Exhibition
Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, New York
Through March 30, 2003
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"Truly marvelous and celestial was Leonardo.so great was his genius, and such its growth, that to whatever difficulties he turned his mind, he solved them with ease." Billed as a "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity, the superb exhibition "Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman", on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, surveys Leonardo's (1453-1519) staggering contribution as artist, scientist, engineer, theorist, and teacher. This landmark international loan exhibition, is the first comprehensive exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings ever presented in America, bringing together nearly 120 works by one of the most renowned masters of all time - the very embodiment of the Renaissance ideal of the universal genius.
The selection of drawings includes rarely exhibited works and illustrates the rich variety of drawing types for his artistic projects - from quickly sketched primi pensieri (first thoughts) to highly finished preparatory and presentation drawings - as well as landscape, botanical, anatomical, and military engineering drawings of monumental expression; reflecting virtually every aspect of the artist's artistic and intellectual achievement. Born in the small Tuscan hilltown of Vinci, Leonardo was the illegitimate son of a notary and a local peasant girl. His early school education did not prepare him for his later career as author of treatises, and he seems to have attained only a cursory knowledge of Latin, the language of most scientific texts and the "lingua franca" among the Humanists who comprised the intellectual elite of his day. Drawings by the young Leonardo include several drapery studies, remarkable for their subtle explorations of light, shadow, and texture, and a group of silverpoint studies of cats, dogs, dogs' paws, and a bear.
Also on view are a number of Leonardo's whimsical allegories, caricatures, and penetrating studies of grotesque physiognomies.
Installed chronologically, the exhibition enables visitors to trace Leonardo's artistic and intellectual development through each of the major phases of his career: his apprenticeship and early artistic maturity in Florence during the 1470s; the highly productive years at the Sforza court in Milan, from ca. 1481/3 to 1499, where he first emerged as a scientist and inventor; his return to Florence, ca. 1500 to 1506, where he was acclaimed and employed both as an artistic and engineering genius; the unsettled decade from ca. 1506 to 1516, when he moved between Florence, Milan, and Rome, seeking respite from political turmoil; and his final years in France, from 1516 until his death in 1519, where he lived as the honored guest of King Franois I. The full scope of his achievement - with its legendary emphasis on observation as the source of all knowledge - is best preserved in almost 4,000 sheets of drawings and notes that survive.
Left unfinished it provides visitors with an extraordinary glimpse into Leonardo's creative process, as he moved from underdrawing to the realization of forms in paint. The painting also preserves the imprint of the artist's fingers in the upper left corner. Works from the years Leonardo spent at the Sforza court in Milan (from ca. 1481/83 to 1499) include his design for a proposed colossal equestrian statue of the Duke Francesco Sforza.
This wonderfully spirited study of a rearing horse is exhibited together, for the first time, with Antonio del Pollaiuolo's working modello for the same project (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, New York), probably prepared in competition. A luminous metalpoint drawing of the head of an elderly bearded man has been identified as a study for figure of St. Peter in Leonardo's celebrated Last Supper, painted for Milan's Santa Maria delle Grazie.
A luminous metalpoint drawing of the head of an elderly bearded man has been identified as a study for figure of St. Peter in Leonardo's celebrated Last Supper, painted for Milan's Santa Maria delle Grazie. Leonardo's dramatic red chalk study of the head of a shouting soldier, probably drawn from the life, is among the group of ten sheets related to his now-lost Battle of Anghiari, a monumental wall-painting commissioned in 1503 for the Great Council Hall of the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence.
Other drawings from Leonardo's second Florentine period include recently discovered sketches intended for an unexecuted sculpture of Hercules that may have been meant to compete with Michelangelo's David; studies for the lost Leda and the Swan; and a presentation drawing of Neptune with Seahorses.
The exhibition also bring together a group of drawings for the beloved painting Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, from the MusŽe du Louvre, offering an opportunity to redefine the chronology and evolution of this complex late project. The magical study for the head of the Virgin provides insight into the development of Leonardo's innovative graphic techniques - most particularly his use of sfumato; an art-historical term created to describe his seamless blending of tone in the manner of smoke.
Many of Leonardo's drawings for his non artistic projects have often been viewed more as illustrations of intellectual content than as aesthetic objects in and of themselves. The exhibition demonstrates that Leonardo brought the same clarity and elegance seen in his studies for paintings and sculpture to his scientific and technological drawings.
In his Star-of-Bethlehem, one of Leonardo's most famous botanical illustrations, the ribbon-like leaves of the plant are rendered in flowing, rhythmic lines, beautifully evocative of vitality and growth.
His pioneering anatomical researches are documented in a double-sided sheet of studies of the human skull, based on direct observation and rendered in exquisitely fine parallel hatchings, and a drawing, inscribed "Tree of Veins", illustrating the main organs relating to the blood vessels.
Although Leonardo abhorred war, he prided himself on his designs for weaponry ("I can make cannon, mortars, and light ordnance of very beautiful and useful shapes, quite different from those in common use," he once declared). The exhibition features a number of his ingenious drawings of various types of assault machines, crossbows, shields, and incendiary devices. The selection of folios from The Codex Leicester (Seattle, Washington, Private Collection), one of his latest extant notebooks, includes drawings, diagrams, sketches, and written observations (in the left-handed artist's distinctive mirror script) on subjects ranging from the reflective properties of celestial bodies, to the nature of gravity, to hydrodynamics.
Leonardo's fascination with the properties and power of water is also revealed in the series of so-called Deluge drawings. Executed towards the end of his life, ca. 1515-17, these are terrifying apocalyptic visions in which giant waves furiously rebound over the diminutive forms of man and nature. Although classified as works of the poetic imagination, they are nevertheless realized with a keen understanding of the scientific principles governing the behavior of water. The exhibition also includes a selection of approximately 25 drawings by his teacher Andrea del Verrocchio and his circle, as well as by Leonardo's Milanese pupils - Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (his earliest pupil), Francesco Melzi (his companion and artistic heir), Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Agostino da Lodi, and others; providing a context for the great artist's legacy. Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman is organized by Carmen C. Bambach, Curator, and George R. Goldner, Chairman, both of the Metropolitan's Department of Drawings and Prints. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press. For more information www.metmuseum.org
March 17, 2003 |
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