HIDDEN details in drawings by Leonardo da Vinci will be revealed for the first time in a groundbreaking new book. Its launch on Friday coincides with the opening next week of 12 simultaneous UK exhibitions of the artist’s drawings from the Royal Collection to mark the 500th anniversary of his death.
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow is among the venues and there will be a further display of drawings at the Queen’s Galleries in London and Edinburgh later in the year. Organisers say the exhibitions offer the widest-ever UK audience the opportunity to see Leonardo’s work and to engage directly with one of the greatest minds in history.
Shedding fresh light on the artist’s drawing methods, tools and materials, the book – entitled Leonardo da Vinci: A Closer Look – presents the findings from 20 years of scientific research by Alan Donnithorne, former head of paper conservation at the Royal Collection Trust.
Focusing on 80 of Leonardo’s finest drawings, Donnithorne takes readers through the Renaissance master’s creative processes.
He examines Leonardo’s work in unprecedented detail using a range of techniques, including microscopy, ultraviolet imaging, infrared reflectography and X-ray fluorescence (XRF).
The book’s publishers say it photography shows both tangible evidence of Leonardo’s way of working, much of it invisible to the naked eye, and physical traces of the artist’s hand, in including Leonardo’s thumbprint on the drawing of the cardiovascular system and principal organs of a woman, c1509-10, which will go on show in Cardiff and London. Leonardo used iron gall ink for his drawings, a pigment made from oak galls and iron salts that becomes transparent under infrared reflectography (IRR). This shows the Italian sometimes drew with no underlying sketch, as in A man tricked by gypsies, c1493, which will be on display at Kelvingrove. Martin Clayton, head of prints and drawings at the Royal Collection Trust, said: ‘The groundbreaking research presented in Leonardo da Vinci: A Closer Look represents a significant contribution to our existing body of knowledge about the Renaissance master. In this ‘Year of Leonardo’, we are delighted to be partnering with organisations around the UK on an ambitious programme of exhibitions.”
The Kelvingrove exhibition runs from Friday until May 6. Eighty drawings will then go on show at the Queen’s Gallery at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, from November 22 this year, until March 2020.
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