Drawing the Italian Renaissance: a 'relentlessly impressive' exhibition

A visitor sitting looking at works at the Drawing the Italian Renaissance exhibition at The King's Gallery.

The exhibition delves into the Royal Collection's seemingly 'bottomless pit of art treasures'

(Image credit: Alamy / Stephen Chung)

"Drawing is both the most central and the most elusive of the key artistic methods," said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. It is central because all art starts with it: we've all had a go at it. It is elusive because it embodies "a dilemma: how do you describe a three-dimensional world with two-dimensional information?" And there are so many ways of going about it. It's "the fiercest test there is of eye-to-hand coordination", and to do it really well requires a precision that borders on "magic".

This show at the King's Gallery is a veritable feast of such brilliance, bringing together an "enormous cache" of around 160 drawings by the likes of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Fra Angelico. It delves into the Royal Collection's seemingly "bottomless pit of art treasures" and raids its extraordinary holdings of works on paper from the Italian Renaissance, most of them collected by Charles II and all in "remarkably good condition". The result is intelligent but never dry, a "fun journey" from start to finish. In short, it is an exhibition "so relentlessly impressive it will have sentient visitors crawling out of Buckingham Palace on all fours".

The curators clearly have a "real passion" for their subject, said Florence Hallett on the i news site. A section on life drawing evokes "the rowdy, frenetic atmosphere of an artist's workshop", giving us "a lively sense of the characters" involved, both draughtsmen and models. Raphael, for instance, was one of the few artists of the time with access to a female model, here depicted three times across one sheet. Michelangelo, by contrast, never had women modelling for him, and instead added breasts "to his uncompromisingly masculine figures". And "no less improbable" is the artist's "The Risen Christ" (c.1532), a "heroic" vision of Jesus with "an impressively honed male physique far removed from daily reality".

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Renaissance drawings were generally used as preparatory tools, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Artists would use them as their initial studies for paintings: several drawings here are "pricked with holes through which a fine powdered chalk" could pass – an ingenious way of transferring the images to another surface. For all the technical information provided alongside these images, none of this feels "workaday or drab".

Many pictures here testify to the artists' extraordinary powers of imagination. Some have "fantastical, even trippy elements", such as Annibale Carracci's bizarre depiction of a lobster attempting to use a nutcracker. Nobody, however, can top Leonardo. Some of his drawings anatomise a single thing, such as a flower, while others "summon miniature worlds", such as a storm breaking across an Alpine valley. A "silvery study" of an angel's drapery, made using brush and black ink in the 1490s, is "as crisp and dramatic as a modernist photograph". All in all, this is a scholarly and fascinating exhibition.

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