Why bother looking at drawings when paintings are so much bigger, more colourful, and, well, finished? If you’re on the side of the sceptics, a new exhibition at the King’s Gallery is your tonic, guaranteed to persuade you that drawings are so much more than workings-out that have escaped the wastepaper basket. With around 160 works on paper by more than 80 artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and the Carracci brothers, as well as less familiar names, this exhibition of works from the Royal Collection is the most expansive survey of Renaissance drawings to have been mounted in the UK.
Curator Martin Clayton has one of the world’s finest collections of Old Master drawings at his fingertips, but his selection of the very best preserved examples shows the central role of drawing during this period of intense innovation and change from 1400-1600, and the many ways in which a line on paper, in ink, graphite, chalk, charcoal or metalpoint, was used to capture, explore and transmit ideas.
It’s true too that there can be few better ways to get a feeling for the rowdy, frenetic atmosphere of an artist’s workshop: the first section of this thematically organised show is dedicated to life drawing, and gives a lively sense of the characters – almost all male – who were in and out of studios, posing nude or in costume. There don’t seem to have been professional models at this point, and instead apprentices might have been asked to hold a pose, or suitable passersby persuaded in from the street.
The study of nature was at the heart of Renaissance values, and nude studies, like that by Annibale Carracci (c. 1580-5), were essential to understanding the structure and dynamics of the body – and formed the basis of naturalistic figures in painting and sculpture.
Raphael was one of the very few artists who had access to a female model, probably a sex worker. In a study from c. 1517-18, the unknown woman appears three times on a single sheet, which then served as the basis for the Three Graces in Raphael’s fresco at the Villa Farnesina, Rome. Michelangelo never went near a female model: instead, he added breasts to his uncompromisingly masculine figures. His heroic figure of The Risen Christ (c. 1532) is no less improbable; the figure is no doubt informed by years of life-study but embellished in stippled black chalk to produce an impressively honed male physique far removed from daily reality.
Hanging next to Michelangelo’s virtuoso drawing is a similarly impressive feat of draughtsmanship by Luca Signorelli (c. 1500) in which two male nudes are locked in battle. Like Michelangelo, Signorelli uses black chalk, but his bold hatched strokes suggest the violent movements of the struggle, and allow us to appreciate the pace of the artist’s hand.
If these poses seem impossibly difficult to hold, for A Man with a Flail (c.1555) Battista Franco required his model to adopt a pose close to a torturer’s stress position. Leonardo’s exquisite and painstakingly made drapery study for The Virgin of the Rocks (c. 1491-4), made with brush and black ink with white highlights on a lightly coloured paper, suggests an uncomfortably lengthy session for artist and model alike. As a solution, artists often used wax or wooden models, which could then be draped with a costume, soaked in plaster of Paris to retain the folds, allowing the artist to work at his own rate.
Such care over the modelling of form needed to be matched by naturalistic, persuasive facial expressions. A series of individualised, characterful heads range from sensitive and apparently faithful portraits to idealised faces created for devotional paintings, such as Federico Barocci’s The Head of the Virgin, c. 1582, rendered in detail in coloured chalks, as preparation for his Annunciation, now in the Vatican Museums.
One rather moving portrait is also the earliest work on display, and a rare example of a drawing by the Florentine painter and Dominican friar Fra Angelico. The Bust of a Cleric (c. 1447-50), thought to be a preparatory drawing for a fresco cycle depicting the life of St Lawrence, is exquisite. Despite its economy, with the ochre paper used as a mid-tone, it has a remarkable solidity that seems to imply a bond between the men. Elsewhere, intimacy comes not from friendship but the relaxing of boundaries between an artist and a practised model. The model for Polidoro da Caravaggio’s Head of St Thomas (c. 1527) must have been accustomed to working at uncomfortably close quarters with the artist, and the pay-off is a nuanced portrait essential to achieving an emotionally compelling final painting.
In contrast, Domenico Ghirlandaio’s study of his patron’s lady-in-waiting may have been the first and last time this woman sat for a portrait, presumably under orders, her downcast eyes making clear the discomfort of such close and prolonged scrutiny.
The Royal Collection is celebrated for its holdings of Leonardo da Vinci, who focused more attention on the details and variety of the natural world than any of his contemporaries. In his sheet of Cats, Lions and a Dragon, c. 1517-18, his imagination works as he draws, his observations of cats washing, sleeping and fighting, sliding easily into complete fantasy. Something similar happens in Jacopo Bertoia’s Six Horses (c. 1570), which look very much as if they are based on the study of a horse’s skull, made spookier still in one case with the addition of wings.
The most successful artists worked for Europe’s rulers, and exotic animals were a fairly common feature of court life. The appearance of an ostrich was clearly an event worth recording, and a large drawing (c. 1550) thought to be by Titian, is on display for the first time in the UK.
Titian lived in Venice, on the trade route between East and West, and just the sort of place you might spot an ostrich being unloaded on a quayside. It’s a big drawing, sketched in some haste, the bird’s great knees and feet caught with wonderful precision despite their alien appearance. Interestingly, the drawing has been squared up so that it could be transferred to a canvas, and though no ostrich appears in any surviving painting by Titian, he must have had something in mind.
A large proportion of the show is given over to the various applications of drawing, with designs for tapestries, candelabras, fancy dress and ceilings. It evokes the busy lives of artists working across different media and accustomed to producing designs to be interpreted and realised by engravers, goldsmiths, stonemasons, and more.
This is an exhibition curated with real passion for the subject, and Clayton’s thoughtful hang prepares viewers for a final room containing the often barely legible survivors of the studio – sheets that have been incised and overdrawn time and time again, their surfaces shiny or scuffed with use, the details obscured by layers of graphite and chalk. These are working drawings, many of them “cartoons”, full-size drawings that were used to transfer a design to a canvas.
What makes these drawings so fascinating and seductive today are exactly the imperfections and insights into process that the artists who made them were striving to refine and remove. Leonardo might well have been astonished to see his designs for a pair of table fountains preserved on fragments of paper, even more the heavily worked cartoons that have, by some accident, survived.
But early on there were collectors who prized the immediacy and virtuosity of drawings as a unique and intimate encounter with an artist, and artists from Giovanni Bellini to Michelangelo made highly finished, autonomous drawings. Having these drawings on public display is nothing short of sensational.