonardo was, but we do need the drawings. If all his paintings had been lost, the drawings would still be evidence of one of the greatest minds of the Renaissance.
‘What’s so exceptional about this collection is that they were in his studio when Leonardo died, and have been together as a group ever since. They’re still as fresh as the day they were drawn, and they’re now one of the greatest artistic treasures of this country.’
The drawings have not always been so highly prized. After Leonardo’s death in France in 1519, they were left in the care of his favourite pupil Francesco Melzi. When he died they passed on to the sculptor Pompeo Leoni, who put them together into a single leatherbound album around 1590.
That album then spent nearly 300 years kicking around Europe, being bundled into the back of cupboards from Milan to Madrid to London, largely ignored and forgotten. By the late 1620s it was in England in the collection of the Earl of Arundel and by 1680 in that of Charles II, but it was only in the late 19th century once it had finally settled in Windsor, in the reign of Queen Victoria, that the drawings were removed and individually mounted.
Now some of the finest of them are being carefully packaged up and sent out for display around the UK to mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death. A dozen batches of 12 carefully selected drawings go on show from this Friday, February 1 in 12 different galleries, including the Ulster Museum in Belfast. More than 200 drawings will then be displayed in the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace from May to October, before 80 go to Edinburgh to be shown in the Palace of Holyroodhouse in November.
In his foreword to the catalogue for this exhibition Prince Charles writes that he has been ‘inspired…
by Leonardo’s brilliance’, adding that ‘Of Leonardo, perhaps more than any other artist, it can truthfully be said that “all human life is there”’.
But our awareness today of his wide-ranging talents could have been drastically reduced.
‘If that album had been lost in the Bay of Biscay on its way to England in the 1620s Leonardo would be a much lesser-known figure,’ says Martin Clayton.
‘His work as a painter was just one tiny aspect of his huge activity in sculpture, architecture, engineering, mapmaking, anatomy, botany and geology – and we only know all that through the drawings.’
Leonardo had an unpromising start in life. He was born just outside the town of Vinci in Tuscany in 1452, the illegitimate son of a lawyer and a peasant girl, and was raised by his paternal grandfather. He was clearly naturally gifted though, and trained extremely hard, so that in the 1470s he was working in the studio of renowned painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio in nearby Florence.
By 1483 he had moved to Milan where he rose to become the court artist in one of the most powerful states in Italy, and it was here that his fascination with science and engineering took hold. He would go on to work in Florence, Venice
and Rome for such celebrated patrons as the Sforza family, the Medicis and Cesare Borgia.
There are many myths that have grown up around the figure of Leonardo, and Martin Clayton believes that a perception of him as a misunderstood outsider is wrong.
‘He was an outsider in that he was a gay, vegetarian, left-handed, pacifist who was illegitimate – he ticks a lot of boxes there. But he was at the heart of the Milanese court, the Florentine court, the Papal court and the French court, so he was completely on the inside.
‘He was an elegant, affable court artist who would have been great fun to have around. He would have just talked and talked and gone off at tangents. You can imagine him on the Parkinson show or something like that, sitting stroking his beard, in a furlined cloak and with his pink silk stockings crossed in front of him, telling anecdote after anecdote. He’d have been the Peter Ustinov of the Renaissance.’
Another myth Martin Clayton wants to quash is that Leonardo wasted his talents and was too easily distracted dreaming up harebrained inventions that would never work, when he should have been painting.
His design for what we might call a helicopter, for example, was essentially just a screw that would spin very fast to give you upwards lift.
‘He wasn’t a painter who was frittering his talents away inventing crazy flying machines, and fantastic fighting machines,’ says Martin. That was just a tiny part of his work.
‘At the start of his career he was a painter who gradually became interested in the sciences. But by the end of his life he was primarily a scientist who painted a little, and he was one of the greatest scientists of the Renaissance.
‘He may have had no impact on the progression of European science because he didn’t publish his research, but that doesn’t detract from the scale of his achievement in his anatomical work in particular.’
What started as an interest in getting bodies to look more lifelike in his paintings developed into him trying to understand bones, joints and muscles and, beyond that, how the brain and the heart worked.
‘He was a pioneer – no anatomical illustrations were anything like his at the time,’ says Martin. ‘His study of the heart is probably the greatest, most elegant and beautifully precise of all his scientific investigations. And he was within an ace of discovering the circulation of the blood a century before William Harvey.’
His scientific experiments, including dissections, were not done secretly and his plan was to publish his findings when he felt they were complete, so that sees off a few more myths. He was not experimenting as part of some sinister cabal, and the notes that accompany his work are not written in code. He was left-handed, therefore he wrote right to left so as not to smudge the ink on the paper – if you hold the writing up to a mirror, you can read it clearly.
Leonardo did live and work in unstable times, so he had to accept that some of his work would be destroyed or left incomplete because of military action or when his patron fell from power.
What was to have been the greatest project of his life certainly went that way. It was a vast equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, former Duke of Milan, commissioned by the Duke’s son Ludovico. Leonardo had been angling to get the commission in the middle of the 1480s and by 1490 he won it. Now only his designs survive.
‘It was to be colossal, well over life-size, and 75 tons of bronze were assembled to cast it and an entire foundry built,’ says Martin Clayton. ‘He then spent the next three years studying horses and making a huge clay model that was maybe 20ft high.
‘He was on the point of casting it in 1494, having worked on the project for a decade, when the French invaded Italy, and the bronze was requisitioned to make cannons. A draft letter from a frustrated Leonardo to the Duke’s son Ludovico survives: “of the horse, I will say nothing, for I know the times.”
‘So the project was put on hold to wait for the bronze he needed to become available,’ adds Martin. ‘But five years later, in 1499, the French invaded again. And this time they took Milan, deposed Ludovico and the giant clay model that Leonardo had spent years building was used for target practice by French soldiers and he had to see it being destroyed before his eyes.
‘The deepest irony was that within a few years the commander of the invading French army then commissioned his own equestrian monument from Leonardo, but that was never finished either.’ Circumstances may often have been against him, but Leonardo’s constant curiosity also had a part to play in how little work he completed. He would start by thinking he needed plants and flowers in the foreground of a picture, but that would lead him literally down the garden path to drawing his incredibly detailed and beautiful botanical studies, just as a simple desire to make people look real in his paintings lured him into an obsession with exploring and recording the human body.
‘These drawings are the daily debris of Leonardo’s daily life,’ says Martin Clayton. ‘The album is not a journal, he’s not pouring his heart out onto these pages but you do get a real insight into how his mind worked.
‘I want people to understand that Leonardo was not a god-like figure beyond our comprehension. He was essentially a human being who was trying through drawing to understand the world around him.’
THESE DRAWINGS ARE THE DAILY DEBRIS OF HIS DAILY LIFE