Leonardo da Vinci: Drawings

please join me in welcoming Kellan Burnham Thank You jasmine I want such a kind introduction and thank you to all of you for coming today for the second installment of this course the subject of the lecture today is Leonardo drawings but I also want it to be an introduction to the exhibition I know that quite a few of you are going to be leading tours of the exhibition and this might be a good opportunity for us to cover some of the bases for you to be able to ask any questions you might have so in a spirit of john garden the previous lecturer who was a friend of mine actually from nyu who in the audience is going to be leading tours of the exhibition and yeah okay so quite a few well let's get started then we all know who this is I just want to remind us that we know Leonardo through these works these painted worked the Mona Lisa obviously in the Louvre in Paris the Last Supper in Milan which was recently restored but was in pretty terrible condition fairly shortly after Leonardo painted it unfortunately because he use such an experimental technique oh so we have in our minds these basically these two or the big paintings that we think of a seat iconic Leonardo's but unlike most artists we also have some very iconic drawings in our head so that the truth Ian man has to be one of the most famous drawings of all time is this pretty much the tip of the iceberg though in terms of Leonardo's drawings there are thousands of Leonardo drawings it still exists probably there were many more even in his lifetime although we don't know of him destroying his drawings the way that Michelangelo did before he died Michelangelo destroyed quite a few of his drawings basically to try to preserve his reputation for posterity I'm not sure that any of us would agree with that we seem to love I love pretty much any scrap of works by Michelangelo and we're lucky to have some of those in the exhibition as well but Leonardo was a prodigious draftsman he drew as far as we can tell constantly just as much as he wrote just as much as he examined the world around him his hand in his eye were continually in concert so why do I have this picture here anyone want to guess it's not a Leonardo anyone in the audience want to guess why there's a peacock on a cake some Renaissance looking guys holding it no volunteers what's tomorrow yes Leonardo's birthday okay it's tax day also but it's it's playing out his birthday and it's possible that in his lifetime you might have been presented with a peacock cake although he might have been a vegetarian I don't know if that included birds but he was said to and there are some quotes from him saying that he did not like to eat meat and then he thought that future generations would find it to be a scandalous murderous practice I am NOT one of those but so the peacock cake we have Leonardo's life dates here according to my calculations tomorrow he would be about 563 years old so rara Leonardo for showing up at the MFA on your 560 third birthday staying to you very much we're excited to have you Leonardo was born in Vinci which is a very small town much smaller even now today he was the illegitimate son of notary and the love love connection not a marriage connection but he was soon taken into his father's household and you heard a little bit about that from John last week he dies in 1519 in clue in France under the patronage of the French Court because you know that in those days and the Renaissance artists had to find patron so they would remove from court to court and Leonardo started out in Florence he was in the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio he had the patronage of the Medici then he moved to Milan where he had the patronage of the Sforza family but also accepted commissions from from other groups including including ecclesiastical church groups and then eventually he did move back to Florence and then he moved well he had a long its trajectory different moods but he eventually ended up in France and so he becomes part of the history of French art as well as Italian art and that is why the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre it's also why you might think of that what would be why one of the other very important works in the exhibition was at one point in France which is the Codex on the flight of birds which comes to us from Turin but actually that was because it was stolen from Italy by Napoleon and then later stolen back by an Italian and made its way through a number of different different hands back to Turin so there are a lot of sub stories and minor histories that cook a company that the fascinating works in the exhibition and I will tell you a little bit more about them as we proceed well so back to our peacock theme why this peacock why are we talking about peacocks because this is a fairly straightforward representation of a peacock it lies in terms of the history of drawing somewhere between a model books so like the faces that John showed you last week that were types of people with different kinds of expressions that would have been handed down from the master artist to his apprentices to learn how to draw so this is something like a peacock that would have showed you what a peacock looks like how you could have used a peacock in a painting in a manuscript page that is how artistic ideas and tropes were passed down from one generation to another and that's for a long time how drawing was used and it wasn't even used really on paper for a long time artists as they learned how to be artists when they drew they drew on tablets either wax or slate or pretty much anything you can imagine even drawing in sand sometimes architects would do that just to demonstrate an idea visual idea and then it would be quickly erased and people did draw on parchment as well and there were people who do on paper but paper did not become as readily available until the 15th century and that really changes the game in terms of of drawing drawing really takes off in the 15th century for a few reasons it would be essentially the most important one is that paper is more readily available now in some respects this does looks like a sort of skiffs model of a peacock but then there are some attention to two