London
Today, we tend to think of art and science as worlds apart. In the popular imagination, the contemporary artist is a free-thinking, creative type while the scientist is hard-nosed and data driven. But in the 15th and 16th centuries, before science became a distinct endeavor, artists commonly engaged in wide-ranging investigations of nature, from flora and fauna to human anatomy.
Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing
The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace
Through Oct. 13
The best-known explorer of these realms was Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps more celebrated now for his sideline hobbies than for his day job as a painter. In our era of self-absorption, we project ourselves onto historical figures, seeing in Leonardo an early version of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. But this is a mirage. Instead, Leonardo was a lot of things we do not prize today: an amateur, a tinkerer, and a dreamer who started a million projects and finished very few.
Why, then, do we hold him in such esteem? An exceptional exhibition, “Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing,” currently on view at the Queen’s Gallery in London, may not answer this question, but it provides hundreds more reasons to admire him. In three densely packed galleries and two auxiliary rooms, the curator Martin Clayton has included 200 original drawings normally held at Windsor Castle that illustrate every aspect of Leonardo’s career, from its beginnings in Florence to its final days in France.
Honoring the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death in 1519, the exhibition assembles the drawings that have been shown for the past year across the United Kingdom, divided among 12 cities, from Belfast to Sunderland. It is a wonderfully egalitarian idea, one that U.S. museums would do well to consider, but possible in part because this is not a loan exhibition: The drawings all belong to the queen. They entered the Royal Collection by way of Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel, who some time before 1630 bought an album of Leonardo’s drawings in Madrid from Pompeo Leoni, who had in turn acquired it from Leonardo’s pupil Francesco Melzi.
Leonardo’s continuing attraction, his fascination and his modernity come less from what he did—the Mona Lisa aside—than from how his mind worked. That, more than anything, is what is on view. While there are polished drawings here, and many beauties, none are finished. Instead, we see Leonardo looking, analyzing, and asking questions: How does water flow, what does a storm look like, what is inside the human brain?
Leonardo sought to quell his curiosity through observation, but often that was not enough. Take, for example, his horses, which he first draws extensively in the context of his preparation of the “Battle of Anghiari” for the Sala del Gran Consiglio in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. He wasn’t interested in horses standing still and eating grass, but charging forward into battle or rearing up on their hind legs—not easy things to capture in a drawing. And clearly he could not observe Neptune riding on his sea horses, as he depicted in a vividly dynamic drawing, with energetic black chalk lines appearing to trace the movements of the horses’ legs. Instead, where observation met its limits, his imagination took over.
Leonardo’s imagination was not some airy, abstract thing. He worked ideas out on paper, laying it all out for us. The thrill is seeing how much we can understand from observing his hand and mind at work, how close we can feel to him.
Despite the range of interests represented here, the attentive observer walking through the rooms may also note certain thematic links or visual analogies developing. For example, Leonardo’s interest in patterns of movement comes through in his representation of flowing water and wind, in the coiled braids and swirls of loose hair he portrays, and in the twisting tendrils of plants.
Even drawings that appear to be direct, observational studies are more complex than that. For example, the many anatomical drawings included are based on Leonardo’s dissections. But in his notebooks he wrote that to make one drawing, he had to dissect 10 bodies, synthesizing what he learned. Whether or not we not take him at his word, many of the anatomical studies bring together what he could see with what he knew or thought he knew from existing knowledge of human form.
Among these well-known categories of drawings are hidden surprises and abiding mysteries. An especially beautiful and polished red chalk drawing, depicting a dog or wolf at the helm of a sailboat, with a tree for a mast and a crowned eagle atop a globe, looks as if it escaped from a lavish children’s book. The catalog suggests at least five possible allegorical interpretations, with the wolf as the pope, the eagle as the king of France, and so on, but none are particularly persuasive. Visitors have the great fortune to be able to pursue such open questions through the exemplary catalog, in which Mr. Clayton returns to the traditional format of brief write-ups for every drawing, or sets of two or three, and concise, illuminating essays.
With all the hype, Leonardo can seem more myth than man, more icon than artist. But here is a chance to see his mind and hand at work as he observed the world, a lifelong project he never finished.
—Ms. Brothers is an associate professor at Northeastern University and the author of “Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture” (Yale).
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