The Royal Collection may not actually be a bottomless pit of art treasures, but it certainly feels like one. Show after show features fresh selections of goodies pulled out from far corners of the monarchical holdings and unleashed on us serfs, pleasuring us and filling us with envy. The enormous cache of Italian Renaissance drawings that has gone on display at the King’s Gallery is so relentlessly impressive it will have sentient visitors crawling out of Buckingham Palace on all fours.
Drawing is both the most central and the most elusive of the key artistic methods. It’s central because we’ve all done it since we were kids and because it embodies the main artistic dilemma: how do you describe a three-dimensional world with two-dimensional information? We’re hard-wired to try. Vanishingly few are really good at it.
It’s elusive because all its questions have many solutions and because choosing the best one is what it’s all about. Drawing is the fiercest test there is of eye-to-hand co-ordination and optical precision.
Look here at the way Leonardo da Vinci describes the folds in a piece of limp cloth. It should be easy — it’s just a bit of cloth. Yet see how miraculously well the light falling on it has been noticed and conveyed, how the angle of every fold is made tangible. This isn’t mere description. These are skills that border on magic.
Or note how Michelangelo and his pacey pen calculate the tensions and angles of a man’s leg. On a single sheet a dozen possibilities are recorded with the shocking quickness that great drawing brings to art’s party. If you want to understand the key differences between Leonardo and Michelangelo, drift backwards and forwards between their two anatomical studies hanging here, side by side. Leonardo is after facts, knowledge, evidence. Michelangelo is after impressions, fundamentals, art.
For a variety of societal reasons that lie outside the scope of this humble review, the modern world has lost most of its understanding of drawing’s heft. It prefers to bathe in the shallow pleasures of the zingy photographic reproduction. There isn’t a drawing in existence whose ’Gram appeal can challenge the blurry wall of an “immersive experience” devoted to Van Gogh. Not that the royal goodies amassed by the nation’s hotchpotch of acquisitive rulers demand any difficult attention. From start to finish, this is a fun journey.
Most of the offerings were acquired by Charles II, a pleasure-seeking voluptuary few of us would have suspected of harbouring this much good taste. The hundreds of important Leonardo studies that pack Windsor Castle, the scores of Raphaels and Michelangelos, date their acquisition to the Restoration. Cromwell emptied the royal collection. Charles II restocked it.
Altogether he amassed more than 2,000 prime Italian sheets. The reason so many of them are in such remarkably good condition is because they needed so rarely to come out. The famous Michelangelo A Children’s Bacchanal, from 1533, a deceptively sweet scene of cavorting babies that harbours dark warnings about the dangers of a pleasure-seeking life, was drawn in red chalk. You know what chalk is like: it crumbles. This example remains so crisp it might have left the studio only a week ago.
The show is split into helpful sections. It begins with a look at the human figure. Michelangelo, again, provides the highlight with a thrusting, stretching, six-packed Risen Christ who belongs in an Olympic swimming pool rather than an Easter altarpiece.
A section devoted to portraits has a rich variety of attempts to fix the Renaissance face. Fra Angelico, whose art appears so sweet and golden when he paints, surprised me with his realism in a dark and brooding head of a Florentine monk.
Federico Barocci, on the other hand — the show’s breakout star, and one of many lesser knowns seen here enlarging our sense of the Italian Renaissance — might almost be a rococo artist, so brightly and pinkly does he record the face of the Virgin Mary.
The section devoted to landscape is predictably short — it just wasn’t an Italian thing. But when we get to nature the range expands and assorted Renaissance precisionists, not all of whom are Leonardo, begin showing off dizzying skills. Verrocchio gives us a huge and exquisite lily. Titian, of all people, draws an ostrich.
We end on religious art and watch the simple religious twosome of Mary and Jesus enlarging into huge scenes of thrashing saints and intertwining angels: the Renaissance is turning into the baroque. As the drawings inflate, I found myself returning to the smaller pleasures at the start of the show.
Fra Angelico’s thoughtful head has been drawn with silverpoint, an early method that involves using a metal stylus on a specially prepared white ground. It’s outrageously difficult to do well, but leaves marks that are particularly delicate and shadowy. A helpful display explains all this and continues around the event with further illuminations devoted to all the main drawing methods.
It’s unusual in a Buckingham Palace exhibition to be this quotidian. Are we noticing a direct intervention by the newest Charles? Is that why the scholarly catalogue we might expect at such an important display has been replaced by a “work book” and why children are invited in the big religious gallery to pick up a coloured pencil and do their own Renaissance drawing?
A lot happens at this nourishing event. I suspect we may also be seeing the setting out of a new royal agenda.
Drawing the Italian Renaissance at the King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London SW1, to March 9; rct.uk