naturalistic elements to the color of his feathers for example he seemed to have a little bit of character in his face but nothing quite like this peacock who is clearly drawn from life who has this kind of animated wonderful liveliness about him and you look at the strokes of pen and ink which is pizza Melo who's an early 15th century excusing early 15th century Italian artist one of my favorites really there's there are a number of wonderful works by him in the Louvre which is really the first Italian collection that I got to know working in France and then you also see these wonderful monkeys all around him in study sheet so it's a piece of paper being used not for any kind of formal purpose to pass along a design from one artist to another but really to study the world around Pisa nello and really the exotic things that he probably saw at the court where he was working we have works like this in our collection which gives a good sense of how fascinated artists were by the natural world in the 15th century and now this is an extension obviously not just of having the means to draw but also the interest in in the world around you and that has to do with the changing mindset of the Renaissance with the reintroduction of classical ideas with the rise of scientific thinking with the rise of the idea of the Renaissance man as being able to pursue many different fields and areas of expertise this is a wonderful work from the MFA collection by FRA Bartolomeo a landscape with farm buildings and a pollarded mulberry tree that means that the tree has been trimmed at the top so that the branches will come out you see this in park still wonderfully expressive tree with farmyard buildings in the background and that is kind of ink and you'll see that in the exhibition we pay a lot of attention to these different techniques one of them would be pen and ink working with ink and a pen usually a quill pen a pen from a feather from the feather of a bird not a peacock and we see a lot of drawings in this period and it stretches through to do into the 16th century and beyond of interest in the world around the artist including in everyday crafts this is the exploration of sericulture or the manufacture of silk by arkum boldo so this is the artist who makes those wonderful faces that are composed of vegetables and other funny things we have an amazing book by arkum boldo in the MFA collection and this is a an example of a page from from the book showing you the processes of drying out the cocoons women finding the cocoons removing them from the branches and exposing them to the Sun so that they could preserve the silk so it gives you a sense of the the interests of Renaissance artists in the world around them and have drawing as an extension of that interest and here is a an engraving you'll see an illustration of it at the very beginning of the exhibition showing you how much emphasis was placed on drawing in the conception of the Renaissance studio this is the studio of boccie abandon le there was an exhibition about Bandhan le in his circle at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum recently did any of you see that yeah it was a great exhibition very thoughtfully selected this is an engraving of his of his workshop and all of the artists who work for Bandhan le are dressed in their best Renaissance outfits and they all look very elegant and thoughtful pensive they are all drawing just give you a sense of how important this becomes now the conception of the artist changes in this period so along with the rise of the intellectual pursuit for the artist becomes this conception of the artist as an artist with a capital A the philosopher a poet somebody who's equivalent to these to these what had previously been more prestigious less labor-intensive fields of intellect and scholarship in the past and honestly even through this period artists were associated with craftsmen but there was this desire on their part and in some cases was very successful to remove themselves from the taint of handicraft and to achieve something higher so if you recall that john Garten gave you that list of of Leonardo's lists of his attributes for Ludovico Sforza his potential patron at the court Milan and he listed all of the ways that he could work for him as a military engineer so he is emphasizing his intellectual capacity as an artist above and beyond his skills as as a handy crafts person so here in the studio the act of drawing in some ways becomes similar to the act of composing creating in a in a very intellectual way so like jotting down thoughts in a journal for example which is something that you see in the exhibition in the Codex jotting down thoughts jotting down visual ideas there becomes this continuity between those two things also notice along here the kinds of things that this is a Mayo Vigo as the engrave our doing this in grieving the kinds of things that he emphasizes probably under abandon Ellie's well probably after a designed by Ben Denali but under Ben dinelli's aegis did you have a classical figure the type of figure who would have been discovered in the Renaissance and kind of archeological digs of a sort then also studying Anatomy human beings oh you have volumes of book books are more readily available Leonardo has inventories of books that he has that he wants to buy when he goes through the stationary store he also had inventories of his clothing which was very fancy purple and pink tunics he was known as being very elegant and very charming unlike Michelangelo so we'll get to that in a minute oh I love this drawing this is not in the MFA collection but to give you a sense of how important it was to draw from life but also to draw the discoveries of the Classical Age that we're popping up around Italy you have this wonderful drawing it's in the Getty collection by Federico zu girl his brother Tadeo in the vatican belvedere court drawing the law on which is one of the most important sculptures that was discovered in this period that's the sky and here is today oh you can read it along here along the term of his coat and this is pen and ink with wash and washes when you take a diluted solution of ink and you brush it on with a brush and he creates larger areas of tone so again