Ten Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo’s drawings are the richest, most wide-ranging, technically brilliant and endlessly fascinating of any artist, and this 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 and two of plants; a drawing of an arsenal, probably intended for a treatise on warfare; a highly accurate map of the river Arno, surveyed by Leonardo himself; a design for a dragon costume and an apocalyptic image of a deluge. The drawings demonstrate all the techniques and materials that Leonardo routinely used – metalpoint, pen and ink, brush and ink, watercolour, and red and blackchalks.