In The Frame: Leonardo Da Vinci at the Queen's Gallery | Tatler UK

The British Royal Collection is one of the largest private art collections in the world, with over a million objects, including a great collection of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. To mark the 500th anniversary of his death, these drawings are being shown at the Queen's Gallery here at Buckingham Palace. Martin Clayton, the curator, is going to give me a taste of what will be on display. So, Martin, you must have been on a round-the-country tour with the drawings, I expect. Yes, I've been to all 12 venues this spring to lecture and talk and so on, and to see the enthusiasm that Leonardo has generated at every one of them was really quite special. But a great way to start the exhibition with this fabulous portrait. Well, it's, we think, the only authentic lifetime portrait of Leonardo. Everything else is posthumous or imagined. This was done by his pupil, Francesco Melzi. Towards the end of Leonardo's life, it shows him at about the age of 65 with this long flowing beard and long hair that he was very proud of. And one of the great things about his drawings is that he actually kept them, didn't he, a lot of them? Yes, everything in the exhibition is what was in Leonardo's studio at his death. He kept maybe 2,000 loose sheets, dozens of notebooks with him to the end of his life. Well, this remarkable survival is the album cover in which the drawings were housed for about 300 years. And this one album contained about 550 drawings by Leonardo. It contains so much of what we know about him today. And had this album been lost, we would know so much less about him. That's extraordinary. So really, this whole exhibition has come out of this album. This one album. That's amazing. So this must have been a really exciting moment for you. How did it happen? Well, it's a drawing that I've been looking at for a while at Windsor. It's never been exhibited before. This is the first time it's ever been on public display. So was it a real eureka moment for you? Or was it something that just gradually... Gradually, you know, you test the idea out over a period of months or years. And, you know, is it really? You don't want to sort of just say, ah, it must be. And it's one of the miscellaneous sheets from the end of his career. You can see there's a small study of a horse's leg and a little bit of script by Leonardo there. So it's around the time he was working on an equestrian monument. But then an assistant must have picked the drawing up from Leonardo's workbench and made a couple of sketches of a smiling youth and an old man with a beard gazing into the distance. And if you look closely at this drawing, with comparison to the earlier portrait, the formal portrait of Leonardo, it's unquestionably the same individual. So this is the only other lifetime likeness of Leonardo. It's not a formal portrait. It's just caught in a moment. So rather wonderful that this little portrait by a pupil is on the same sheet as a drawing by Leonardo. Well, it does reinforce how central drawing was to Leonardo's work in all its aspects. And it's the relic that we have of him. These are pretty much all that survives of Leonardo's preparatory work for The Last Supper. As an exercising composition, it must have required dozens, hundreds of drawings. But only these half dozen sheets survive. And this is the only preparatory sketch that shows Leonardo working out the composition. It's on a sheet of geometrical studies. He's showing how to construct an octagon in a circle. And then in the margins, almost, he sketches one of the great compositions of world art. And this is all that we know about Leonardo's process of developing this composition. So it's absolutely spectacular to have them here hanging below. So if you have a favourite, difficult question, what would it be? If I had to choose, I think it would be this drawing of the internal organs of a woman, which Leonardo did when he was about 55 years old. It's a drawing that encapsulates the restlessness of Leonardo's mind. And to really bring us close to Leonardo, if you look closely in the left margin there, you can see the impression of his inky thumbprint. And it's interesting, you mentioned the famous mirror writing. Well, he was left-handed, and it was simply easier for him to write a mirror image, starting at the right, working to the left, so that he was pulling the quill pen rather than pushing it against the nap of the paper, and so that he wasn't smudging the ink. When it was necessary for somebody else to read, he was perfectly capable of writing in the conventional direction. But these are his private notes. Right, which is fascinating. So you couldn't get much closer to Leonardo with a sheet like this, could you? If only one drawing of the whole of Leonardo survived, I'd choose for it to be this one. And I think if I could take away one drawing, it would be this one, this beautiful head of Leda. It's a lovely pen and ink drawing on paper, but for me, it really encapsulates the serenity that I associate with Leonardo's women.