another work from the MFA collection you may again be wondering what this has to do with Leonardo but when we're talking about when we're talking about materials this is a particularly interesting one to to consider Roger van der Weyden's saint-luc drawing a portrait of the Virgin and what is he drawing it on does anyone know someone knows yeah somebody said silver point okay um so to try to make things easier in the exhibition we've called everything metal point but silver point is a form of metal metal point um here you go so what he has and he has a piece of paper that's been prepared and this is an ancient technique people were doing it as far back as the ancient Greeks and Romans you could prepare a tablet or you could prepare a piece of paper or parchment with a kind of boned solution okay who in know Giannini handbook he says that's pretty disgusting when you need some bone for priming this little panel that mrs. bone you've already scraped and ground he recommends the thigh bone of a gelded lamb take less than half a beam of this bone or even less and stir the stone up with saliva spread it all over the little panel with your fingers before it gets dry hold a little panel in your left hand and tap over the panel with the finger tip of your right hand until you see that it is quite dry and then you can take a stylus with a metal tip lead copper silver then you can draw on the preparation and as the metal moves over the surface that ground which is like a very fine sandpaper ground you wouldn't feel that yourself but the the ground has enough of a tooth that it picks up little bits of metal from the stylus and that creates your line and it's very difficult to erase and start over so for the most part you want to get it right the first time and so there's a sense of exacting precision and that goes along with metal point generally artists are not using metal point to make quick sketches of peacocks and monkeys who are using it to draw a very finished portrait of the Virgin and Child or something equally elevated we have some beautiful examples of metal point drawings in our collection at the MFA one of my favorites for looking at the whole process of drawing is from the school of filippino lippi some people have thought of filippino lippi over time and that is typical of old master drawings some drawings missed period are often attributed Andry attributed and we'll talk about that a little bit later in a lecture so you seated on a stool so this is clearly somebody who's modelling for somebody else to draw he's striking a pose and somebody is drawing it in a silver point on an ochre preparation so the bone that was or whatever solution was put on the paper was tinted so it would create a middle tone so then you would have your darker tone the silver point and then you would put on some light white tones with usually with a brush very fine brush and then one of the finest drawings metal point drawings in our collection is by Lorenzo de cría T who was a contemporary of Michelangelo of Leonardo and of MacLean so actually this is a head of a youth and it has this wonderful kind of eeriness that he's so incredibly engaging is if he's really staring out at you just barely appearing from the paper and part of that is that metal point is a very delicate technique but also some metal point fades a little bit over time and becomes even more delicate don't know why this is shaking so much so these are two of the highlights of the exhibition itself on the right is the drawing that's the star of the exhibition took couriers from Italy called her super style and on the left is another drawing which is equally beautiful in its own way and it's probably not by Leonardo and in the exhibition I have said that it is by one of his followers Bowl trophy oh but this is a question that is it's you know a question for scholarly debates so we'll talk about that also in a little bit but for now I wanted to highlight for you that they are both metal point drawings so let's let's start looking then at the exhibition and the schematics of the exhibition while also concentrating on Leonardo's techniques and materials the first room of the exhibition you see an exploration of Leonardo's ideas beauty in terms of the theory of contrasts this theory was in the air in the late of 50 century it was something that Leonardo would have come across in parochial studio of course Leonardo was always reading and exploring so he could have encountered it in many other venues as well and I'll go back to that drawing but first I wanted to show you that so you see it in the work of other artists of this period for example Domenico Gilliland IO in his studio Michelangelo came of age this is really one of my favorite paintings so I had to I had to stick it in somewhere with this beautiful little boy and older man and the combination of the two emphasizes each to a much greater degree than the idea is anyway then they would be on their own so you come back here and these figures they don't have the same kind of connection at the two in Darrell and IO had certainly not a father-son pair I wouldn't think but it's almost as if they're standing in opposition and by contrast increasingly the intensity of of each other so on the left you have the older man with his what Kenneth Clark called his Nutcracker chin and on the right you have this almost more Morial use who for many people believed that he was modeled on stelae who was a member of Leonardo's household and who epitomized Leonardo's idea of beauty and who may have been Leonardo's special friend he certainly stayed with him for a very long time and in inventories of their clothing and other possessions they seemed to be mixed together so the purple tunics and pink tights sometimes belonged to Leonardo and sometimes belong to Soleil but he was a he was also kind of a a character and was known to have stolen from Leonardo and from the other students and then eventually matured into into a more responsible leader in this studio and those on the left again the older man he's very similar to a number of older men that you see in Leonardo's drawings as he explores the possibilities of depicting old age both in terms of what he sees with his eyes and then developing from