Italian Renaissance Drawings on display at British Museum

5 April 2012

There is no more beautiful sentence in the whole history of English literature than "In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God". I do not know what the Jacobean translators and revisers meant by it as they steered a course through ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin texts to reach an agreed version in the English of the early 17th century and hope that they were not merely asserting the rightness of their scholarship; I know only that, if we discount that possibility, whether or not we believe in God, the sentence marvellously encapsulates the mysterious spirituality that is occasionally to be found in man. Were we able to ask the 50 scholars what they meant by it, I’d not be surprised to find that none could answer and that they agreed on it simply because they too found it beautiful. Perhaps they recognised it as an example of inspiration in the theological sense of divine influence upon the human mind or soul, a phenomenon acknowledged even by those of more agnostic mind, who see inspiration as the sudden awakening of some impulse or insight for which there is neither source nor reason and is beyond their understanding. Even the most modest scribbler occasionally asks his surprised self: "Where did that come from?"

No, it’s not Leonardo: but Verrocchio’s Head of a Woman of 1475 foreshadows the work of his greatest pupil

I often ask it when I look at drawings — "In the beginning was the line, the smudge of chalk, the brush of wash" — for it is in drawing that the sperm penetrates the egg, so to speak, and the conception of a work of art begins (it is tempting to suppose that pen, pencil and penis come from the same root, but they do not). It is drawing that gives first substance to the idea in the mind’s eye. In this I do not mean the drawn studies of still life or portraiture, nor of landscape and townscape, nor of lions and elephants, all of which we find among the drawings of Dürer and Rembrandt, Cézanne and Leonardo, but the first notes that may lead to the composition of a great painting.

Consider Leonardo’s studies of The Virgin and Child with a Cat. A cat? Where did that come from? A cat had no emblematic place in the traditional iconography of such a votive subject — a lamb perhaps, a bullfinch too, even two cherries on a bifurcated stalk to symbolise Christ’s testicles and his wholeness as a mortal man — but not a cat. Leonardo must have seen a cat squirming in the arms of a child, in turn in the arms of a kneeling girl, and recognised in the complication of the momentary torsions of three very different bodies a subject as difficult to pin down as the swirling waters of a whitewater river. The pen cannot move as rapidly as the model, nor record as swiftly as the eye and memory, and everywhere there are overdrawings and corrections. We cannot determine which of the five studies was first to develop on the sheet — they were probably all preceded by eight studies on another double-sided sheet — for it is only with the introduction of the Virgin that we sense the composition of a painting forming in Leonardo’s mind, a composition that in still other sheets developed into an arch-topped panel that in closely confining the energy of the group enhances it. The painting, alas, was never executed, and the drawings now act as records of what might have been. In the beginning was the line and in this case that must be enough.
Two of these sheets of studies are included in the British Museum’s new exhibition of more than a hundred Italian Renaissance drawings, shared with the Uffizi in Florence. It is intended to show us the purposes of drawings as, among other things, the preliminary studies in which undeveloped concepts may tentatively be stated, and the subsequent stages through which these may pass until their compositions are defined in readiness for translation into paintings: with these the patron may be precisely informed as to what he will get for his patronage, and the drawing will act both as final preliminary model and as a record. Had the exhibition included Leonardo’s studies for the arched-top painting, this process of clarification and development would have been perfectly demonstrated in three sheets of paper, but alas was not. Perhaps it was felt that to give a tenth of the exhibition to Leonardo was enough but I am inclined to argue that the Head of a Woman from the Uffizi has, as an exercise in connoisseurship (it is sadly damaged and Leonardo’s authorship is questioned), no place in this didactic exhibition, and that his Head of a Warrior and Military Machines are almost too familiar; all could have given way to the tale of the Virgin and Child with a Cat.
The catalogue is introduced by an extraordinarily useful essay by Hugo Chapman, curator of Italian Drawings at the BM. He deals with all the purposes of drawing in the 15th century, the underdrawing that we can often see only with technical aids, drawings as records of ideas that may be re-used by assistants in a master’s studio (sometimes preserved in albums), drawings as records of contracts and as cartoons (that is as final models for paintings), drawings as a means of training, the materials and techniques of drawing, paper, vellum, inks, silverpoint, metalpoint, the stylus, chalks, charcoal, watercolour and bodycolour. We learn something of drawing the live figure (usually an apprentice or assistant in the workshop), the sculptured figure and the antiquities of Rome, even something of rates of survival, early collecting and the legacy of such disciplined purposeful drawings. It is the clearest explanation of drawing and the purest justification for treasuring drawings that I have ever read; it is a pity that, to widen readership, an offprint is not available at a bargain price, for even the paperback edition of the catalogue costs £30.

The exhibition begins with a handful of drawings that in style and mannerism demonstrate the dying days of International Gothic at the beginning of the Quattrocento — elongated figures with small heads, their bones and bodies smothered by the artists’ overwhelming interest in the flowing fold-forms of muffling drapery. In the ninth drawing it is thus with shock that we encounter the bleak realism of Pisanello’s studies of Hanged Men of the mid-1430s, their clothes the costume of the day, their haircuts fashionable.

