January 22 – March 30, 2003
Special Exhibition Galleries, Second floor
Monday, January 21, 10:00 a.m.-noon
The first comprehensive exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings ever presented in America, Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman, a landmark international loan exhibition, will bring together nearly 120 works by one of the most renowned masters of all time. Even in an era celebrated for its limitless scientific discovery, technological invention, and sublime artistic achievement, Leonardo stands as an icon in Western consciousness — the very embodiment of the universal Renaissance genius.
On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from January 22 through March 30, Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman will survey Leonardo's staggering contribution as artist, scientist, theorist, and teacher. Gathered from private and public collections in Europe and North America — with unprecedented loans coming from Windsor Castle, the Louvre, and the Galleria dell'Accademia in Venice — the exhibition will include many rarely exhibited works and will illustrate an astounding variety of drawing types, reflecting virtually every aspect of the artist's output. Of special importance will be the Vatican Museum's Saint Jerome Praying in the Wilderness, an unfinished painting that reveals much of the original drawing, helping us to understand the artist's creative process. The exhibition will also integrate a small group of drawings by artists critical to Leonardo's formation in Florence and to his multifaceted activity in Milan, to provide a more unified view of the great master's legacy.
The exhibition is made possible by Morgan Stanley.
Additional support has been provided by a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts.
The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with the Mus—e du Louvre, Paris.
Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan, commented on the exhibition:
"It will indeed be a great pleasure to present our visitors with the richest and most varied selection yet conceived of Leonardo da Vinci's artistic genius. Perhaps no other artist before or after him has engendered such a wide-ranging appreciation for his gifts of eloquent observation, refinement of technique, and boundless intellectual curiosity. The selection of works vividly illustrates the full spectrum of Leonardo's astonishing output, from spontaneous notations of scientific principles to highly finished presentation drawings for his most acclaimed masterpieces. Tremendous new scholarship has informed the exhibition and its catalogue, and I can only surmise that more great strides will follow, once scholars have had an opportunity to digest this magnificent survey and perhaps further expand our understanding of this most aptly described Renaissance master."
Despite his well established rank in the pantheon of art history and as a visionary genius foreseeing all manner of technological invention, Leonardo was hardly the prototypical artist of the Italian Renaissance. Of illegitimate birth, he was left-handed in an age when "sinistra" in Italian meant not only "left," but also suggested a disturbing psychological character, and he was later publicly accused of homosexuality in Florence at a time of particular intolerance. Most astonishingly, he was largely self-taught intellectually and was barely able to master the rudiments of Latin, the language of most scientific texts and the "lingua franca" among the Humanists who comprised the intellectual elite of his day. As an artist and scientist, he came to his revolutionary belief in the value of empirical observation as the foundation of all knowledge, possibly out of necessity, because so much book–learning was inaccessible to him.
This emphasis on observation is best preserved in Leonardo's drawings, of which some 2,500 survive; the number of extant paintings by him is actually very small — at most 15, including both finished and unfinished works as well as autograph and collaborative works. Yet, quite surprisingly, many of Leonardo's drawings have been viewed more as illustrations of intellectual content than as aesthetic objects in and of themselves, bearing rich evidence of the artist's highly nuanced design processes and techniques. For Leonardo, the medium of drawing was of crucial significance — more so than for any other figure of his time, or since — as it offered him a highly ordered language for invention, exploration, evocation, and illustration in both an artistic and scientific sense.
Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman will survey the rich variety of drawing types that Leonardo produced, from the quickly sketched primi pensieri of figure and compositional studies to highly finished drawings conceived as independent works of art. In addition, preparatory drawings of exceptional beauty for nearly every major project of the artist's career will be represented, as will landscape, botanical, anatomical, and military engineering drawings of monumental expression.
Among the first highlights encountered in the exhibition will be a comparative presentation of the large finished studies of young women's heads by Leonardo's teacher, Andrea Verrocchio, whose style and techniques the young Leonardo closely imitated. These drawings — known since the 16th century as teste divine (divine heads) for their exquisite drawing technique and elegiac beauty of form — transcend their original function as exercises in draftsmanship. The exhibition will also include drawings by Leonardo's contemporaries, Antonio Pollaiuolo and Lorenzo di Credi, so that for the first time ever, Leonardo's spirited study for the Sforza equestrian monument from around 1488 will be seen next to Pollaiuolo's working modello for the same project, probably prepared in competition.
Many of Leonardo's other early drawings will be reexamined thematically, including his Madonnas, Adorations of the Magi and Shepherds, and the whimsical Allegories. A selection of Leonardo's charming animal studies of the 1470s will include delicate early silverpoint drawings of cats, dogs, dog's paws, and a bear. Large-scale studies for the unfinished mural of the Battle of Anghiari, the lost Leda and the Swan, and the presentation drawing of Neptune with Seahorses will illustrate the breathtaking grandeur of expression of Leonardo's mature work. This group will also include the recently discovered sheet of sketches intended for an unexecuted sculpture, a Hercules that was probably meant to compete with Michelangelo's David.
The exhibition will bring together for the first time a group of studies for the beloved painting Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, offering an opportunity to redefine the chronology and evolution of this complex late project. It will also provide insight into the development of Leonardo's innovative graphic techniques, such as his magical use of sfumato — an art–historical term created to describe his seamless blending of tone in the manner of smoke. The exhibition will conclude with a small selection of drawings by Leonardo's Milanese pupils—Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (his earliest pupil), Francesco Melzi (his companion and artistic heir), Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Agostino da Lodi, and others.Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman is organized by Carmen C. Bambach, Curator, and George R. Goldner, Chairman, both of the Metropolitan's Department of Drawings and Prints; and Françoise Viatte, Curator, Department of Graphic Arts, Musée du Louvre.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press. The exhibition catalogue will be written to appeal to both a general and scholarly audience, and is being co-authored by a team of international Leonardo scholars: Martin Kemp, Carlo Pedretti, Alessandro Cecchi, Carlo Vecce, Claire Farago, Françoise Viatte, Varena Forcione, and Carmen C. Bambach.
The exhibition catalogue is made possible by The Drue E. Heinz Fund.
A variety of educational programs will be offered in conjunction with this exhibition, including lectures, a film series, and a teacher workshop. The exhibition will also be featured on the Museum's Web site www.metmuseum.org.
A special Audio Guide for the exhibition will be available for rental at the entrance to the galleries.
The Audio Guide is sponsored by Bloomberg.
Following the Metropolitan Museum's presentation, a modified version of the exhibition will be on view at the Musée du Louvre, Paris from April 28 to July 7, 2003.
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June 3, 2002
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