that a kind of type on the right is a figure that looks like he might actually be dead it certainly certainly begs the question with those blank eyes a music and a red chalk drawings leonardo is one of the first artists to really use red chalk in a very and push the possibilities of it in this period it wasn't the first person to use these materials like red chalk or or black chalk but he's one of the first to really explore its potential for expressive drawing and on the Left drawing that probably relates to the Last Supper it might be an apostle for the Last Supper or there's some thought that he might be a Socrates on his deathbed gesturing to his students I encourage you any exhibition to look very closely at these drawings and to try to find some of the characteristics that you would identify as being typical of Leonardo and one thing you might notice is it's real interest in the funny ways that hair curls and how expressive it can be when you see up here he's fascinated by these curling ringlets this is much more even typical of Leonardo and in his writings and in his other drawings you see parallels being drawn between the ringlets of hair the ways that water moves in waves and forms Eddie's the way that plants grow that air flows over wings he's fascinated by almost manifestation of nature and curious to find out what the controlling forces are the thing that really binds all of those different manifestations together and here's a wonderful portrait of an elderly man this one I think has much more dignity to it and then the first one who was in contrast with the younger man he's much less of a caricature although there is some of that kind of veering toward the grotesque with it was the real emphasis on the sort of strange character of his chin and Leonardo would go out in the streets of Milan and draw as many interesting looking people as he could find looking for difference as much as consistency now how does all of this interest in in old and idiosyncratic and unusual even peculiar how does that fit in with any kind of concept of beauty well this is one of my favorites in the exhibition it doesn't reproduce very well so that's why you need to go see it in person some people have thought that it's Cesare Borgia who is the military leader who who was Leonardo patron for a short period you can see him in the Borgia program if any of you was seeing that but it is just a wonderful portrait of what looks like a very thoughtful man it captured very quickly it's delicate red shock on paper first so Leonardo works from left to right so first he would have drawn this figure and you can see this in the way that the strokes go also then coming over this line this man is now turning 3/4 profile fascinated with the beard of course in the hair and then in complete profile and to some degree becomes more of a kind of sculptural figure but we move from those studies of what you might think of as the real or the the more rough and earthy side of humanity into more idealistic Beauty divine and worldly beauty is the title of the second Roman II exhibition and what I'm showing you right now are two beautiful drawings which actually are probably not by Leonardo himself but by by his very close followers assistant students one of the things I point out in the Y labels is that it's almost impossible to have an exhibition of Leonardo drawings without including people from his school who are sometimes known as the Leonor deskey doesn't really roll off the tongue but this group followed Leonardo's principles they copied his works they finished his work for him in some cases to such an extent that it's sometimes very difficult to tell whether a work is by Leonardo's hand or by one of his followers and that kind of decision is the work of connoisseurs people who have studied Leonardo for many many years very closely looking at real works of art but it's something that you as visitors to the exhibition can also participate in and learn about one of the things you'll notice in these two drawings for example is that the strokes of the metal point tend to go up like this and that is a characteristic of a right-handed draftsman it's very unusual to draw with your left hand or to write with your left hand in this period not because people weren't left-handed but because it was extremely looked it was very much looked down upon children were urged to use their right hand forced to use their right hand and so Leonardo's very unusual in being so free with his left hand now this drawing on the other hand which is another beautiful drawing which is not quite certain that it's by Leonardo but it's probably by Leonardo and another dress and you see some of those left-handed strokes and this one you can't we can't really even any exhibition it's very difficult to make this sort of thing out because this drawing is in very modeled condition the top is a what we call a modern paper insert it's been fixed because it's sort of deteriorated along these lines it's so it's amazing that this still exists even a working drawing like this but that an artist is using either in preparation for or for a canvas or after the canvas as a record of the work this is a major commission from the workshop of Verrocchio's Leonardo's teacher and Leonardo was allowed to contribute to it with this figure of an angel on the left and when you see this work it's it's really remarkable how you can actually see a different hand at work in in the depiction of the angel and you think about how much confidence porochial must have had in his assistant to allow him to participate in this important Commission well here you have a better view of it and here we have the star of the exhibition and again here we go with the left-handed strokes and actually when you use your left hand generally you wouldn't be doing what I'm doing right handed going down like that you would be going up like that and if you look carefully especially with pen and ink strokes not as easy to see with metal point you can see how the line sort of ends at the top usually one of the other things that you'll notice about this drawing which is a study for the angel here in the virgin of the rocks-- the version that's at the Louvre there are two versions of this painting