Leonardo Da Vinci: A Life in Drawing Exhibition

Celebrating 500 years since his death, Leonardo Da Vinci's genius work is worth seeing! I went to this exhibtion last Thursday at the Queen's Gallery in Buckingham Palace. I didn't even know that the Queen had her own gallery, so cool! This means you will be kinda taking away a Royal experience and seeing one of the world's finest artists work. If you do go you will be witnessing his biggest collection in over 65 years and there's over 200 pieces of his drawings from the Royal Collection. 

  

You will be getting an insight into Leonardo's interests and the general way in which his mind worked. There are three big rooms that explore his portraiture work and close up details of his sketches that reflects upon the movement of his subject. Leonardo is known for being a genius and was known as one of the greatest scientists of the Renaissance era. As you walk through the exhibition, you will come across some of his drawings that contain notes on the side featuring how a mountain is measured, the construction of boats, the geometric principles of how light and shade work on an object and human anatomy, where he claimed to have performed 30 dissections to help source his material. I have to admit viewing these drawings cringed me out a bit, as I am a bit squeamish with that sort of thing. However, that just shows how well detailed they are. He was also an architect and engineer at one point where he created maps and other designs. Speaking of designs he drew studies of costumes, some were even provided for the King's seamstresses. He further designed a horse monument that unfortunately led to tragic circumstances. For pure amusement Leonardo illustrated countless 'grotesque heads', where he dilliberatly distorted them to show 'ideal ugliness'. It reminded me of what we would call today as being cartoon like or comic book related. There is also some artwork that other artists had done from that time. One drawing was a self portrait of Leonardo, that had been done by Francesco Melzi. It is said that this is the most accurate portrait of Leonardo to survive.

  

As well as the artwork you will see the tools and materials that Leonardo used to create his masterpieces and how he changed what he used throughout the years. For instance, he used metalpoint, which is a stylus usually made from silver. He used pens which were feathers plucked from a goose and the ink was made by mixing iron salts with tannic acid from oak galls. He also used a variety of different coloured chalks and charcoals. All of Leonardo's drawings were done on paper that were rags made of hemp or linen.

If you are thinking of going I would definately recommend to pre-book your tickets online, because when I was waiting to go in I saw some people got turned away because the exhibition was fully booked that day. Furthermore, as for taking photos, I think you were allowed, but I didn't know this till the end when I saw a couple of people capturing his work. Also if you are an artist why not take a sketchbook and pencil, I even saw a woman sat on a stool doing a detailed sketch of one of Leonardo's 'deluge's'. If you are reading this from a schoolteacher's point of view, there are activities that children can do, it's under a title called 'school sessions', on the 'Queens Gallery' website. Some of the Leonardo sessions include 'A Creative Writing Workshop', 'Sketching Science', 'The Art of Sketchbooks', 'Life Drawing-key stage 5' and 'Closer to Leonardo'. The exhibtion is still on daily and ends on the 13th October 2019.

  

Here is the website if you want to know more on the exhibition: https://www.rct.uk/collection/themes/exhibitions/leonardo-da-vinci-a-life-in-drawing/the-queens-gallery-buckingham

Hope you enjoyed this short insight into the work of the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition!

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