When the medium is the message

Drawing in Silver and Gold

British Museum

Drawings by great artists can fetch staggering sums. Yet the materials used to create them are generally almost worthless. This exhibition, however, looks at a medium where the materials are inherently valuable. In metalpoint, or silverpoint as it’s often known, paper is covered in bonemeal paste, creating an abrasive surface over which the artist works with a silver or gold stylus, leaving behind lines of precious metal. It inspired the likes of Leonardo, Raphael, Dürer and Rembrandt, and is championed today by avant gardists of the order of Jasper Johns.

The first image in the exhibition, a pair of hands by Leonardo, gives an immediate sense of its appeal: the burnished metallic lines enhance the three-dimensional quality to which the great Renaissance man aspired.

Metalpoint, it turns out, is the ancestor of the pencil, but one that can’t be rubbed out and doesn’t allow shading: everything is constructed through line, and every line must count. The forceful facial contours in Leonardo’s Bust of a Warrior seem almost to rise from the paper.

Artists in Northern Europe took psychological realism to extraordinary levels, as in Jean Fouquet’s beady-eyed

Portrait of a Papal Legate or Dürer’s unfinished Head of a Boy, in which the frank gaze appears unsettlingly modern. If the other Dürers here are less than astounding, the German artist created a surge of interest in metalpoint, inspiring later artists such as the Dutch engraver Hendrick Goltzius, whose self-portrait breathes with vivid detail. It also has a pedantic, miniaturist quality, a characteristic of metalpoint, that made it irrelevant in the ensuing age of Rubens and the grand Baroque gesture.

This earnest exhibition requires considerable concentration. It is perhaps best appreciated as a history of drawing – the building block of European art – viewed through the lens of a challenging medium. From tomorrow until Dec 6. Details: 020 7323 8181; britishmuseum.org