one of them is at the Louvre and the other one is in the National Gallery in London and if you go to the Louvre you will see this painting not too far actually away from the Guerlain dial of the olden temps and the baby in the same hallway and of course we've all learned in our art history textbooks 101 about the importance of this triangle in terms of the stability of this composition and that it is the angel that invites us into the into the composition because we engage with her and then we can look up we look over to the Christ child down to John the Baptist and then she's surrounded by this natural very natural feeling but almost so natural it doesn't seem even real setting which for many people have to do with the idea of the Immaculate Conception which is part of the the point of making this painting for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception anyway back to the point of the drawing for me one of the most pressing things about the drawing is that it is so much more engaging even than the painted version of the angel it really feels like you're looking at a real person and not just a superstar but somebody who is complicated and thoughtful maybe even a little bit quizzical and that separates her from all the other angels in my mind who are in the exhibition all these other images of ideal beauty don't have the same kind of inner life as this figure and was thought by Bernard Berenson who is the advisor to Isabella Stewart Gardner oh and who helped create some of the great collections in the US at the end of the at the beginning of the 20th century could be one of the most beautiful drawings in the world and Bernard Berenson was a mentor of Sir Kenneth Clark who would go on to be the head of the National Gallery in London I think at the age of 35 and also we probably all know Sir Kenneth Clark from the series civilization which is one of the ways that I first learned about art history anyone else the audience yes I remember watching civilization while doing Stairmaster in high school that made me someone but Sir Kenneth Clark said it is the most beautiful drawing I daresay he's English he had that I daresay in the world and it's interesting to see what their reactions that people are as they go into the room some people do think that she's the most beautiful others are disturbed that they find the bolt ratio to be more beautiful so you'll have to tell me at some point what your reactions are oh here's a better shot of the of the angel and you can see how she doesn't quite she doesn't quite grab us the way that the study does in fact when I look at this painting some of the things that grabbed me even more than the human figures are these plants down here which is which is part of Leonardo's voracious appetite for everything they plant in and of themselves could be the most remarkable botanical studies in the world and they certainly remind me of Albrecht Durer's watercolors as his studies of rabbits and other kinds of flora and fauna so it's a sub theme of the exhibition is the Renaissance men contrasting Michelangelo with Leonardo Michelangelo on the left in terms of their varied approaches to this idea of beauty in Raphael's School of Athens he has Leonardo in the center in the guise of Plato and he has Michelangelo down here who's incredibly muscular and incredibly brooding and I could you a sense of of the difference in terms of their appearance to their friends not just physical appearance but Leonardo is seen as a central intellectual leader and Michelangelo certainly off on his own and not looking at anyone else and that does have something to do I mean it has a lot to do with the way that their art looked as well although that I would say that if you were really going to go by how Leonardo's art looks in the end I would have him pointing out to the world around him instead of pointing up to some kind of idea because he continually said that one should not trust in the authority of of established philosophies or series one should trust one's eyes here's a better shot of the two of them um their rivalry comes to a head remember Michelangelo's 25 about 25 years younger than Leonardo he also comes of age in Florence which is his hometown it wasn't Leonardo Sun town and mikono comes from a family who had high ideas about themselves they were somewhat impressed they had least had fallen lower on the social scale than they had been originally but they had they had an established sense of themselves as a fine Florentine family and Michelangelo enters the court the Medici court some some years after Leonardo had been there so he sort of in the shadow of this other man and then eventually their rivalry comes to a head in in a commission both of them were commissioned to do battle scenes for an important salon or a room in in the Palazzo Vecchio which is the building that John showed you last week which is the center of government in Florence and their their battle scenes if they are still there and this is a question that people are pursuing actually are covered over by the work of other artists now but this gives you a little bit of a sense of what they might have looked like this is a Battle of Anghiari by Rubens after Leonardo and this is a copy of the Battle of Cascina by Michelangelo but it's by of another artist after Michelangelo so we do have a few drawings related to this projects but we don't have the overall composition and we certainly don't have the original frescoes unless some people arguing that perhaps we should try to recover them and that is a very controversial topic so we start out the Michelangelo section with drawings that look a little bit lay on our desk we have on the right it's quite difficult to see even in the exhibition you have to look very closely and carefully a very elderly looking woman and it is a naturalistic study much more naturalistic and even on idealized than than most things in Michelangelo's of and or his body of work and then on the left you have a working sheet from his studio probably none of these drawings are actually by Michelangelo but we know that it's from his workshop and these are very finely drawn figures an old elderly man who looks a lot like them the Leonardo elderly men and then a direct