Demystifying Drawings #14
‘Drawing the Italian Renaissance’ with Martin Clayton
Agostino Carracci, The Return of the Prodigal Son c.1587-90 (recto), Red chalk, pen and ink and wash, with a little oil paint, 47.5 x 34.4 cm, RCIN 901755
Agostino Carracci, Studies of heads, and figures, details, caricatures and trees (verso), Pen and ink, and black chalk, 47.5 x 34.4 cm, RCIN 901755
The Royal Collection houses one of the world’s finest collections of Italian Renaissance drawings, and from November 1 the King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace will play host to the widest range of drawings from the period ever to be shown in the UK. The exhibition spans the years 1450-1600 and will feature around 160 works by over 80 artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian.
On the eve of the exhibition, Martin Clayton, Head of Prints and Drawings at the Royal Collection Trust and exhibition curator, joins the editor to discuss the history of the collection, the goals of the exhibition and the drawing he’d like to take home with him.
How do these drawings come to be in the Royal Collection? Do they originate from one principal royal collector as a coherent group, or were there diverse and convoluted routes of entry for individual drawings?
The collecting of drawings has always been a niche activity, and most of the 2,000 or so Renaissance drawings in the Royal Collection were acquired during a single reign, that of Charles II (1660–85). Documentary evidence is almost non-existent, but it is likely that the albums of 555 Leonardos, 85 Holbeins and 30 Parmigianinos, that had been in the collection of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel before the Civil War, were presented to Charles by Arundel’s grandson around 1670.
Some 150 other drawings bear physical evidence of English seventeenth-century collections they had been in before entering the Royal Collection – the star marks and ascriptions of Nicholas Lanier; William Gibson’s price marks; and the peculiar ‘clipped top corners’ often seen on Italian drawings that were in England in the seventeenth century. (I haven’t been able to determine whether this last feature was the habit of one unidentified collector, or a more general fashion, and I’d be interested to hear of any theories!)
A few Renaissance drawings were acquired individually at auction for George III around the start of his reign in 1760 – probably including the handful of drawings from Sir Peter Lely’s collection, dispersed after Charles II’s death. George III’s mentor, the Earl of Bute, was building a library and collection for the young prince/king, but his greatest coups – the entire collections of Cardinal Alessandro Albani and Consul Joseph Smith, both purchased in 1762 – contained primarily Baroque and later drawings, some 10,000 in number. And when Bute fell from power in 1763, George III’s collecting of drawings ceased. George IV’s interest was mainly in British drawings and prints, and Victoria and Albert collected and commissioned contemporary works. Very few old master drawings have therefore been acquired for the Royal Collection since 1770.
Perhaps the biggest mystery is the provenance of Michelangelo’s fabulous ‘presentation drawings’ – we have no idea of their route from the Farnese collection around 1600 to the Royal Collection, where they were first documented around 1800. They are in pristine condition and were clearly well looked after, and it is baffling that these famous drawings are not mentioned in any known inventory, letter or account for two hundred years.
Last month Dr Claire van Cleave presented the Farnese drawings collection at Capodimonte which has hitherto received little public and scholarly exposure. The Royal Collection, on the other hand, is one of the most widely known, and well catalogued collections in the world. What narrative, thematic, or didactic threads has the display been arranged around?
Because of the way in which the Royal Collection was formed, we have great strengths in areas that were fashionable in seventeenth-century England – for example the ‘muscular Michelangelesque’ – but also weaknesses, such as the Florentine Mannerists. There has never been a curatorial effort to fill the gaps and assemble a representative survey of Italian art. So even though the show consists of 160 drawings by 80 different artists, a conventional arrangement by artist/school/date would have been very ‘lumpy’.
Instead I aim to show how drawing was key to many of the great artistic achievements of the Italian Renaissance. The rapid increase in the availability of paper during this period, and its corresponding fall in price, meant that artists could use drawing experimentally, even wastefully, and by the end of the fifteenth century it had become central to most artists’ practice.
The exhibition explores how artists used drawing – the types of drawings that they made, the creative process and the range of materials. It’s organised in sections that explore figure studies, head studies, drawings of landscape and nature, designs for the applied artists, studies for sacred works (devotional panels, altarpieces and frescoes) and for secular contexts, and ‘finished’ drawings as works of art in their own right. By juxtaposing works from different periods and cities, the visitor will be able to see for themselves the great variety of drawings produced during this period, and hopefully some ‘echoes’ across time and space.
As the exhibition is about the act of drawing, we are providing drawing materials for visitors to use; and excitingly, we have for the first time engaged Artists in Residence for the run of the exhibition – Jesse Ajilore, Sara Lee Roberts and Joshua Pell, all alumni of the Royal Drawing School, who will be drawing in the exhibition on weekday afternoons. They have an open brief to draw in any way they wish, and their works will form a growing display in an adjacent gallery.
Fra Angelico, The bust of a cleric, c.1447-50, Metalpoint, pen and ink and white heightening, on ochre prepared paper, 18.1 x 16.7 cm, RCIN 912812
Were there any surprises that emerged during the research process, or any discoveries that will be on display for the first time?
As you noted, the collection is already well catalogued (and everything is on our online database). But more than thirty sheets in the exhibition have never been shown before, and others not for several decades. One of the highlights, for example, is a large squared study of an ostrich that has a very good claim to be by Titian. The drawing was copied in Van Dyck’s Italian sketchbook with that attribution, and it has exactly the boldness of line and slightly skewed perspective that we see in all of Titian’s (relatively few) chalk drawings. But it hasn’t been exhibited since 1976, and this exhibition will give a new audience the chance to judge it for themselves.
Given the age of some of these drawings, what is the condition of the collection and how has that been maintained over the years? Were any measures required to conserve certain drawings prior to their display, and did these measures lead to any further discoveries?
The condition of the drawings that Charles II acquired is very variable – the Leonardos are in great shape, for example, but other drawings had been damaged by damp, insects and exposure to light. One of the largest works in the exhibition is a cartoon of the Virgin and Child by Bernardino Campi, used for an altarpiece in the town of Codogno near Piacenza. Though it has never been exhibited in modern times, it had clearly been framed and hung at an early date – it was backed with rough canvas, badly wrinkled and abraded, eaten by woodworm and silverfish, and the cheap poor-quality paper was unevenly darkened. For the exhibition our Head of Paper Conservation, Victoria Button, lifted and repaired the cartoon, revealing several of the artist’s patched alterations to the paper as he changed details of the faces and drapery, and an early inscription on the reverse, ‘LA MADONA DI S. VITORE’, suggesting it might also have been used for a lost work for the monastery of San Vittore in Campi’s home town of Cremona.
If you had to choose one drawing from the exhibition to take home with you, what would it be and why?
An impossible question! How do you choose between Fra Angelico’s Head of a Cleric, Andrea del Verrocchio’s Lily, Raphael’s Three Graces or Michelangelo’s Bacchanal of Children? But I am very fond of Agostino Carracci’s Return of the Prodigal Son, a large bold study for a lost altarpiece reportedly painted by his younger brother Annibale. We’re displaying it double-sided because the verso is covered in sketches by several different hands – there are figure and head studies, a landscape and several charming caricatures. For me, the sheet encapsulates the multiple roles of drawing in the Renaissance workshop – a functional tool, a laboratory of ideas and a thing of beauty.
What important dates should readers mark for their diaries?
The exhibition runs from 1 November 2024 to 9 March 2025 (closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays), and there is a full programme of lectures, in-conversation events and art activities – see our website www.rct.uk for details.
View the exhibition’s ‘Related Events’ here.
