Renaissance Drawing at the British Museum: from Fra Angelico to Leonardo

I recently went to the British Museum to see the exhibition about drawing during the Renaissance in Italy. As I have never been that interested in the subject I nevertheless, was interested in the historical background and was looking for some answers. Fortunately this exhibition was answering my questions while featuring works by Leonardo da Vinci, Fra Angelico, Jacopo and Gentile Bellini, Botticelli, Carpaccio, Filippo Lippi, Mantegna, Michelangelo, Verrocchio and Titian. In order to gather all these artists in one place, the British Museum pooled into its own collection and into the Florence based Uffizi collection. The Renaissance was a period, starting in Italy in the 15th century and then in Europe, which saw an intense revival of the classical art and learning from the Greek and Roman civilisations. Hugo Chapman, the curator of the exhibition, notices that “marble figures like Bacchus encouraged artists to recognise the sensuality and beauty of the human body. The sculpted Bacchus presents an idealised vision of the perfect male body.” Indeed, amongst these drawings we can see that the artists, such as Leonardo or Raphael, started to draw different subjects of the day-to-day life and that their portraits were focusing on the body and the face of their subjects.

The exhibition begins by focusing its attention on the innovation that developed the profession of artists: the paper. In fact, it points that the Chinese invention of papermaking had been brought to Europe via the Islamic world. The invention of the printing press in Germany in the 1450s gave a huge impetus for papermaking, above all in Italy which was the most literate and urbanised region of Europe. Renaissance paper was handmade from cloth fibres (not wood pulp as today) obtained from old clothes, sails and ropes. To complete the explanation, a video shows how paper was made and visitors are invited to touch different types of papers to feel the differences. This is obviously a detail, but it is a good way to put into its historical context this artistic breakthrough.

The exposition then proceeds to show the evolution of artists’ techniques through the ages and how important were the various Italian city-states. Starting with pioneers religious men such as Fra Angelico or Lorenzo Monaco, the spectators' attentions are then focused on the main cities. Florence, with mainly the Medici and the Tornabuoni amongst others, has been one of the first city were the Renaissance artists could evolve from religious subjects and thus became a pole for them. The powerful Italian families wanted to use their talents to express their wealth and leave behind them a glorious picture. The Vatican was also another major player as it attracted artists such as Raphael or Michelangelo from Florence. There, the most successful of them would receive the most important commission and be able to impose their own style and thus fulfil their ambition as being the best artist. Leonardo Da Vinci’s career, apart from being one the quintessential Renaissance man, shows the important cities and families at this time as he worked for no less than Florence’s Medici, Milan’s Sforza, the Doge of Venice and the Vatican and then Francois 1er of France. However, his career does not reflect the way Renaissance was present in all the Italian peninsula as many lesser cities also employed lesser artists.

 Although I have never been a huge fan of this period artistically speaking, I can still appreciate the precision of these drawings and this exhibition allow the visitors to observe the artists’ talent with their pencil and sometimes even compare these with the finite paints, notably Lorenzo Monaco’s tryptich. The historical side, was an interesting side of the exhibition, showed that artists had a huge ambition and how through this war between them the style of the Renaissance evolved progressively from a religious theme to everything that the artists wanted to show.

-C