comparison being made with this kind of beasts which is a very Leonardi Leonardo thing to do this whole idea of comparing strands of hair to waves of water to air currents goes also through human beings to animals to grotesques and you can keep you could keep keep working that out I think this is the best comparison that we have in the exhibition it's in the third room which is called science and Anatomy and it is drawing on the left by Leonardo of men's legs and a drawing on the right by Michelangelo so Michelangelo has is a kind of proportion diagram here and something that also looks diagrammatic here but it doesn't seem to have really determined anything this is if you put a graph down and then just went for it and found something very elegant and pleasing and here a little dramatic or stressed these are probably related to the dyeing slaves from the unfinished Pope tomb of Pope Julius a second and those sculptures other dying slaves are in the Louvre also and then here Leonardo on the other hand has these very appealing but also very anatomically accurate studies of musculature and bones and how are the legs working together and what is it like when you put more weight on your left foot and the other one is still in the air and is that how the body really works in motion so you see the different ways that their minds are working and this comes out in criticisms of each other Michelangelo is criticized by Leonardo as being obsessed with muscles spilling it's figures with bags of nuts and and then of course Michelangelo makes fun of Leonardo for never actually finishing anything but because and I will remind you we have those two paintings that we know by Leonardo the Mona Lisa miss black pepper and there's some 18 others that are here there one in the United States the National Gallery in DC but that's not many paintings by somebody who's considered to be one of the greatest artists of all time all the rest are drawings and codices so books that are one of which is in the in the exhibition so in the end you might say that Michelangelo won in terms of in terms of the number of works that you actually can see by his hand in great public spaces and he pursued those projects relentlessly Leonardo on the other hand pursued his scientific projects relentlessly and I think in his mind really there was no division there between his artistic projects and his scientific projects and you really do see that in the Codex but just a little bit more on Michelangelo to give you a sense of how Nicoletta is looking more at classical sculpture than and thinking about sculpture sculpture said he's going to make then-then-then he is just studying what he sees with his eyes every day now that only is something of a generalization it's a nice way to polarize the two but we see that even in even in a poll that I pointed out here Mekons was still interested in systems of proportion he may not attend to them all the time but he's interested in them he attends dissections he may not do 30 of them at night by Leonardo but he's thinking about some of the same things that Leonardo is thinking about just in a different way and so any exhibition you can see these two poles but you can also see some of the nuances between them so this is a drawing in the exhibition it's one of the most powerful ones by Michelangelo and it's probably related to his sculpture of dusk in the Medici Chapel in Florence and then we almost immediately go from Michelangelo's studies of sculptural figures to some sculptural figures by Leonardo and Leonardo thought of himself as a sculptor one of his most important commissions never completely finished was going to be a bronze equestrian statue for Ludovico Sforza in honor of sports this father but even when he was working in the workshop of Hiroki oh and this is a sculpture by burro Keo on the right they were doing sculptural studies like this where Leonardo is said to have created created mannequins and draped them in cloth that would then dry and the other students in Verrocchio's workshop could could paint pictures of them as he's done here so this is actually on linen not on paper and it's painted in opaque watercolor and wash and it probably relates to sculptural projects along these lines and you see how important draperies are in the creation of sculptures in a period in drapery studies are something which which artists continue to do even to this day and which are really wonderful because you can just approach them without any knowledge at all you don't need to know that it's an angel or that it's a some kind of myth from a story you've never heard before it's just cloth it's a study of light and dark it's the study of plastic values it's they're beautiful so this is the science and Anatomy section is the last section it's the section that includes the Codex and what I said in the introductory wall label us at all strands of the exhibition lead to the drawing that we think of as the most beautiful drawing in the world so you might wonder how does the science and Anatomy section lead to her um well we'll go through it and then perhaps one of you can that to me in addition to the studies of legs we have studies of horse's legs this in red shock some of the darker lines are probably reinforced by Francesco Melfi who is one of Leonardo's closest students and assistants he actually traveled with Leonardo to France at the end of his life and inherited most of his belongings including the Codex on the flight of birds and I think if you if you look at this drawing and you know something about 20th century drawings you can see how even modern artists are looking back at these amazing Renaissance study sheets for ideas about composition that really how do you fill up a sheet in such an extraordinary energetic way and why would you just for the pleasure of doing it for the arrangement of figures in relation to each other because this isn't necessarily something that Leonardo would ever sell maybe you would show it to a patron in preparation for the bronze monument but but otherwise it's pretty much a private work and a lot of these study sheets are and yet they are incredibly they're enchanting in terms of their in terms of their disposition of figures in on the space of the page