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Da Vinci drawings showing at Met
From Phil Hirschkorn
NEW YORK (CNN) -- The first comprehensive survey of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci opens Wednesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Da Vinci (1453-1519) was an inventor, engineer, scientist and artist. He is best known for his paintings the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. But among 4,000 of his known art works, fewer than 15 are paintings. "A great many of these drawings are first thoughts and often preparatory studies for the paintings," said Philippe de Montebello, the museum's director. For example, a drawing of St. Peter appears to be a study for the apostle's depiction in the Last Supper. "The exhibition is relevant to today because it is as alive as ever, because it represents the genius of man," de Montebello said. The Met's exhibit contains about 120 rarely seen da Vinci works loaned from collections all over the world, as well as a handful of works from a teacher and his students. The exhibit took six years to research and assemble. "This is one of the great creative minds of all time and this is the one opportunity the public will have to sort of stand over the shoulder of the artist while he creates," de Montebello said. Some drawings are so delicate they are displayed in sealed, temperature-controlled boxes. That includes eight pages from da Vinci's "Leicester Codex" notebooks, loaned by computer mogul Bill Gates, who purchased them for more than $30 million in 1994. "You can really see Leonardo thinking on the paper. You can see how he first uses black chalk, and then how he changes his ideas about a particular solution, and then he will go onto another thought always on the same page," said Carmen Bambach, the exhibit's curator.
Observers may also see that da Vinci was left-handed. "If you pay real attention you can see where the strokes begin, you see a little point, and then the stroke lifts as he takes the hand off the paper," Bambach said. There are portraits, anatomical drawings and architectural sketches on display. Da Vinci's obsession with the deformities of old age and deep interest in human biology is apparent. He participated in autopsies to better understand the skeletal and muscular systems. "At the top you see a sketch of a sweet man," Bambach said of one detailed drawing of the human arm. "That's probably the man who got dissected." One drawing of a soldier is a study for an unfinished battle mural that pitted da Vinci against Michelangelo. "A showdown of the two greatest rivals of the Renaissance," Bambach said. The city of Florence commissioned both men to paint different battle scenes on opposite walls of the same public building. The French painter Peter Paul Rubens later completed a painting based on da Vinci's drawings. The da Vinci exhibit will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum through March 30. A gallery of exhibit images can be seen at www.metmuseum.org.
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