ARTS
LAURA GASCOIGNE
WORLDS OF
POSSIBILITIES
An exhibition in London of working drawings by Renaissance masters offers a compelling insight into their creative processes
I
n the British Museum’s Round Reading Room, now used for exhi- bitions, the atmosphere is as hushed and dim as a church. There’s an air
of reverence surrounding its latest show, and it’s not attributable to the pictures’ subject matter – although some of that is sacred – but to their technique. The almost audible sense of awe in the room is inspired by draw- ing, and its seemingly miraculous ability to bring dead artists to life. To the draughtsmen responsible for the
100 drawings from the collections of the British Museum and the Uffizi now on show in “Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings” (until 25 July), this audience reaction would have seemed odd. That their altarpieces should inspire reverence might have been expected, but that their preparatory sketches should be handled as relics would have come as a shock. It was not until the sixteenth century, when individual artists became as famous as their art, that working drawings became collectors’ pieces. In the period covered by this exhibition, 1400- 1510, they were throwaway items and – unless useful as studio aids – they were thrown away. From posterity’s point of view, this makes
the few that survived all the more precious; add to that the fragility of the paper they sur- vived on, and the reverence is explained. But there’s another reason for the hush: we’re not meant to be here. Because these drawings were not made for public consumption, there’s a sense of stealing up on the artists, looking over their shoulders and barging in on their private thought processes. To appreciate the intrusion, you’ve only to compare Michelangelo’s presentation draw- ings from the early 1530s in the Courtauld’s current exhibition “Michelangelo’s Dream” with the two sheets of working drawings from 30 years earlier on show here. The polished perfection of the presentation drawings, meant for display, keeps us at a distance; the scrap- piness of the working sketches lets us behind the scenes. When Michelangelo drew them
in 1503-04, he had so many projects on the go at once that he hadn’t the time to reach for a fresh sheet. Squeezed on to two sides of one piece of paper we find studies for the infant John the Baptist in The Taddei Tondo; a Virgin and Child for The Bruges Madonna; two soldiers giving a third a leg-up for The Battle of Cascina fresco; a stray anatomical study of a left leg and a snatch of verse, all crammed in at odd angles as the ideas came. Drawings like this only escaped destruction by oversight. In old age, Vasari tells us, Michelangelo burnt any evidence that might detract from the myth of his genius; he wanted his oeuvre to look “nothing less than perfect” and conceal from posterity how “he toiled and stimulated his creativity”. There is plenty of evidence of toil in the
sketches here, although the finished paintings, where we can compare them, look like harder work: the fire in Raphael’s drawing of St George and the dragon (c. 1504-05) in the Uffizi seems somehow dampened in the paint- ing in the Louvre, in which St George gains a princess but loses his mojo. The simple immediacy of ink, charcoal or chalk allows inspiration to flow straight from brain to hand, while also unlocking its magic for the viewer. We witness Botticelli’s second thoughts in a drawing of Pallas with alternative heads. We glimpse the less than perfect reality behind the ideal in Filippino Lippi’s life studies of a studio assistant with bony hips, knotty knees and a ski-jump nose – hardly a Men’s Health cover boy, but nothing a lick of paint wouldn’t fix. (Who knows, he may have been posing as a woman, like the muscle mary sitting in for the Bruges Madonna in Michelangelo’s sketch.) We follow artists on their day-to-day trawl for visual reference: Pisanello studying corpses on gibbets for the background of a fresco, Signorelli drawing a kindly man with a lived-in face who would do nicely for a saint. Michelangelo may have called this toil, but
not Leonardo. For him, the pleasure of art was in R and D; the chore was producing a painting at the end of it. So he filled notebook
Raphael’s cartoon for St George, c. 1504-05. Copyright Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi
after notebook with drawings and left fewer than 30 paintings, several unfinished. Working drawings, by definition, have an end in view, but most of Leonardo’s were done on spec. There’s no Leonardo painting of a Virgin and Child with a cat, but the 10 drawings by him here include two fabulous sheets exploring just such a possibility, from every angle. A sequence of thumbnail sketches documents the cat’s efforts to escape being hugged by the child; the speed of Leonardo’s pen is breath- taking, but even he is defeated at the end. The final frame is a blur of imprisoning arms and flailing paws, with a cat’s chin emerging from the top, gulping for air. The experimental urgency in these drawings
feels rather like a cat playing with a ball of wool. The same creative exuberance strains at the seams of Leonardo’s background sketch for The Adoration of the Magi (c. 1481) – the overambitious setting, with its complex archi- tectural perspective, reclining camel and battling horsemen, had to be simplified in the final painting. To the artist with a pen and paper, anything’s possible – the image remains fluid until fixed in paint. Leonardo’s reluctance to commit is understandable, when the life of a drawing is so easily lost in trans- lation. In Ghirlandaio’s fresco of The Birth of the Virgin (1486-90) in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, we miss the characterful frown of concentration on the face of the young woman pouring water in the preliminary sketch. And if Mantegna ever incorporated
his Man Lying on a Stone Slab (c. 1475-85)
into a painting – perhaps of the raising of the widow’s son at Nain – he could never have repeated the miracle of the foreshortened drawing, in which the young man lifting him- self on his elbows seems about to come to life before our eyes.
22 May 2010 | THE TABLET | 29
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