Ten Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci

To celebrate the sixtieth birthday of HRH The Prince of Wales, ten of the Royal Collection’s finest drawings by the Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) will be shown in the National Library for the first time. The Royal Collection contains the world’s most important group of the artist’s drawings. These delicate works are preserved in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle and are among the greatest treasures of the Collection. Leonardo’s drawings are the richest, most wide-ranging, technically brilliant and endlessly fascinating of any artist, and the exhibition has been selected to demonstrate the extraordinary scope of his interests. It includes studies for painting, sculpture and architecture; a beautiful portrait of a young woman, and a caricature of a grotesque old man; two exquisite studies of a dissected human skull; studies of botany; a drawing of an arsenal, probably intended for a treatise on warfare; a highly accurate map of the river Arno; a design for a dragon costume; and an apocalyptic image of a deluge. The drawings demonstrate all the techniques and materials that Leonardo habitually used -  metalpoint, pen and ink, brush and ink, watercolour, and red and black chalks. Through drawing Leonardo attempted to record and understand the world around him. He maintained that an image transmitted knowledge more accurately and concisely than any words, yet some of his drawings are extensively annotated. Leonardo was left-handed, and throughout his life he habitually wrote his personal notes in mirror-image from right to left (although he wrote in the conventional manner when the text was intended for some other reader). This was not an attempt to keep his researches secret, as has been claimed, but probably a childhood trick that the artist never abandoned. The exhibition will be on show at the National Library from 8 November 2008 – 7 February 2009. Visit the Royal Collection website for more information regarding the exhibition.