Why bother looking at drawings when paintings are so much bigger, more colourful, and, well, finished? If you’re on the side of the sceptics, a new exhibition at the King’s Gallery is your tonic, guaranteed to persuade you that drawings are so much more than workings-out that have escaped the wastepaper basket. With around 160 works on paper by more than 80 artists, including Leonardo da Vinci , Michelangelo, Raphael and the Carracci brothers, as well as less familiar names, this exhibition of works from the Royal Collection is the most expansive survey of Renaissance drawings to have been mounted in the UK. Curator Martin Clayton has one of the world’s finest collections of Old Master drawings at his fingertips, but his selection of the very best preserved examples shows the central role of drawing during this period of intense innovation and change from 1400-1600, and the many ways in which a line on paper, in ink, graphite, chalk, charcoal or metalpoint, was used to capture, explore and transmit ideas.
It’s true too that there can be few better ways to get a feeling for the rowdy, frenetic atmosphere of an artist’s workshop: the first section of this thematically organised show is dedicated to life drawing, and gives a lively sense of the characters – almost all male – who were in and out of studios, posing nude or in costume. There don’t seem to have been professional models at this point, and instead apprentices might have been asked to hold a pose, or su.
