“Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings” at the British Museum
“Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings” offers a multitude of such vivid glimpses into a long-since vanished world. Drawn jointly from the collections of the British Museum and the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi in Florence – where the show will travel later this year – it is the richest display of Italian Renaissance drawings to have been brought together in this country since before the Second World War, teeming with images which, in the memorable phrase of Lawrence Gowing, “disclose the inconceivable strangeness of the past for which one is never quite prepared”. The Venetian artist Gentile Bellini, who travelled to the court of the Ottoman Emperor Mehmed II in the late 1470s, furnishes a pair of startlingly clear-eyed pen and ink sketches of a man and woman in Middle Eastern costume; then, safely back home, he conjures up the warm, welcoming and peculiarly intimate civic space of a Venetian city square, the Campo San Lio, noting not only the chequerboard flagstones of the square itself, where men and women gather in statuesque groups to share the news of the day, but also, on the skyline, the several different ways in which the washerwomen of the time chose to hang shirts out to dry. In the stillness of his own workshop, circa 1460, Bellini’s Florentine contemporary Fra Filippo Lippi poses a beautifully demure young girl as the Virgin Mary, hands clasped in prayer, and sets out to capture the fineness of her profile and the unblemished softness of her skin, drawing in metal point and picking out the highlights with lead white. Some twenty years on, another Florentine artist, Sandro Botticelli, draws a very different girl, fuller of face and form, in clinging diaphanous drapery, holding hands with smiling children who clutch a bunch of grapes and brandish a cornucopia. Suspended somewhere between myth and reality, she is at once a real, flesh-and-blood, sexy Florentine girl and an allegory of Abundance. Botticelli was plainly fascinated by her: she would later be reincarnated as Venus, stepping from her shell on to dry land, in perhaps the single most celebrated mythological painting of the entire fifteenth century.
Date: 21-04-2010
Owning Institution: British Museum
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2011
Subject:
Renaissance
In about 1433 Antonio di Puccio Pisano, otherwise known as Pisanello, drew three neatly coiffed courtiers showing off the latest trends in early Renaissance men’s wear. They strut and pose in fur-trimmed thigh-length gowns with extravagantly flared sleeves, each outfit topped by an extravagantly large and floppy hat. With their slender legs and delicate claw-like hands, these dedicated followers of fashion resemble nothing so much as large preening birds, although to judge by the earnest and unsmiling face of the man in the middle they have succesfully cultivated an ostrich-like obliviousness to their own absurdity. Pisanello studied them as if they were exotic specimens – which, to him, they were. He was a court artist in Ferrara and they were travellers from the distant north, members most probably of the retinue of the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund.
A year or so later the same artist made a study of another, rather different form of human spectacle. This time he drew the bodies of several hanged men dangling from the noose at a variety of sickeningly dislocated angles. The most vividly realised of them is shown from the front and the side. In profile, his mouth is still stretched in the last gasp of death, making him look disconcertingly like a man opening wide for his dentist. Seen straight on, it becomes vilely apparent that the man must have been executed several days if not weeks earlier. The birds have had his eyes, while the skin on his scrawny legs has begun to decompose and rot away, flesh melting from the bone. Near the bottom of the same sheet, the artist has drawn a woman in profile and a boy with curly hair and staring, haunted eyes. He gazes out, seemingly at the viewer, but the expression on his face suggests that he is really looking at the same show of death and retribution recorded in the imagery suspended above him.
“Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings” offers a multitude of such vivid glimpses into a long-since vanished world. Drawn jointly from the collections of the British Museum and the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi in Florence – where the show will travel later this year – it is the richest display of Italian Renaissance drawings to have been brought together in this country since before the Second World War, teeming with images which, in the memorable phrase of Lawrence Gowing, “disclose the inconceivable strangeness of the past for which one is never quite prepared”. The Venetian artist Gentile Bellini, who travelled to the court of the Ottoman Emperor Mehmed II in the late 1470s, furnishes a pair of startlingly clear-eyed pen and ink sketches of a man and woman in Middle Eastern costume; then, safely back home, he conjures up the warm, welcoming and peculiarly intimate civic space of a Venetian city square, the Campo San Lio, noting not only the chequerboard flagstones of the square itself, where men and women gather in statuesque groups to share the news of the day, but also, on the skyline, the several different ways in which the washerwomen of the time chose to hang shirts out to dry. In the stillness of his own workshop, circa 1460, Bellini’s Florentine contemporary Fra Filippo Lippi poses a beautifully demure young girl as the Virgin Mary, hands clasped in prayer, and sets out to capture the fineness of her profile and the unblemished softness of her skin, drawing in metal point and picking out the highlights with lead white. Some twenty years on, another Florentine artist, Sandro Botticelli, draws a very different girl, fuller of face and form, in clinging diaphanous drapery, holding hands with smiling children who clutch a bunch of grapes and brandish a cornucopia. Suspended somewhere between myth and reality, she is at once a real, flesh-and-blood, sexy Florentine girl and an allegory of Abundance. Botticelli was plainly fascinated by her: she would later be reincarnated as Venus, stepping from her shell on to dry land, in perhaps the single most celebrated mythological painting of the entire fifteenth century.Drawing was the foundation stone of Renaissance art, the principal arena of compositional experiment, invention and preparation in painters’ and sculptors’ workshops across the whole Italian peninsula. In many respects the British museum’s (literally) wonderful exhibition demonstrates the extent to which drawing was the essential medium through which the Renaissance itself – the Rinascita, as Giorgio Vasari christened it – was conjured into being. It was through drawing the physical remains of antiquity that artists as various as Benozzo Gozzoli and Andrea Mantegna familiarised themselves with the traditions of ancient Greece and Rome which they subsequently sought to revive and reanimate. It was through drawing that painters such as Piero della Francesca or Paolo Uccello – represented here by an astonishingly complex study of a chalice rendered in a latticework of geometric orthogonals – mastered the new technique of mathematically calculated perspective that lent their imagery such a heightened sense of actuality. It was through drawing life (and death) as it actually was, before the eyes or in the mind’s eye, that the artists of the Renaissance opened themselves up to that deeper and richer sense of humanity that distinguished their work from that of the generations who had immediately preceded them – a process movingly exemplified, in this show, by works ranging from Mantegna’s study of a groaning Lazarus, reluctantly resurrected into life, to Raphael’s agonised studies for The Entombment.
Ultimately, at the turn of the sixteenth century, it was also through drawing that Michelangelo mastered the male nude form, which he would transform into nothing less than a new vocabulary of art; and that the incomparable Leonardo da Vinci came to understand so much about anatomy, geology, botany, physics and the deeper mechanics that drive the natural world. This exhibition contains just over 100 images spanning roughly 100 years, most of them small, many of them dashed off in a matter of minutes or at most hours. But collectively they represent far more than a survey of developments within a particular field of art. What they reveal, in microcosm, is nothing less than a complete and wrenching transformation of vast territories of human knowledge, human thought and human emotion.
Ultimately, at the turn of the sixteenth century, it was also through drawing that Michelangelo mastered the male nude form, which he would transform into nothing less than a new vocabulary of art; and that the incomparable Leonardo da Vinci came to understand so much about anatomy, geology, botany, physics and the deeper mechanics that drive the natural world. This exhibition contains just over 100 images spanning roughly 100 years, most of them small, many of them dashed off in a matter of minutes or at most hours. But collectively they represent far more than a survey of developments within a particular field of art. What they reveal, in microcosm, is nothing less than a complete and wrenching transformation of vast territories of human knowledge, human thought and human emotion.
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