Exhibition review - Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing

The exhibition ran from May to October 2019, and you can find the exhibition blurb here. (I recommend the website, it’s very in-depth.) 

I want to start by saying we didn’t arrive late: we were exactly on time to be there with 5-10 minutes to spare. What we didn’t take into account (because we didn’t know it was happening), was that the course for the Virgin London 10 K would prevent us from crossing from Green Park to Buckingham Palace. 

[Cue a 15 minute dash around Buckingham Palace to get to the exhibition in time.] 

Mostly, other than a sore ankle (the sloth is my heraldic device for a reason), my take-away from this was how tiny Buckingham Place is (relatively). 

Not so much the building itself, Schönbrunn is probably no bigger, but the grounds. I can’t think of another palace where you could circle round the whole thing, gardens and all, in less than 15 minutes, at a fast walking pace. 

So, after that, the security checks and your brave protagonist finding out that they'd got their top on back-to-front, we arrived at the exhibition. 

Now I’d seen some of the highlights while I was in Newcastle, and I have to say, I think the layout of the Newcastle exhibition was easier to follow. They made a virtue of having less, and focussed on da Vinci’s techniques and materials, and how he used them to create the effects he was aiming for. 

The Buckingham Palace exhibition didn’t seem to know whether it wanted to be organised chronologically, or thematically; and went with a mixture of the two, a mostly chronological layout with blobs of theme, which didn’t quite work. 

You’d be reading along going “okay, this followed that, because he fell out with yet another patron” when suddenly there’d be some work from 10 years and two patrons before. I think a thematic layout would have worked better. 

The works themselves were exceptional - the detail, and the way the drawings and sketches demonstrate the work that went into the greatness of his larger works and his plans for works that didn’t quite come off (the bronze horse for instance, sadly I can’t find a link to the studies for the engineering required for something that idiotically big). 

My favourite pieces were either the maps, the plants or the cat sketches. 

After that, a trip to Brazilian barbeque, to finish off an excellent day.