Leonardo Biblioteca Reale Drawings
Turin's Royal Library Loans Works to Two U.S. Museums: A Preview
Eleven rare sheets of drawings and one manuscript by Italian Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci will be exhibited briefly at two American museums in 2008.
Turin, Italy's Royal Library is loaning 11 important sheets of drawings and one codex (manuscript) by Italian High Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) to the United States. Leonardo da Vinci: Drawings from the Biblioteca Reale will appear at Alabama's Birmingham Museum of Art (September 28-November 9, 2008) and San Francisco, California's M.H. de Young Museum (November 16-December 28, 2008). The works' light-sensitive nature has determined their relatively short appearances at both American venues.
Anatomy, Fantasy, Theology and Reality
Having never before traveled as a group from Turin's Biblioteca Reale, the exhibition presents an unusual bi-coastal opportunity to explore selected aspects of Leonardo's mind from the relatively few works on paper displayed. Some of the drawings (ca. 1480-1510), three double-sided, are unique records of the artist's precise observations regarding the human anatomy. Others are the genius' utilitarian designs and his explorations of fantasy, rendered in red and black chalk, metal point and pen and ink on blue, green and red prepared paper. They're joined by Leonardo's detailed Codice sul volo degli uccelli (Codex on the Flight of Birds) (ca. 1506).
Leonardo's expressive sketch of an Angel (ca. 1483-85) is an exquisite drawing made in preparation for his first of two Madonna of the Rocks (ca. 1483-85), a chapel altarpiece intended for Milan's Church of San Francesco Grande. Described by art critic and connoisseur Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) as the world's most beautiful drawing, this rarely exhibited masterpiece exudes calm as the beatific angel's head turns gently to the left.
The most important civic project of Leonardo's career was undoubtedly his unfinished mural of the Battle of Anghieri for the assembly hall of Florence's Palazzo Vecchio, the room's opposite wall designed by the competing Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). Leonardo's missing masterpiece is known from his surviving preparatory sketches and a famous reworked print by Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). His Figural Sketches for the Battle of Anghieri (ca. 1505) reveal Leonardo's acute observations of human musculature and proportion.
Symposium
David Alan Brown, revered Curator of Italian Renaissance and Baroque Painting at Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art and author of Leonardo da Vinci: Origins of a Genius (Yale University Press, 1988), will lead a symposium regarding Leonardo's life and work at the Birmingham Museum of Art on September 27, 2008. Jonathan Pevsner, Ph.D., Professor of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, will join Dr. Brown and other distinguished experts to explain Leonardo's profound understanding of art, science, technology, human anatomy and physiology.
For information on Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus, a manuscript seriously endangered by mold infection, click here.
Sources:
- Bambach, Carmen (ed.), et al. Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman (exh. cat.). New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003.
- Brown, David Alan. Leonardo da Vinci: Origins of a Genius. Yale University Press, 1988.
- Kemp, Martin. Leonardo. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
- _____. Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design (exh. cat.). London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 2006.
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