Press Release
Group of Leonardo Drawings Shown for First Time in U.S.
Birmingham, AL, February 15, 2008 — The Birmingham Museum of Art announced today that one of the most significant groups of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci will be loaned to a U.S. museum for the first time by the Biblioteca Reale (Royal Library) in Turin, Italy. Organized by the Birmingham Museum of Art, the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Drawings from the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, will open September 28 and run through November 9, 2008 in Birmingham. The works encompass one of Leonardo’s most celebrated notebooks, the Codex on the Flight of Birds, and 11 important drawings, including one described by Bernard Berenson as the “most beautiful drawing in the world.” The drawings have never before traveled as a group nor in their entirety been made available outside of Italy.
This exhibition provides a rare glimpse into the mind of the greatest draftsman of all time, whose designs still fascinate and challenge us today. Often called “the universal genius,” Leonardo is recognized for his restless, inventive mind, and the drawings in Turin illustrate in microcosm the extensive range of his interests.
“It is a tremendous honor to be the first museum to present these drawings as a group to the United States,” says Gail Andrews, director of the Birmingham Museum of Art. “We are deeply grateful to the Biblioteca Reale and to the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture for facilitating this initiative. The Birmingham Museum of Art is committed to bringing to our community objects of global significance that broaden appreciation for artistic endeavor, our understanding of the world and ourselves. These drawings by Leonardo da Vinci offer an unparalleled opportunity for careful observation and insight into the mind of a master.”
The drawings are acute observations, fantastical explorations, anatomical studies, and utilitarian working drawings; one sheet includes a fragment of a poem. They are executed in a variety of media, including red chalk, black chalk, metal point, and pen and ink—some on red, blue, and green prepared paper. Dating from about 1480 to 1510, the works traverse the most fertile period of Leonardo’s career.
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.”
The Biblioteca Reale
The Biblioteca Reale was established during the reign of Carlo Alberto of Savoy (r. 1831-1849). The House of Savoy, one of the Europe’s oldest dynasties, had long collected the rare manuscripts, illuminated books, and exceptional book bindings that make up some of the library’s 200,000 volumes today. Carlo Alberto not only ordered the construction of the Library to house the collection, but he also acquired a group of more than 2,000 drawings, including important examples by Michelangelo, Raphael, Poussin, Rembrandt, and Tiepolo. The Leonardo drawings, however, are undeniably the jewels of the prestigious collection. This nucleus of Leonardo drawings was enhanced in 1893, when a Russian collector donated the Codex on the Flight of Birds to King Umberto I of Savoy.
“Italians consider the Biblioteca Reale’s Leonardo drawings among their most important cultural patrimony, yet access to the drawings in the library is extremely limited,” O’Grody says.
The Foundation for Italian Art & Culture
This exhibition was made possible by the Foundation for Italian Art & Culture (FIAC), an organization that seeks to promote the knowledge of Italian cultural and artistic traditions in the United States. FIAC works closely with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Affairs, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and major Italian cultural institutions in order to expand appreciation of Italian art in the United States. "The Foundation principals have been extremely gracious throughout the planning of this important project, which would not have been possible without them," O'Grody says.
Exhibition Catalogue
The Birmingham Museum of Art will publish the catalogue for this exhibition. Individual entries on the 11 drawings—three are double-sided—will situate each within the greater framework of Leonardo’s graphic oeuvre. The entries will incorporate discussions of the purpose of the drawing, medium, date, and context for which it was made. The catalogue will include full-scale color illustrations of each sheet and several essays. The Codex on the Flight of Birds will be given a page-by-page description and analysis, and essays will cover Leonardo’s drawings, his quest for flight, and the reasons Leonardo still fascinates us today.
Exhibition Programming and Partnerships
The Birmingham Museum of Art will present programs relating to Leonardo’s life and his contributions to the fields of art and science, and more broadly to the town of Turin, Italy, where this exhibition originated. The exhibition offers an opportunity for an intimate encounter with Leonardo’s draftsmanship, says O’Grody. “I hope that we can encourage the kind of meticulous observation of his drawings that Leonardo brought to his recordings of the world around him. Leonardo’s variety of subject, range of technique, and eloquence of line will, I think, produce a sense of wonder and admiration that only he can engender.”
Symposium of Leonardo Scholars
A symposium on September 27th at the Birmingham Museum of Art will bring together leading scholars in the field of Renaissance art, including David Alan Brown, Curator of Italian Renaissance and Baroque Painting at the National Gallery of Art and author of Leonardo da Vinci: Origins of a Genius (Yale, 1988), who will keynote the event. Jonathan Pevsner, PhD, Leonardo scholar and professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s Kennedy Krieger Institute, will explore Leonardo’s integration of science, technology and art, along with his discoveries ranging from anatomy to physiology.
Alabama Symphony Orchestra Concert
Local partnerships include a collaboration with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. For centuries the city of Turin has been recognized as one of the great capitals of Baroque music, yet it was only in the early 20th century that a large cache of manuscripts by Antonio Vivaldi was discovered there. In collaboration with the exhibition of Leonardo’s works at the Birmingham Museum of Art, and in celebration of Turin’s musical history and its collection of Vivaldi manuscripts, the Alabama Symphony Orchestra will present a concert of works by Italian masters Antonio Vivaldi, Giovanni Gabrieli, and Ottorino Respighi on October 24, 2008.
Student Exhibition of Leonardo-Inspired Designs
Students from The Visual Arts and Communications Academy (Jefferson County, AL) a public magnet school, will submit designs and working models of flying machines for a juried exhibition displayed concurrently with the Leonardo exhibition. Academy students are drawn from the acclaimed Jefferson County International Baccalaureate School and recruited from around the state of Alabama.
After the exhibition closes in Birmingham, it will travel to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, November 16 through December 28, 2008.
About the Birmingham Museum of Art
Founded in 1951, the Birmingham Museum of Art today has one of the finest collections in the Southeast. Its collection of more than 17,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and decorative arts represents a rich panorama of cultures, including Asian, European, American, African, Pre-Columbian, and Native American. Among other highlights, the Museum’s collection of Asian art is considered the finest and most comprehensive in the Southeast, and its collection of Vietnamese ceramics one of the finest in the world. The Museum also is home to a remarkable Kress collection of Renaissance and Baroque paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts from the late 13th century to c.1750, and its collection of 18th-century European decorative arts includes superior examples of English ceramics and French furniture.
The Birmingham Museum of Art is located in the heart of the City’s cultural district. Erected in 1959, the present building was designed by architects Warren, Knight and Davis of Birmingham, with a major renovation and expansion by Edward Larrabee Barnes of New York completed in 1993. The facility encompasses 180,000 square feet, including a splendid outdoor sculpture garden.
ADMISSION to the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Drawings from the Biblioteca Reale in Turin and to the Museum’s permanent collection is FREE.
MUSEUM HOURS: Tues—Sat, 10 am to 5 pm; Sun, Noon—5 pm; closed major holidays Go to www.artsbma.org or call 205.254.2565.
For high resolution images please contact Julie Mann.
Contacts
Birmingham Museum of Art:
Melanie Parker
205.254.2076 / mparker@artsbma.org
Julie Mann
205.254.2707 / jmann@artsbma.org
Resnicow Schroeder Associates:
Julia Kirchhausen
212.671.5161 / jkirchhausen@resnicowschroeder.com
Geetha Natarajan
212.671.5175 / gnatarajan@resnicowschroeder.com
HOURS:
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