here's another one which is a little bit more subtle it is actually a metal point drawing of horses if you think about how precise you have to be with metal point how quick you have to be when you're studying a horse and finally we have the Codex on a flight of birds this is a subject that interested Leonardo he claimed from his birth or any of you in the audience psychiatrists or psychoanalyst if any of you read Freud study of Leonardo well it's pretty weird it's been a while for me too but it starts out talking about an early memory that Leonardo has of a vulture coming down to him in the crib and opening his mouth and beating his wings into his mouth this sounds pretty preposterous to me but it does show you how important birds and the idea of birds and flight were to Leonardo and that it's one of his personal passion from something he pursues throughout his life the idea that he can understand how birds fly and he can translate that understanding into a machine to allow human beings to fly and he got so close that his studies actually became inspiration for people like the Wright brothers who did create flying machines and airplanes now one of the things that is especially interesting about the folio spread that we have displayed in the exhibition is that there is this hidden red shop drawing of a man underneath this writing so this writing is Leonardo's typical mirror script and some people wonder if maybe he was writing this way to encode his writing so that people wouldn't be able to read them a little bit of Dan Brown DaVinci Code there yeah DaVinci Code but it is equally as likely that he was just writing this way because it was more natural for him with his left hand being so fluid in his left hand to write starting from the right side of the page working left that way you wouldn't budge the ink that way he could write really quickly and he could draw at the same time but back to the little red drawing here recently in 2009 a team of journalists and imaging technicians whatever that is people who are very skilled at using things like PowerPoint to take out lines of text isolated the drawing from the text and then talk to doctors and other experts in facial features and came up with the idea that this might be a self-portrait of the artist hidden under his text in the Codex and for proof of that they used a comparison with a drawing that has long been thought to represent Leonardo in old age so the only problem is that this drawing actually stylistically dates to a period when Leonardo would have been about 40 years old so it may be a projection of what he imagined he would look like in old age or it may be some kind of a type a kind of mages figure as John Garten mentioned last week or maybe you study someone else altogether but it does look like from the Raphael picture that we have from another portrait that we have by Francesco Melfi and you can see how incredibly skilled Leonardo students artists is a portrait by mlc of Leonardo it does bear similarities to this figure which in turn do look something like this guy so is it a self-portrait or not I still think it's inconclusive one of the questions that I have is why he would eventually write over it and why it becomes seemingly insignificant in the grander scheme of the Codex but it is tantalizing to think that such a personally significant volume that he would include a portrait of himself within it although you might argue that the volume itself all of the writings and observations are something of a self-portrait as well and for me those are the things that are the most arresting and I'll read you a few quotes from the codex from these pages and this is the quote that we have in the exhibition if the bird grows backwards with its wings when defending it will move swiftly and this happens because the wings beat the air which then flows behind the bird to fill the vacuum it has left behind it very scientific I mean he has a really great understanding at least close to I'm not an engineer but it seems that if he's really studying the mechanics of how air and musculature and bones and feathers work together to produce this amazing thing and then I wanted to highlight one of my favorite drawings in the exhibition which is actually two little drawings which also have to do with flight they are of two insects the dragon and beetle drawn probably at two separate times in his career because the styles are quite different see how this is a much more schematic feel to it with these horizontal strokes and this one you have this really really delicate depiction of almost translucent wings of the dragonfly well what I particularly like about these is that we really have a lot of personality they look they look like a little bit menacing certainly peculiar very buggy something else I want you to notice and everyone asked me about this so why don't we just talk about it are the collectors marks these stamps what are these why do you see them on so many cheats in the exhibition as I said these are collectors marks and we can identify them and now of course we even have a website where we can look them up and find out all about the person who who had them this one here if you were to isolate it would look like this faded over time so it's hard to make out now if I wanted to find out what that was I would go to a site called the loot it's the loot collection Lu GT and I would look up according to a number of criteria palette the letter R I think you could even put in feather and it would bring me to a number of possibilities and then I would narrow them down to Sir Jonathan Richardson an artist and collector in the 18th century and maybe it was he who put the little clippings of bugs together on another sheet being such a refined connoisseur he would realize that they weren't just humble pictures of little bugs but something really exquisite and then on the loot collection you can find out all about him and his collection and where whether he had any sales of his collection and where those works ended up and this is important not just for interest sake but also because whenever you acquire anything in a museum of this nature you do a provenance search and you try to find out what's happened to the object that allowed it to