Humanity and genius in the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci
The Queen’s Gallery is the standout among this year’s global exhibitions marking Leonardo’s death in 1519
In his The Lives of the Artists the 16th-century artist and writer Giorgio Vasari gives special place to Leonardo, “marvellous and divine . . . variable and unstable”, who left so many paintings and sculptures incomplete because “he was convinced that his hands, for all their skill, could never perfectly express the subtle and wonderful ideas of his imagination”.
But his drawings did. Rearing horses, twisting violently, kicking, biting, and a raging rider, cloak billowing in the wind, leap out from the bright sketches for the 18-metre war mural “The Battle of Anghiari”, never finished, now lost. Human and animal power and fury, muscular force and grace, rise and fall in a few swirling red chalk marks on paper.
Leonardo’s most ambitious completed painting, “The Last Supper”, already deteriorated in his lifetime; its energy and psychological originality live potently in the rapidly sketched head of St James, eyes cast down in horror; in the ethereal black chalk “St Philip”; in the guilty coils of “Judas”. For “The Arm of St Peter”, curving back as the apostle leans over Judas’ shoulder, the chalk is expressive, tonal. By contrast Leonardo uses pen and ink in “Sketches for the Last Supper”, delineating structure: integrating 13 men in a harmonious composition while differentiating facial type, pose and gesture.
All these drawings belong to the Royal Collection, the world’s most comprehensive Leonardo holdings. Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing at the Queen’s Gallery in London features almost half its collection of 550 sheets, and is the standout among this year’s global exhibitions marking 500 years since Leonardo’s death in 1519.
It demonstrates conclusively that drawing was central to everything Leonardo did, and how, whenever he lifted pen or brush, he strove for perfection. In the circular striped “Star-of-Bethlehem” he gives as close attention to the clump of greenery to soften the edge of the rock on which the swan stands in the (lost) painting “Leda” as, in the lovely “Head of Leda”, to the girl’s demure, distant countenance and sumptuously interlacing plaits. A swag of drapery falling from right shoulder over the left hip of a kneeling figure, drawn in brush and black ink with white heightening on blue paper, is a study for the angel in “The Virgin of the Rocks”; it is also an enthralled depiction of light passing through and reflecting off textiles.
No artist ever articulated their thoughts, their attempts to understand an infinite range of experience, with such supreme technical accomplishment yet sense of mystery, as Leonardo in his works on paper. On a single sheet, in 1490, he draws patterns of circles, arcs and triangles, a mighty horse; an old man whose cloak merges with a study of trees; geometric diagrams morphing into mountains; a blade of grass, cumulus clouds, a screw press, a vision of a deluge. In a breath, he moves from representing the appearance of things to analysing the rules of the universe, from art to engineering, geology, botany, and on to the apocalyptic.
If Leonardo is remote and magisterial in his paintings, here he is immediate, personal, his interests and obsessions threading across three decades. Palpable is the love for animals, especially horses — from early metal-point studies to a black-chalk sheet from 1517-18, “Horses, St George fighting the dragon, and a lion”, where he experiments with depicting extreme movements.
Dominant, too, is water. “Studies of water” fixes the momentary impression of bubbles in a pool. “A river landscape” is an idyllic study of the Adda near Milan, with boats and ferrymen, coursing over shallow rapids. In the lively charcoal “The Arno valley with the route of a proposed canal” water is a phenomenon to be tamed by engineering logic. In “Map of Valdichiana” the bright blue lake resembles the silhouette of a bird circling the land, as if Leonardo envisaged the scene in aerial view — an image connected to his diagrams for flying machines. In the black chalk “Deluge” suite, water is the force overcoming everything: mountains fragment, towns are washed away, a fortress collapses. In the final sheet, nothing stable remains in the rush of air, cloud, rain, wind, each discernible yet merging into formless chaos.
Visionary possibility, and human life as a mere moment in unconscionable timespans: Leonardo distilled in his drawings the extremes of Renaissance sensibility as well as the span of Renaissance knowledge.
His anatomical studies, including the complex, large-scale “The cardiovascular system and principal organs of a woman”, based on dissections, unite early-16th-century scientific endeavour and humanist optimism. Chalk drawings of young men with classical profiles and corkscrew locks, probably inspired by Leonardo’s assistant/lover Salai (according to Vasari “a very attractive youth of unusual grace and looks, with beautiful hair which he wore curled in ringlets and which delighted his master”), idealise nobility and sensuality. There are leadpoint “Designs for Boats and Other Machinery”, then a declaration that all this is futile: the fantastical “A Cloudburst of Material Possessions”, where rakes, ladders, shears, set-squares, pliers, fall in a torrent.
The backcloth is war and politics in Florence and Milan, whose regimes competed for the artist; his last patron, the French king François I, “did not believe there could be anyone else on earth who knew as much as Leonardo”.
In 1499 French troops invading Milan used Leonardo’s model for his massive Sforza sculpture as target practice and razed it, only to commission from him a new one celebrating the destroyer, the Trivulzio Monument. It was also unrealised. No studies for either commission have the tragic grandeur of his final drawing, in 1517-18, of an equestrian monument imagined for his own delight: a soaring horse and naked rider on a lightly sketched pedestal with hints of frieze and pilasters, the uncertain scale and hazy black chalk giving a dreamy atmosphere of interiority.
Leonardo designed (unbuilt) weapons for various rulers, with the proviso they only be used against “ambitious tyrants . . . to preserve Nature’s chiefest boon, that is freedom”. He never surrendered his independence: through his sheer pleasure in drawing, we glimpse in this magnificent exhibition the exhilarating freedom of one of the most inventive, restless minds that ever lived.