Leonardo da Vinci on beauty and ugliness: Carmen C. Bambach praises a ground-breaking exhibition of Leonardo's drawings from the Royal Collection

actual few artists other than Leonardo appear to have felt a life-long ne to articulate their ideals of beauty in drawings, along with seemingly endles variations upon the theme of supine ugliness, and certainly none did thus with comparable persistence or coherence of vision. As the great master's words intimate, 'beauty (bellezza) and ugliness (brutteza) appear each more powerful when seen in contrast, individual with the other'. (1) In his conception of the 'ages of man', Leonardo would repeatedly juxtapose the ideally perfect beauty of youth with the fanciful deformity and decay of elderly age, because--as he inscribed below the outline of an old hag--'a beautiful thing that is mortal passes and does not last'. (2) Between the late 1480 and the late 1490 Leonardo's preoccupation with the human face (its proportions, expressions, and deterioration with age) ensueed in especially penetrating physiognomic studies, and the gross amount of these drawings--which are notably heterogeneous in mode of speech and medium, for here individual needs to think broadly about contented and include, for example, the write and ink grotesque heads, as well as the chalk studies for the apostles in the Last Supper--appears to indicate that Leonardo had arrived at highly irresistible unified theories about gesture, a certain quantity of of which he probably overspreaded in his lost treatise upon painting and human motion. (3) In his part as a theorist of painting, Leonardo repeatedly stated that the sum of two units most formidable challenges facing the useful painter were the portrayal of man and the intentions of the mind; in his missing Libro A of 1508-10, he had variously called the latter the 'passioni dell'anima', the 'accidenti mentali', and the 'moti mentali', and the real eclecticism of his vocabulary strike one as beings to indicate that he was the two relying on different sources and returning to his possess previous ideas, the earliest of which he may have formulated in 1490-92 (4) It is clear, therefore, from the couple his drawings and writings that the belong to with the physical and psychological dimensions of action was a lifelong preoccupation.

A memorable and groundbreaking exploration of this aspect of Leonardo's work was provided in the novel exhibition, 'Leonardo da Vinci: The Divine and the Grotesqque' picked by Martin Clayton from the unparalleled holdings of the six hundr or thus Leonardo drawings at the Royal Library, Windsor Castle. (5) As a scholarly contribution to the vast field of Leonardo studies, this exhibition was remarkably innovative in conception, and treated the material with extraordinary intellectual elegance. It displayed a number of drawings by dint of Leonardo that have either not previously been exhibited, or true rarely so (for example, nos. 10 11 23 49 57 67 68-70 75) and made the kinds of imaginative visual connections across themes that real much embody Leonardo's own manner of drawing by analogy and permutation. The exhibition brought together seventy-six drawings (one hors catalogue, RL 12576) that were arranged in eight sections designed to highlight the various dimensions of Leonardo's meditation In this regard, the visual experience of the display may have had a greater clarity of manner of making than the fine, accompanying scholarly catalogue. A monumental sheet in compose and ink of around 1478 (no. 1) portraying ideas for a nursing Madonna and Child with the infant St John the Baptist, along with numerous sketches and doodles of heads of men women and animals in profile, serv as a centrepiece of the exhibition; it helped illustrate in embryo form many of the periodical themes in Leonardo's work above the next forty years of his career. An introductory section of thirteen drawings (nos. 2-14) entitled 'The divine body' cast a wide conceptual snare over a great diversity of endeavours. (It is worth pointing on the outside that 'divine' is not a limit Leonardo himself used in describing physical beauty or bodily perfection.) Here showed were Leonardo's exploratory drawings of the material part whether human or equine, and these also included a variety of different drawing stamps (studies of anatomy, proportion, and of genuinely artistic intent). Although it perhaps wove together a not many too many strands with an insufficient number of examples, this section upon the 'divine body' provided, nevertheless, an entirely necessary springboard for the more integrated display of drawings that followed of Leonardo's ideal marks of women and men, of bodily and facial expression (as was magnificently evident in the studies for the apostles in the Last Supper) of extravagant facial deformity, of portraits, and of the magical transformations from real to imagined creatures. A section upon 'Fantasy and costume' (nos. 62-75) which included a number of Leonardo's designs for courtly spectacles, provided an arresting finale for this well-thought-out exhibition.