A young lad dressed in a cap and pointed slippers sits hunched over a sheet of paper at work on a drawing. Beside him a dog is curled up fast asleep. This is the down-to-earth subject of a 15th-century sketch by an unidentified Florentine artist that appears at the start of this exhibition at The King’s Gallery – artfully selected to announce the show’s approach. Drawing, it suggests, isn’t a rarefied activity.
There are around 2,000 Renaissance drawings in the Royal Collection, mostly amassed during the reign of Charles II, including show-stopping sheets from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and meticulous presentation pieces by his rival Michelangelo Buonarroti. Yet, for head of prints and drawings Martin Clayton, who, here, selects 158 of them (including nine which are double-sided), Renaissance drawings were, with a few exceptions, “working tools”.
Often, they were preparatory studies for finished paintings or works in other media – such as a candelabrum, organ case, or salver. Various drawings in the show were squared up or pricked with holes through which a fine powdered chalk or charcoal could pass so that, ingeniously, a design could be transferred to another surface.
Clayton invites us to consider the tangible properties of the media – including pen-and-ink and metalpoint – that, between 1450 and 1600, the 81 artists in this show deployed to astonishingly diverse effect. Sticks of charcoal dipped in linseed oil yielded an especially saturated black; a lump of red, black, or white chalk, mounted in a split stick, could be sharpened to a fine point.
When pressed upon a dried, tinted coating of bone ash mixed with glue, a silver stylus produced a gossamer-like mark. With pencils and pads of paper on hand, visitors are encouraged to make drawings of their own.