It’s 25 January 1504, and so cold in Florence that the Arno river is about to freeze over. Thirty men meet in an icy room to decide where to position a giant statue of a little hero somewhere outdoors in public view. Among them are Botticelli, Leonardo and Filippino Lippi, who will be dead only weeks later and has already had to concede a substantial commission to the more famous Leonardo, currently working on the Mona Lisa. The statue is Michelangelo’s David, and it will take four days to drag it, upright, to the most prominent square in the city.
Raphael arrives in Florence a few weeks later, possibly from Siena, at the age of 21. He sees the enormous figure, and he draws it. And looking at this nimble image in brown ink, now hanging in the Royal Academy’s small but potent exhibition, you see through Raphael’s eyes for a moment. He stands behind this most familiar of all statues, noticing the extreme musculature so strenuously recorded in Carrara marble; and he corrects it, ever so slightly, scaling down the outsize hands.
There are only 40 or so works in this show, not counting some very telling documents, but they give the most exhilarating sense of this trio of titans looking over each other’s shoulders, selecting and plundering with rivalrous intent. The connections between Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael (born 1452, 1475 and 1483 respectively) become so animate that one has a sense of each man’s mind and eyes at work in Florence.
Michelangelo’s earliest surviving teenage drawings are here, copying a couple of figures from a Giotto he has seen in the church of Santa Croce. He gives one of them, not incidentally, those muckle hands. Later, during the Florentine craze for circular images (tondos), he paints the Doni Tondo – Mary twisting diagonally backwards to baby Jesus, wriggling on Joseph’s thigh – and sculpts the Taddei Tondo relief, where Jesus corkscrews sideways out of Mary’s lap – for a prominent Florentine patron.
To see this huge marble disc – unfinished, its every chisel mark laid bare – beside Michelangelo’s wild drawings of babies is to sense the affinities between circularity and torsion for him. This is the way the eye moves, round and around, constantly restless as both sculpture and drawings. It’s the way Michelangelo turns the page, drawing these sturdy infants so that they seem to be almost dancing and flying.
Raphael, at the Casa Taddei for work, makes sketches of the tondo. His babies are more cherubic than Michelangelo’s; they will eventually become angels.
Raphael also draws Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, and his painting of Leda and the Swan (now lost), making them saner and sweeter. This show makes a dramatic virtue of invisible art, in fact: the lost, unmade and incomplete. The city commissioned paintings of two Florentine victories from Leonardo and Michelangelo – the battles of Anghiari and Cascina – that neither artist ever actually fulfilled. But their drawings appear here in a showdown of staggering action, flailing soldiers and scattering horses.
The central gallery rises to a beautiful climax. In something like chapel conditions, you sit before Leonardo’s vast and mysterious drawing of the Virgin, Saint Anne, Saint John and the infant Christ, its sheer scale more striking than ever, given the small drawings around it. The curators point out that it was almost four times larger than the Mona Lisa, on which Leonardo was also working in the studio. You are on eye level with rocky ground and bare feet, with the overlaps between the many glued-together pages, with the smoothings and rubbings of charcoal and chalk, rising to Anne’s spectral face and upward-pointing hand. You see it both as graphic act and magnificent vision.
A direct sightline back and forth to Michelangelo’s tondo puts the emphasis on the epicentre of each work. Where Michelangelo puts Christ’s navel at the circle’s centre – so that everything whirls around his original connection with his mother – so Leonardo carries the point even further. The Virgin’s hand cups Christ’s navel even as he twists away in her lap, leaning towards baby John, whom he is blessing.
The cartoon was not used as a template for some painting that Leonardo, typically, never got round to making. It is too grand and complete a wonder in itself. The curators’ radical new proposal seems, in this context, completely convincing. This is surely the drawing that Vasari writes about, displayed in a Florentine church: a work of art so remarkable that “men and women, young and old, continued for two days to flock for a sight of it… which caused all those people to be amazed”.
Anyone wondering how these artists drew with such precision and grace, without even the benefit of a sharp pencil, should go if they can to a magnificent parallel show across St James’s Park at the King’s Gallery. Drawing the Italian Renaissance selects 158 images from the 2,000 and more in the Royal Collection, to show the hand and imagination at work. It opens with sheaves of the coloured paper Renaissance artists used, and a fetchingly intimate drawing of a lad labouring away on such a page, a dog fast asleep beside him.
Raphael’s Leda reappears here as a different character, along with a gracefully self-conscious nude (he was one of very few Renaissance artists to work from female models, unless they were lovers). Michelangelo’s Risen Christ soars up the page in an electrifying leap. Leonardo draws southern Italy from high above, like a living map of land and cobalt sea, as if he were circling up there with the eagles.
Making is as significant as meaning in this show. Here is a girl in profile, pricked out with holes through which powdered chalk was pressed to make the outline for a wedding portrait. Here is silver stylus for metalpoint drawings, sticks of charcoal dipped in linseed oil for extra blackness, quills sharpened at especially fine angles. There are designs for silver salvers, bookplates and candelabra as well as sketches of living people.
The show’s choreography is superb, moving fluidly from portrait to imaginary head, lily to spreading bush, solo figure to grappling pair, one lifting the other higher and higher up successive pages. Variations of character, in both subject and style, are in constant play. Renaissance drawings can be so fugitive, in white chalk on blue paper, or so nuanced in red on orange; so rigorous, stark or shocking, so comical or tender.
A lobster, by Annibale Carracci, tries to work a nutcracker with its own claws. Leonardo imagines a dog captaining a ship with an oak tree for a mast; Titian a big and foolish ostrich. Parmigianino draws a bust of Julius Caesar, like any art student down the centuries, and the emperor resembles a management consultant.
There are possibly twice as many images as the teeming brain can take, especially in the later galleries, but also quiet places where you can sit down and draw. For the whole exhibition is conceived in the true Renaissance spirit, knowledge to the fore. What a bear’s foot looks like, or the womb of a pregnant cow; how the fringe falls on a boy’s turning head, or the veil over a girl’s coiled plait; how Jesus might hand a heavy key down to a kneeling apostle: seeing, thinking, inquiring, imagining – and all of it drawn in the living present tense.
Star ratings (out of five)
Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael ★★★★
Drawing the Italian Renaissance ★★★★★
Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c.1504 is at the Royal Academy, London, until 16 February 2025
Drawing the Italian Renaissance is at the King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, until 9 March 2025
