15 November 2024
This beautifully informative exhibition in the renamed King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace is a breathtaking chance to see the preparatory studies of more than 80 Renaissance artists. It brings together the widest range of drawings ever shown together in the UK from the period. Exploring the diversity and accomplishment of drawing across Italy between 1450 and 1600, the exhibition feature 160 works by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian alongside lesser-known artists, all drawn from the Royal Collection, which holds one of the world’s greatest collections of Italian Renaissance drawings.
With high quality paper plentiful in the period, many of the works here were created by the artists as preparations for projects including paintings, prints and sculptures, with one highlight a red chalk working by Raphael of The Three Graces, circa 1517-18, which is a study of one model in three poses made for his fresco The Wedding Feast of Cupid and Psyche in the Villa Farnesina, Rome.
Other notable works include a chalk study of an ostrich, circa 1550, attributed to Titian, and Michelangelo’s The Virgin and Child With the Young Baptist, circa 1532, but there are also other pages that feature the equivalent of artist doodles today – specifically Leonardo da Vinci’s study of lions, cats … and a tiny little dragon.
This elegant exhibition is a perfectly balanced mix of ravishing drawings and practical know-how – with explanations of what distinguishes metal point from pen and ink or chalk from charcoal, sticks of charcoal dipped in linseed oil yielded an especially saturated black, and how the naturally occurring mineral, red chalk, could be sharpened to a point for the finest detail, and wedged into the end of a split stick that an artist could use like a stylus.
My advice is to examine the artworks first then read the captions – they are excellent: precise, but not off-puttingly technical.
Booking to 9 March, 2025
