King Charles is a very lucky man. Largely thanks to a namesake – Charles II – the Royal Collection holds a peerless collection of Renaissance drawings in trust for the nation. For his delectation, the monarch can rootle through boxes that contain 550 works by Leonardo – the most important group in the world – some 20 Michelangelos and the same again of Raphaels. When he’s had enough of them he can move on to Veronese and Titian, Fra Angelico and Fra Bartolomeo. Indeed there is hardly an artist of note whose graphic work he can’t hold in front of his nose.
HRH is, however, kindly sharing some of his most cherished pieces for the next few months. Handily, he won’t have far to stroll to catch up with those on display at his own venue, the King’s Gallery, where 160 pictures by more than 80 artists are on show in “Drawing the Italian Renaissance”, and it is a short limousine hop to another part of London to reacquaint himself with 11 more that have joined loans from elsewhere for “Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c1504” at the Royal Academy.
The first is an overview exhibition – a spectacular array of drawings that shows how the availability of cheap paper in the period unleashed not only myriad imaginative possibilities but also new techniques. Here are portraits and compositional studies, architectural schemes and decorative designs, presentation pieces and doodles, drawn in graphite, charcoal, pen, metalpoint and chalk.
The second takes as its theme the moment when the three most revered names of the High Renaissance were in one place at one time. In Florence in 1504 the artists were at different points of their careers but twitchily aware of what the others were up to: a dynamic developed that was a mixture of emulation, learning and, importantly, competition. Where the King’s Gallery exhibition stresses the sheer number of hugely skilled artists at work in Italy between 1450 and 1600, the RA’s focus is on the “great man” theory of art history. Together they function as two parts of one exhibition, that might be entitled: “This is what drawing could do.”
One of the most compelling works at the King’s Gallery, for example, is Raphael’s Christ’s Charge to Peter, c1514, an offset drawing made by rubbing a dampened sheet of paper on the original chalk drawing to obtain a reverse impression. The design was for a tapestry, but its real merit is not simply in displaying Raphael’s extraordinary facility and finesse but his gift for transubstantiation. Artists did not always draw from the life but used lay figures, wax models and sculpture too; the models for Raphael’s figures, however, were his ragazzi – his studio assistants and collaborators – and he shows them in the loose shirts, mantles and hose they wore in the workshop.
However, these young men, living and working in the bustle of Rome, become, under Raphael’s hand, Christ and the Disciples, robed, timeless and expressive of intense drama and faith. But the drawing also shows something of Raphael’s wonder at his own skill and the possibilities of the medium: the clothes of his models would not appear in the finished work yet in places, his gaze fixed on the point of his chalk, he drew the folds and shadows of the fabrics with greater care than he did their limbs.
By way of contrast, when, around 1550, Titian was confronted with a different type of marvel – an ostrich imported to Venice from north Africa – he captured its fluffed haughtiness on a large and expensive sheet in broad, rapid and confident sweeps of chalk. Each mark reveals an artist both startled and fascinated but with the dexterity to make a portrait of this outlandish bird in real time. It is squared up for later use on an oil painting.
But there are delights everywhere, whether the delicacy of Fra Angelico’s Bust of a Cleric, c1447–50, the sweetness of Federico Barocci’s heads or the flitting imaginations and nibs of the Carracci clan who ran an art academy in Bologna and supposedly “ate and drew at the same time, bread in one hand and chalk or charcoal in the other”.
This exhibition is also about the vagaries of chance. Most working drawings were just that – compositional and developmental tools for paintings or frescoes – and were discarded. Indeed, Michelangelo destroyed many of his drawings to bolster his reputation as Il Divino – an artist whose gifts came straight from God and that, contrary to the truth, practise and effort were irrelevant. The number of drawings of the period that have survived, outside fully finished presentation pieces and those regularly used in pattern books in studios, is an indication that they were already seen as revealing something of the artists themselves and were valued as such.
Drawings form the bulk of the exhibits at the RA but they are supplemented by paintings and the Academy’s own Michelangelo sculpture, the Taddei Tondo, 1504-5, showing the Virgin Mary and Child with the infant St John the Baptist. The influence of this work, in particular the squirming Christ child who almost seems to be swimming out of his mother’s arms in fright at the sight of a goldfinch, a portent of his future death, can be traced in both Leonardo and Raphael. The pose, which holds movement and narrative, was adopted by both men, in Leonardo’s huge and mysterious The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist, c1506-8, and in Raphael’s numerous depictions of the Madonna and Child – here as both sketches and in the oil painting The Esterhazy Madonna, c1508.
