Exhibitions
Huon Mallalieu
‘By the ancients,’ wrote Leonardo da Vinci in about 1492, ‘man was termed “a lesser world”, and certainly the use of this name is well bestowed, because ... his body is an analogue for the world.’
To Leonardo, ‘the ancients’ meant specifically the first-century-bc Roman architect Vitruvius. Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture inspired Leonardo’s preoccupation with ideal proportions, best illustrated by his Vitruvian man-ina-circle drawing.
Despite the fame of his Mona Lisa, and the notoriety of his Salvator Mundi, Leonardo was not principally a painter. He did not enjoy the work, often failing to finish commissions, and, although he served an apprenticeship to Verrocchio, no sculptures are widely accepted as by him.
The argument can convincingly be made that Leonardo’s importance as a draughtsman far outweighs his achievements in other, supposedly superior, branches of the arts. He was, according to Kenneth Clark, ‘the most relentlessly curious man in history’, and for him drawing was a natural continuation of thought. These are not often studies for supposedly greater works; most are records of his
investigations into all of nature, with mankind at its centre – and they are also very beautiful.
The 500th anniversary of his death on 2nd May 1519 is being celebrated in exhibitions across the world, and the Royal Collection has responded admirably. It has owned 550 of Leonardo’s sheets since the reign of Charles II – the second-largest holding after the Ambrosiana in Milan.
In 2016, as a recce, it sent ten of them on a tour to three British galleries and the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. This year, 144 drawings were selected to demonstrate the extraordinary scope of his investigations, 12 each to go to a dozen galleries around the country. Now they have been reunited, with 56 additions, to form the summer show at the Queen’s Gallery, and the peregrination will end at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, from 22nd November to 15th March 2020.
As the catalogue notes, ‘It is difficult to trace a continuous narrative in Leonardo’s career, for his work is characterised by a multitude of simultaneous pursuits – artistic projects that stretched on for years or even
decades, and scientific interests that evolved and cross-fertilised.’
Within a chronological framework, individual works are grouped thematically, with sections on cartography, landscapes, weaponry, botany, anatomy, horses, rivers, deluges and so on. One of my favourite drawings is a red-chalk rearing horse which would make Stubbs howl with frustration. Two or three poses are overlaid, making it seem like Whistlejacket in motion.
In fact, the Collection’s tally of Leonardos has increased by two. Two blank sheets of paper are included, with reproductions beside them revealing that on them were intricate studies of hands for his Adoration of the Magi, c.1491, now invisible except under ultraviolet light. At that date, Leonardo often drew with metalpoint but here, contrary to his usual practice, he used a copper rather than a silver stylus and, over time, the copper traces have faded.
The show includes what is very probably only the second surviving portrait of the man himself. The pen and ink sketch of a weary-eyed, bearded face appears among drawings of a horse’s leg on a double-sided sheet. It was spotted by Martin Clayton, Head of Prints and Drawings at the Collection, who recognised similarities to the red-chalk portrait by Leonardo’s assistant Francesco Melzi, also owned by the Queen and in the show. This new one is likely to be by Melzi or another pupil Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, nicknamed Salaì or Imp by Leonardo. It shows the elderly master in his last years at the French court. An exciting discovery.