Democracy in the King’s Gallery? That might sound like a contradiction in terms. And yet, viewing – or more precisely revelling in – these priceless drawings, has a surprisingly immediate down-to-earth quality.
A small image of a young man making a drawing on his lap, a dog curled up nearby, shows that all you need is a piece of paper and a simple implement such as chalk or a pen. The Royal Collection’s presentation encourages visitors to do just that.
Visitors are provided with desks, pencils, paper and old master reproductions. Instead of the usual catalogue, there is a workbook, Inspired: To Draw Like a Renaissance Master, to help people engage in the practice of making drawings, guided by masterly examples.
The 160 works on paper show the astounding way that Renaissance artists focused on the (mostly male) human body, using live models as well as corpses.
Most were never intended as more than studies but now we see them as works of art in themselves. What is fascinating is the sense of process, the separate parts which would later become incorporated into a complex, larger painting, tapestry or fresco.
This is apparent in the balanced harmonies that appear so powerfully in Raphael’s sketch for The Massacre of the Innocents (1510-11). Beauty appears alongside horror. Herod’s killer’s body is like that of a dancer in a complex ballet of moving forms.
Raphael’s drawing of Christ’s Charge to Peter (1515-6, made for the fully worked cartoon, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum) reveals how the secular or “profane” was the basis for the sacred. The original for Raphael’s idealised Christ figure, draped in an off-the shoulder white toga, was a young male studio model wearing a loin cloth.
In Baccio Bandinelli there is a different, directly active mood. His pen and ink Bust of a Man from 1545 is a flurry of curved marks made with a quill pen dipped in rust-brown iron gall ink. What a powerful sense of the man it gives: bright-eyed curly-haired, his squiggly beard exuding a sense of life. The dynamic rhythm looks forward to the way that Van Gogh wielded his pen three centuries later.
But we don’t need to go so deeply into the 16th century to find a strong sense of individual life. The Head of a Man from 1520-30, made with chalk on blue paper, attributed to Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, shares that alert and sympathetic look. The man has a reflective calm, and there is a softness to his lips. The coiled ringlets on the brow and beard recall those of Roman statues, reminding us that Renaissance artists drew on ancient Roman sculpture to evoke an individual rather than idealised types.
In place of a chronological presentation, where the transition from the Early to the High to the late Mannerist phase of Renaissance would be more apparent, curator Martin Clayton has opted for a thematic display: portraits, studies from nature, designs for the applied arts and sacred compositions.
The Head of a Youth
But it nonetheless becomes evident that over time artists found the means to express ever more subtle feelings and complex subjects. The Head of a Youth, attributed Pietro Faccini, made 50 years later, has a startling modernity. He could be someone you saw in the street yesterday.
Annibale Carracci’s Male Nude, also from 1580-5, is on public show for the first time. In this supremely sensuous depiction of a recumbent male back (comparable in its erotic charge to Velasquez’ Rokeby Venus), the artist made use of newly available red chalk, which allows the most delicate tonal modelling, using the white of the paper for highlights.
The inclusion of lesser-known artists alongside the “big three” gives this selection an unexpected freshness. Encountering Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci amongst the others, we can appreciate what made these three so exceptional but also that they were part of such an exciting and innovative movement by so many talented people.
Drawing was central to the transformation of art between 1450 and 1600, the period covered by this show. It evolved “from a simple tool of workshop practices to an exciting means to explore visual ideas, develop new compositions and study the world”, as Clayton has noted.
Any chance to get up close (which you can!) to these 500-year-old marks on paper is totally worth it. They are only a small number of the Royal Collection’s holdings of 2,000 Renaissance drawings, most of which were acquired by King Charles II, including an astonishing 550 by Leonardo da Vinci, 16 of which are included here, along with seven by Michelangelo and eight by Raphael.
Drawing the Italian Renaissance is at The King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 8 March 2025.
The King’s Gallery offers a £1 ticket for those receiving Universal Credit and other named benefits and a range of concessionary rates, while visitors who purchase standard tickets directly from Royal Collection Trust can convert them into a 1-Year Pass, allowing free re-entry for 12 months.
All images: courtesy of Royal Collection Trust. © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024