Leonardo, born in 1452, Michelangelo, born in 1475, and Raphael, born in 1483, belonged to different generations. Raphael had come to Florence from his native Urbino to learn from the works of the two famous men and the city’s other distinguished artists, past and present. Among the many sketches he made after his arrival is a dorsal view of Michelangelo’s sculpture of David, a drawing of Leonardo’s now lost Leda and the Swan and a small image of an early version of the Mona Lisa. Later, Raphael would become Michelangelo’s rival but in 1504, and during the few years that followed, he was there to study.
By this time, however, jealousy meant that the older pair were already prickly with one another. Leonardo was one of the artists (Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo were among the others) convened by the Republic to advise on where best to site the David. Leonardo wanted it tucked away under the Loggia dei Lanzi, opposite the Palazzo della Signoria – the seat of government – denying Michelangelo as much glory as possible. He was outvoted and over the course of four days it was inched into position, in full public view, in front of the Palazzo.
There was, therefore, an element in mischief in the ruling council commissioning both Leonardo and Michelangelo to paint battle scenes for the Great Council Chamber, the Sala del Gran Consiglio, as part of a decorative scheme celebrating Florence’s escape from Medici rule. Leonardo was asked first and given the Battle of Anghiari, in which the Florentines beat the Milanese in 1440; Michelangelo was commissioned six months later and allotted the Battle of Cascina, where the Florentines saw off the Pisans in 1354.
Neither mural was ever painted, although Leonardo did start his, but the drawings and scaled cartoons they made by way of preparation were to prove hugely influential. The exhibition contains a selection of drawings by both men relating to the project. Leonardo’s concentrate on a knot of four mounted knights attacking one another in a snarling frenzy as they struggle over a battle standard, their own blood-lust mirrored in their horses which plunge and bite at one another. Michelangelo chose not a scene of combat but the moment when the alarm of an impending attack is shouted as the Florentine troops bathe in the river Arno. Both were characteristic of the artists’ interests: an examination of the traits shared by man with wider nature shown through faces moved by extreme emotion, and the potential of the human body as a means of expression.
The complicated, multi-figure compositions evolved through studies of groups, individual figures, and through more general drawings of limbs, moving bodies or muscles in action. Among the most beautiful of Leonardo’s preparatory drawings are those showing horses. One red chalk and ink study from the Royal Collection summarises in extraordinary beauty both his powers of observation and his quest for the most telling pictorial moment: the horse is shown rearing but both head and legs are sketched in several positions as he sought the perfect arrangement. They transmit both equine energy and movement, as though he were condensing a flick-book of images into one drawing.
Michelangelo focused on twisting male bodies, treating the musculature with great care but rarely spending time on the faces of his warriors. In one rapid pen and ink sketch he did imagine a melee of mounted combatants similar to Leonardo’s, but perhaps for that very reason he took the idea no further. As the scenes progressed – the finished compositions were both recorded by other artists – it became clear that in war Leonardo saw bestial struggle (he had, after all, experienced it first hand as part of the entourage of the brutally uncompromising Cesare Borgia) while Michelangelo discerned both a classical heroism and a measure of eroticism too.
Unlikely as it seems, it may have been for the best that the murals were never painted. While Leonardo’s is coherent as a composition, his technique of painting with oil or tempera on plaster means that his battle would most likely have deteriorated as quickly as his Last Supper did in Milan, which began to peel almost as soon as it was finished. Meanwhile, Michelangelo’s battle would have been undoubtedly impressive but his 19 nudes compressed into a tight cluster resembled so much writhing gristle rather than physical nobility. The drawings are perhaps more potent (and to modern eyes more intimate and refined) than the finished murals could ever have been.
As the men worked, Raphael, the student of sublime gifts, was watching. While the two older men used their drawings to explore their very different conceptions of art, Raphael was busy using their examples to form a distinctive artistic personality of his own. Around 1505 he made a pen and ink drawing of two male figures seen from behind. They clearly bear the influence of Michelangelo’s naked soldiers but neither figure is a copy. Both hold complicated poses, seemingly lowering themselves off a ledge, into water probably, but the rippling of Michelangelo’s forms that he conjured through cross-hatching so intense that it takes on a life of its own is absent and outline takes precedence.
While the drawings of many of the draughtsmen represented in these two complementary exhibitions were expressions of the artists they already were, in Raphael’s case they showed him working towards the artist he wanted to be.
Drawing the Italian Renaissance
King’s Gallery, London SW1. Until 9 March 2025
Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence c1504
Royal Academy, London W1. Until 16 February 2025
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This article appears in the 27 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Optimist’s Dilemma