British Museum Collaboration: Drawing From Drawings 2010

Exhibition overview

Drawn from the two foremost collections in the field, this major exhibition features 100 exquisite drawings by Italian Renaissance artists including Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Verrocchio.

A unique collaboration between the Uffizi in Florence and the British Museum, the display charts the increasing importance of drawing during this period, featuring works by Leonardo da Vinci, Fra Angelico, Jacopo and Gentile Bellini, Botticelli, Carpaccio, Filippo Lippi, Mantegna, Michelangelo, Verrocchio and Titian.

In 15th-century Italy there was a fundamental shift in style and artistic thinking in the use of preparatory drawings. What began as a means of preserving artistic ideas became the ideal way to perfect more naturalistic forms and perspective – a new approach by painters, sculptors and architects.

Infrared and other technology used in conservation research provide fresh insights into how drawing allowed painters to experiment and explore with a freedom not always reflected in their finished works. Examples in the exhibition show the trend towards depiction of movement and expression of emotion, often inspired by classical antiquity.

This exhibition is a unique opportunity to discover the evolution of drawing which laid the foundations of the High Renaissance style of Michelangelo and Raphael.

During the autumn of 2009, not long before the fifty drawings that comprise the British Museum’s contribution to Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings were taken from their Solander box and temporarily sealed away behind glass, a group of staff and graduate students from the University of the Arts, London, selected by The Centre for Drawing, individually visited the print room where they each spent two or three hours making a drawing of one of these drawings. This collaboration with the British Museum continues through the run of the exhibition; The works of the Renaissance masters continue inspiring a new generation of artists. Dates and details to follow, click here for more information.

Drawing from Experience: Fra Angelico to Leonardo

An essay by Professor Stephen Farthing, Artist and the Rootstein Hopkins Research Professor of Drawing at the University of the Arts London

By the end of the twentieth Century the access Andre Malraux anticipated his "Museum Without Walls”, (the world beyond museums that the mass distribution of reproductions of artefacts offered), was firmly in place. What he failed to take into account of however, were two factors that John Ruskin had written passionately about during the previous century, first that reproductions may be good for jogging the memory but t no substitute for the real thing and second that access alone doesn’t necessarily lead to understanding.
The point of visiting museum collections and exhibitions today is neither to simply see the stuff nor read the labels, we can do that on the web. The point is to absorb the bigger picture of the show, then focus in on perhaps just one object that really interests you. To spend time; looking, interrogating, learning directly “from” the object, then to realize your visit has become an experience.
To imagining that you can gain an understanding of how a drawing was made by looking at its image on screen is I suspect not so different from believing you can learn what it feels like to get shot by watching Clint Eastwood movies.
There is of course nothing wrong with sitting back and immersing your self in an image, not caring if it is a reproduction or the real thing and simply enjoying it. That is unless, you are trying to learn how to make and or read drawings then you really do need to be able to see how something is made and to be able to distinguish a reproduction from the real thing.
To explain the business of getting beyond the surface and the all important difference between a drawing and its mechanical reproduction is a task that there is no space for in this short essay, a quick way however, of getting the feel of where I’m going is for you to write two short essays.
The first about a drawing you have never seen in the flesh using a reproduction as the source, then a second that must be written in front of the real thing. The second essay will almost certainly not only be much easier to write but more interesting. Not because the second is informed by the first but because the second is better informed. The improved “view” the real thing offers is made possible by the fact that good drawings make visible the story of their own making, or as Brice Marden so elegantly put it “the hand touches more delicately in drawing. There is less between the hand and the image than in any other media”.
You see more in a drawing than its reproduction- you see marks, details, indentations, and blemishes and edited out edges that vaporise in print. You can see how much pressure was applied with the drawing instrument, how soft the chalk or how hard the pencil was, what effect the roughness or smoothness of the paper had on the line, whether there were any erasures, if it was drawn quickly or slowly, if its a copy or a tracing, and so on. This information helps us build a picture of the circumstances surrounding the making and provides us with a step towards not only understand why and how a drawing was made but how we might physically go about the business of drawing.
Because drawing can be used to reflectively analyse, and all drawings contain to some degree the visible history of their own making, I suspect the perfect way of teaching drawing to young adults is to start by teaching them to “ read” drawings by redrawing them, then after that encourage them to develop drawing skills based on their reading.

What follows are some notes I wrote in the British Museum print room after I had spent two or so hours making drawings of Pisanello’s drawing of Hanged Men.
“ It took time for me to realise that the very calm drawings of hanged men, were most probably not drawn from life. The line was too slow, there were no corrections and the component parts were far too carefully arranged. What I began to realise as I drew was that I was most probably looking at a polished copy or version of a drawing made earlier from life, so this wasn’t “ one drawing “, but a series of drawings put together as an “arrangement” on a page- not a recording but a production.
As I drew I knew that I wanted my image to look slow and calm like the original, normally I draw quite quickly. After about an hour I became less interested in Pisanello’s steady hand than his detail, it was the obsessively drawn buttons only visible to me through a magnifying glass that finally caught my attention. It was no longer the taughtness of the rope or the hanged mans distorted face it was his clothing. I finished my drawing by counting the barely visible buttons on carefully described folds of cloth! As I did it struck me how good Pisanello’s eyesight must have been, did he use a magnifying glass? Why did he include all this barely visible detail?
What puzzles me still about my reading of this very simple drawing is how Pisanello managed to look death more or less square in the face then become obsessed with drawing buttons, and with what, within the bigger picture of things must be classed as trivial detail. If Madame Defarge demonstrated her indifference to the guillotine by knitting then perhaps Pisanello shared her view and sewed buttons.