Volume 36, Number 13 · August 17, 1989
The Real Leonardo
By Charles Hope
Leonardo da Vinci (January–April 1989)
catalog of an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, by Martin Kemp, by Jane Roberts, by Philip Steadman, introduction by E.H. Gombrich
Yale University Press, 246 pp., $29.95
Leonardo on Painting
edited by Martin Kemp, selected and translated by Martin Kemp, by Margaret Walker
Yale University Press, 328 pp., $11.95 (paper)
Michelangelo Draftsman DC (October–December 1988), and, in revised form, as Michel-Ange Dessinateur at the Louvre, Paris (May 13–July 31, 1989)
catalog of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington,, by Michael Hirst
Olivetti (Milan), English edition out of print; French edition, 203 pp., fr250
Michelangelo and his Drawings
by Michael Hirst
Yale University Press, 302 pp., $40.00
The first public exhibition of a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci took place in Florence around 1500. According to Giorgio Vasari, writing fifty years later, Leonardo, who had been asked by a patron for an altarpiece, instead made a cartoon of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, 'which not only filled all the artists with wonder, but when it was finished men and women young and old continued for two days to crowd into the room where it was exhibited, as if attending a solemn festival, to see the marvels of Leonardo, which astonished all those people.' By modern standards the success of the exhibition seems modest enough, but Vasari evidently thought it remarkable that members of the public as well as artists had gone to see a drawing, even a particularly elaborate one like Leonardo's cartoon. He would have been much more surprised by the crowds at the recent exhibitions of Leonardo and Michelangelo, held in London and Washington respectively, not because these artists are still so much admired after more than four centuries, but because most of the exhibits were drawings.
Review, 4372 words
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