come to the point where it could be on the market you certainly don't want to buy anything that might be the subject of some kind of a lawsuit but there's also the question of of trying to find out whether something has a prestigious past and in this case it does and interestingly enough this Lorenzo decree from our collection also has the same collectors mark so who is also in the collection of Sir Jonathan Richardson in the 18th century is when we see a lot of these drawings collections formed it's also the period when people start to hang drawings on the walls and mount them in these beautiful blue maps that were the inspiration for the color of the walls and new exhibitions it's a very much a Renaissance blue but it's also a blue that has been shown over time to be very flattering to a lot of different drawing materials and techniques and I was a little bit tired of the red burgundy that you see in every single old master drawings exhibition I love it and it immediately tells you that it's that it's an old master drawings exhibition but there are other colors that work well with the drawings and glue is one of them now interestingly enough in the exhibition there is also this drawing I didn't show it to you before because I don't think it's very good actually down here somebody's written in hand D crazy um so someone at some point thought that it was by Lorenzo de crudité and used a lot an old master John you see someone may be a connoisseur a curator a collector writing in the name of the artist that they believe that the work is by Lorenzo de cría T was part of the same workshop as Leonardo who's part of a rocio's workshop he became head of it but suddenly and he influenced Leonardo but then later he was influenced by Leonardo so it's a possibility he could have drawn something lay on our desk like this but I don't think that someone who drew something is incredibly sensitive as and as this drawing would necessarily have produced something which I find to be a little bit more clumsy less confident you see how harsh this line is around the figure less less skilled with the use of metal point truly now I'm not saying anything insulting about this work because even the courier's from from the Uffizi didn't think that much of it so then you might wonder why is it in the exhibition because it's interesting to show a range and variety of different works and styles and and abilities because that's the way that you truly can see how something is so much more skilled than another thing now this is another wonderful drawing within the exhibition that is not given to Leonardo but rather to one of his circle and I wanted to show you the part of the way that people decide these attributions is by comparison so of course we have The Strokes I know I wanted to show you this is more of the way that the left handed strokes go this is the way the right handed strokes go but unfortunately difficult to make out the strokes in this slide so this was not perhaps not the best demonstration of that okay so she's a little bit better but I wanted to show you I wanted to show you this comparison because this is a wonderful drawing which is in the Clark or the Clark collection in Williamstown Massachusetts of prints and drawings also this is a drawing that was once thought to be by Leonardo da Vinci somebody wrote that here here's a collector's mark I don't know whose collectors what that is but one could look at us by putting P and L into the loot collection site and over time people have identified this kind of sculptural face this way of drawing strokes like this as being more typical of bull Trofeo Leonardo's most refined pupil who has a style that actually in terms of his painting style is closer to the second version of the virgin of the rocks-- so if you have a chance to compare those two it's not really the subject of our talk today and you see how in some ways he's very similar to this one in terms of the way that our face is made up this kind of sculptural quality to our face one of the reasons that this one is more successful I think is because you don't have this kind of blank expression that you have in the Clark version so when the artist has the eyes looking down he no longer has to to deal with that potential weakness in his in his his own technique and you see how oh okay so I did inclusion this is the second version of the version of the rocks where everything becomes a list a little bit more perfect a little bit more idealized to such an extent that for a long time people thought that this version might not have been by Leonardo that it might have been by bull Trofeo or one of his other students and now scholars are coming around and starting to think well actually Leonardo's conception of the virgin of the rocks-- of human beings changes over the course of his life why not his style - and they've looked at those those things and so they think now that this work is most likely to be by Leonardo himself even though it doesn't have the same kind of amazing naturalistic detail that you have in the first version so then why wouldn't this be by Leonardo and and some people including the curator who put together the exhibition from the muscarella Museum of Art in Willy in Williamsburg Virginia do you think that is by him and he thinks that maybe he's just working in a different way in this in this drawing in terms of the way that he uses the metal point and the kind of right-handedness that we see here and some of the other details that that for him is convincingly similar to this and not just a copy or an inspiration from the master so I'll leave you on that and you're welcome to ask me questions we have about I think 15 minutes before we need to leave [Applause] there are wireless mics on either side of the auditorium if you have a question please raise your hands and we'll bring the mic to you that's it we covered all the bases okay thank you very much happy birthday Leonardo okay

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 32,767

Keywords: Leonardo da Vinci, art history, drawings, art course, art lecture, renaissance, renaissance art, art, fine art, italy, italian art

Id: g_0CCwMGoro

Length: 65min 48sec (3948 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2017