Art
Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing
2019 marks 500 years since the death of the extraordinary artist, scientist, inventor and thinker Leonardo da Vinci.
For this significant anniversary, the unrivalled collection of his drawings in the Royal Collection will be shared with audiences across the UK.
Twelve simultaneous exhibitions in Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Derby, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Southampton and Sunderland will each display twelve different drawings, selected to reflect the full range of Leonardo’s interests including painting, sculpture, architecture, music, anatomy, engineering, cartography, geology and botany.
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To complement the exhibition, three young Bristol creatives have produced an accompanying display in response to the drawings, called Leonardo Unfinished. By identifying themes within Leonardo’s drawings, they have selected objects from across Bristol’s collections to create an eclectic and compelling manifesto to nurture your inner polymath.
Revered in his day as a painter, Leonardo completed only around 20 paintings; he was respected as a sculptor and architect, but no sculpture or buildings by him survive; he was a military and civil engineer who plotted with Machiavelli to divert the river Arno, but the scheme was never executed; he was an anatomist and dissected 30 human corpses, but his ground-breaking anatomical work was never published; he planned treatises on painting, water, mechanics, the growth of plants and many other subjects, but none was ever finished.
As so much of his life’s work was unrealised or destroyed, Leonardo’s greatest achievements are to be found on sheets of paper.
The drawings in the Royal Collection have been together as a group since the artist’s death, and provide an unparalleled insight into Leonardo’s investigations and the workings of his mind. Few of his surviving drawings were intended for others to see: drawing served as his laboratory, allowing him to work out his ideas on paper and search for the universal laws that he believed underpinned all of creation.
The exhibitions will include examples of all the drawing materials employed by the artist, including pen and ink, red and black chalks, watercolour and metalpoint. They will also present new information about Leonardo’s working practices and creative process, gathered through scientific research using a range of non-invasive techniques, including ultraviolet imaging, infrared reflectography and X-ray fluorescence.
Feb 1-May 6, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Tue-Sun (plus Bank Hol and school holiday Mondays) 10am-5pm. For more information, visit www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/bristol-museum-and-art-gallery/whats-on/leonardo-da-vinci
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