Feature: THE BIG PICTURE - Exhibition - Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings, British Museum
Published: 22 April 2010
THE Fra Angelico to Leonardo exhibition at the British Museum is the finest group of Italian Renaissance drawings to be seen in the UK for more than 70 years, a collaboration involving the two foremost collections, the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe Uffizi in Florence and the British Museum.
Highlighting the development of drawing between 1400 and 1510, it includes 100 works from Fra Angelico, Jacopo and Gentile Bellini, Botticelli, Carpaccio, Cosimo, Leonardo da Vinci, Filippo Lippi, Mantegna, Michelangelo, Pollaiuolo, Titian, Verrocchio, Zoppo, and others. The starting point of the year 1400 marks the beginning of the Renaissance, which saw the development of perspective, increased interest in classical forms and focus on naturalism. The exhibition closes with early drawings by Raphael and Michelangelo and the unfolding of the High Renaissance.
In the 1400s artists began to make drawings as works of art in their own right. Yet most shown here were never intended to be seen outside the studio. Drawings allowed artists to practise and refine their designs for paintings.
Curator Hugo Chapman describes the show as “very much a kind of nuts and bolts exhibition” about the techniques of the time. He also stresses the importance of paper as allowing artists “liberation”. This was, he says, “…a period when paper was this new and exciting and vital material”.
The exhibition includes the first known surviving study for a panel painting: Lorenzo Monaco’s study of six kneeling saints, c1407, for the left side of his Coronation of the Virgin altarpiece, the drawing and panel brought together here for the first time.
A move towards realism, the representation of man and nature and the use of a linear perspective were core elements of the Renaissance style. An album of finished drawings made by the Venetian painter Jacopo Bellini showcases this.
The importance of Leonardo is reflected in the inclusion of 10 drawings by him, including his pen study of a sun-baked panorama, precisely dated August 5 1473. It is the earliest landscape drawing in European art and his first documented work.
The exhibition looks to Florence and Venice. Venetian artists tended to favour atmospheric, tonal, compositions while Florentines tended to favour outline and emphatic volume. Florentine drawing was characterised by the depiction of movement and the expression of emotion by pose, gesture and drapery as seen here in Andrea del Verrochio’s Head of a Woman.
• Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings is in the Round Reading Room at the British Museum,
Great Russell Street, WC1, until July 25. £12, 020 7323 8181, www.britishmuseum.org