You’ll never feel closer to the brilliance of Leonardo
Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing Queen’s Gallery, London SW1
It isn’t easy to be objective about Leonardo da Vinci. The moment you confront the ultimate Renaissance Man, you’re hit by 500 years of hyperbole – from Vasari to Dan Brown – that knocks rational assessment aside. The ludicrous $450 million paid for his Salvator Mundi – the highest sum for a painting – confirms his status as a figure to whom the normal rules don’t apply.
The one place you can get an intimate sense of Leonardo, however, is through his drawings, 200 of which are displayed in a new exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace. The show, which marks the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death, is the biggest in terms of numbers of works, it is the biggest Leonardo exhibition in the UK since 1952. All are drawn from a single album that has been in the Royal Collection for nearly four centuries, which the artist himself assembled and left to a pupil. The album has come to be seen as Leonardo’s personal legacy, but while the exhibition certainly subscribes to this view, its approach isn’t hagiographic.
It starts with an array of drawings
by artists of the previous generation, including a wonderful study of lilies by his teacher Andrea del Verrocchio. It is clear from the outset that Leonardo was far from the first artist to look penetratingly at the natural world.
We first feel that quintessential Leonardian curiosity, with its drive to categorise and connect, in a doublesided sheet of drawn profiles in which studies of a beautiful young woman are gradually transformed into a hideous old man. It’s tempting to see Leonardo’s feel for the grotesque (evident in many other images here) as a deeply felt flip-side to the urge to idealise that we see in his paintings. Yet these works were done principally to entertain his patrons, the dukes of Milan. (His drawings of scientific “inventions”, on the other hand, were to entertain himself: doodling in the margins of bigger projects.)
Indeed, the show makes no bones about Leonardo’s urge to generalise/ idealise. He may have exhorted artists in his writings to draw on the limitless variety of nature, but in four portrait studies for The Last Supper, his 1490s painting, he veers instinctively towards a stylised beauty. Only one, St James (1495) appears to have been done from life, judging by its more animated line.
We get a far more personal sense of Leonardo from a series of maps produced for the notorious warlord Cesare Borgia, for whom he worked briefly in the early 1500s. An extraordinarily modern-looking proposal for a canal around the Arno valley (1503-4) gives a very immediate “first draft” sense of the artist.
The opportunity to dissect the corpse of an elderly man in Florence in 1508 reawakened his early interest in anatomy, first as an aid to
representing the human form as accurately and convincingly as possible, but increasingly as an obsessive end in itself.
A large and densely detailed drawing of The Cardiovascular System and Principal Organs of a Woman
(1509-10), which merges information gleaned from this dissection with ancient beliefs about the structure of the body, makes an extraordinary visual impact. Over the winter of 1510-11, Leonardo performed 20 further dissections – mostly on hanged criminals – that enabled him to produce a series of drawings regarded by scientists to this day as the most lucid visual exposition of the human system ever created. His pen and ink have the advantage over photography in that he can arrange the muscles and tendons to show how they fit together: with sections cut away to show the complex joints of knuckles and fingers, for instance; or, best of all, the muscles running from the neck into the chest and arms, from four different angles. The drawing is at once dispassionately analytical and full of probing energy, every spare inch of paper crowded with written observations in his mirror script (written from right to left). The sense of entering the mind of a man from 500 years ago is quite staggering.
The show ends with murky and quite frenzied drawings of tempests and deluges (1517-18) that, as the wall panels rightly point out, tend towards the decorative. This critical perspective on Leonardo may not be what you’re expecting, but it’s exactly this focus on his low-points, disappointments and stillborn projects, alongside his highs, that brings a sense of light and shade to the subject: it humanises and makes accessible an artist whose maverick brilliance can make him seem remote. I doubt you’ll ever feel closer to Leonardo than in this exhibition.
Scientists still regard the drawings as the most lucid visual exposition of the human system ever created