Exhibition Highlights: “Most Beautiful Drawing in the World”
Among the most celebrated of the Turin sheets is the preparatory sketch of the angel for the first version of the Madonna of the Rocks (ca. 1483), originally intended for a chapel altarpiece in the church of San Francesco Grande in Milan. Its powerful and expressive silverpoint parallel hatching led art critic and connoisseur Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) to describe it as the “most beautiful drawing in the world.” Rarely displayed to the public, the Madonna of the Rocks made international news in 2003 when it was displayed for two hours outside of its protective case.
A sheet from ca.1505/06 is associated with several of Leonardo’s projects, above all, the Battle of Anghiari. Leonardo’s most celebrated commission, his unfinished mural painting for the assembly room of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, was pitted in competition with Michelangelo’s battle scene on the opposite wall. The sheet in Turin is one of several made in preparation for the painting. In addition to two figures seen from the back, with carefully delineated musculature outlined and hatched in pen and ink, brief musings of hastily scrawled figures in action flit across the page. Other figures, unrelated to the Battle of Anghiari, also are sketched in. The Turin sheet reveals the variety of projects Leonardo would consider on a single page, and is a prime example of his “thinking on paper” so often remarked upon.
Leonardo continually measured and mapped the world around him. He studied human anatomy with sketches of legs, the body in movement during battle, and proportion studies for the head and eyes on an extended sheet that includes notes and observations in his mirror writing. Three sheets from Turin are filled with equine studies, two in metal point and one in red chalk. They are probably in preparation for Leonardo’s planned monument of patron Francesco Sforza, which would have been the largest equestrian statue ever made. Leonardo’s desire to master the anatomy of a horse is found in each articulated detail of foreleg, shoulder, and flank. Drawings of insects, and even a minute sketch of a cloud of butterflies, reveal a glimpse into Leonardo’s investigations of the natural world.
The exhibition will also feature Leonardo’s Codice sul volo degli uccelli (Codex on the Flight of Birds) of 1505/6, which is contained in a bound notebook of 18 recto and verso sheets. It is filled with Leonardo’s observations on the movement of birds and ideas to reproduce these natural movements with a machine. His comments on flapping and gliding wings, equilibrium, and harnessing the power of wind and its currents are interspersed with sketches of birds, flowers, machines, architecture, turbulent rivers, and diagrams.
Leonardo’s ideas for flying machines from the mid-1480s concentrated on the power of the pilot to take off and stay aloft. After 20 years of studying aerodynamics, however, he came to realize that manpower alone would not make human flight possible. By focusing instead on the ability of birds to take advantage of the wind, and the construction of their wings, Leonardo hoped to overcome the issues of weight and gravity.
Explanatory panels and a new didactic software program will aid the visitor in penetrating Leonardo’s famed mirrored writing and lateral thinking. The program will allow visitors to virtually page through the Codex and animate the drawings. Appreciation of Leonardo’s skills and intellect transcend time. “We are still learning from him,” says exhibition curator Jeannine O’Grody, PhD, Birmingham Museum of Art Curator of European Art. “As few paintings have come down to us, the heart of his artistic legacy is in the works on paper. Leonardo’s famed powers of expression are found principally in his drawings, which provide a visual delight and intellectual astonishment that, if possible, have increased with time.”
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