Child’s play: Leonardo’s studies for The Virgin and Child with a cat in the language of immediate response to the animal’s twisting and turning and the Child’s hanging onto it, the pen desperately keeping pace with the violent wriggling movements of both

Four of the men are, as it were, still warm; two others, in different stages, rot on their ropes, one topped by a skull, the other’s face still recognisable, his belly swollen and, bizarrely, the hose and shoe still in place on his left leg, the right leg bare. Do men’s toes turn in when they are hanged? It is in the observation of such details that these studies for an unimportant and very subsidiary detail of a fresco of St George are so striking. Below the hanged men, two studies of a court dwarf (was she a spectator at the execution?) serve to heighten the dispassion of Pisanello’s looking.

Twenty years later, Maso Finiguerra took realism into the realms of the "How to Draw" instruction books common in the mid-20th century, with the deliberate precision of heavily outlined studies of hands and figures. These have the character of models for apprentices to follow and we can imagine the instruction "First the outline, then the brown wash to suggest the volume of the outlined form, its shadows and its wrinkles " In this, they more or less accord with the instruction of Leon Battista Alberti, the first Italian theorist in the visual arts, who stressed the fundamental importance of "circumscription" in an influential treatise of the 1430s. With such models of general application to follow, assistants in the workshop could speed the production of altarpieces and other paintings in which pose and gesture were to give identity and clarity to the narrative. Sheets such as these, mere tools of precision, are at the bottom of the aesthetic heap, a world away from Leonardo’s drawings inspired by the cat.

Mantegna’s Man lying on a stone slab is another precision tool but one invented by an enquiring mind that so often asked the how of things — how, exactly, were men crucified, how the cross erected, and what could it have felt like to come to life again? Is this last what he studies here, seeing resurrection not as a triumphant springing into life, but as a slow and pain-filled process of cramps and spasms as blood begins to flow again and muscles are revived? It is, I am convinced, a study of an apprentice, his pose and expression directed by Mantegna to reflect an enquiry of this kind, and the acute discomforts he imagines.

After crucifixion: is Mantegna’s Man lying on a stone slab the study of a slow and pain-filled process of resurrection, of cramps and spasms as blood begins to flow and muscles are revived?

At the other end of the working process, the drawing in which all ideas have been tested and agreed, we find entirely different characteristics. In Lorenzo Costa’s Coronation of the Virgin there is nothing of an enquiring or exploratory nature — it is exactly how Costa imagined his altarpiece would be. Even so, significant changes were made between them; the number of angels was reduced to two, the positions of Christ and God the Father reversed, and five saints were made to look heavenward — including the young saint on the left who, in the drawing, looks directly at the spectator and is the link between his reality and the pictorial event (a common device in Italian altars of this period), but in the painting looks upward and away. The stilted quality of Costa’s draughtsmanship is not uncommon in finished drawings of this kind and purpose, but in Filippino Lippi’s Triumph of Thomas Aquinas the quality is wonderfully spirited, movement flowing through the figures from one spatial zone to another, only to be tamed in the fresco that followed, the animals removed, the liveliness of debating figures calmed, the architectural space made more pictorially conventional. Was this taming Filippino’s decision or demanded by his ecclesiastical patrons? This is a case where a drawing records what might have been.

I could continue, for there are drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael in this exhibition, more by Leonardo, and at least 50 by other artists over which to gloat, not only for their position in the hierarchy of drawing, but for their daring, beauty and perfection. Consider Pollaiuolo’s Adam and Eve which, in their frank nakedness, comes within a whisker of alternative development as the erotic mythological subject Hercules and Omphale. Contemplate the Head of a Woman in which Verrocchio adumbrates so much that Leonardo was ultimately to do but which, in 1475, was so much finer than the Leonardesque head that should have been omitted from the exhibition. Compare Raphael’s studies for a Virgin and Child of 1506-7 in which, with free-flowing but habitual part-circular sweeps of the pen, he attempts from memory to mimic the rapid observations from the life of which Leonardo was capable a generation earlier, and fails. Be seduced by Botticelli’s Allegory of Abundance, a young woman who shares the beauty of his Venus and his Primavera (with the graces and nymphs of which, particularly Flora, it has a close affinity). In its unfinish it draws attention to the processes involved, the first thoughts in black chalk, the smudge of red lead to lend warmth to bodies, the infinitely delicate refinement of the work in pen and ink, and the brilliant heightening of fold forms and the fall of light on flesh with white lead and the tiniest of sable brushes. Her movement thrusts the diaphanous stuff of her dress against her legs and into her crotch but above it is bundled as wrapping for a belly, waist and breasts that, strung about with tapes, seem far less real than those of Pollaiuolo’s Eve — are they invention, rather than observation, welded to the figure of a boy? Can she have been, with her face and feet, a boy? Perhaps a rather bewildered boy, slack-jawed and open-mouthed. Not without flaws — the left arm is absurdly long and a prominent vertical drawn with the pen, falling from the armpit, is an improbable alternative outline — this allegorical figure is a thing of exquisite beauty as well as instruction; in this it reaches beyond the didactic purposes of the exhibition, beyond the beginning and into the mysterious spirituality that is occasionally to be found in man.

Italian Renaissance Drawings is at the British Museum (020 7323 8299, www.britishmuseum.org) until July 25. Daily 10am-5.30pm (Thurs and Fri until 8.30 pm). Admission £12, concessions available.

Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings
British Museum
WC1

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in