Leonardo Cartoon was ‘presentation drawing’ in Florence commission bid

Leonardo da Vinci’s Burlington Home Cartoon, which is able to quickly be the centrepiece of an exhibition on the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London, initially hung near the Mona Lisa within the artist’s studio. Approaching mortgage from the Nationwide Gallery, this spectacular massive drawing can have its personal room within the RA’s Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c. 1504 (9 November-16 February 2025).

The cartoon, almost 1.5m excessive and drawn on quite a few sheets of paper caught collectively, depicts the Virgin and Youngster, with St Anne and the toddler St John the Baptist. It’s the solely surviving large-scale drawing by Leonardo and is among the many most interesting works on paper to outlive from Renaissance Italy.

Superficially the Burlington Home Cartoon and the Mona Lisa may hardly be extra completely different. One is a vibrant oil portray, the opposite a sober charcoal drawing. One is a flattering portrait, the opposite a spiritually-charged devotional work. The cartoon is sort of 4 instances bigger than the portray, in space.

What they do have in frequent, because the exhibition curator Per Rumberg explains, is their background landscapes. It’s intriguing to think about the Mona Lisa (1503-19) at Leonardo’s aspect in the course of the two years he was engaged on the drawing.

Cartoon as ‘presentation drawing’

A key level in regards to the Burlington Home Cartoon is that it was not really a useful cartoon, a sketch for use as the idea for one more completed murals. Rumberg believes that it was as a substitute an unbiased “presentation” drawing for the centre of an altarpiece made to impress a possible patron, the Florentine authorities, often known as the Signoria.

The cartoon was in all probability drawn significantly later than has often been assumed. Till just lately artwork historians believed that it had been achieved by Leonardo in 1499-1500 in Milan. However in accordance with Carmen Bambach, a Leonardo specialist at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, it was drawn in 1506-08, a later courting mainly accepted by the RA’s curators.

Rumberg is now positing that Leonardo drew the work to point out the design for the centre of an enormous altarpiece within the newly constructed council chamber, the Sala del Gran Consiglio, in what’s now referred to as the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. St John was the town’s patron saint and St Anne was additionally related to the republic. These two saints not often seem collectively in Italian artwork of the interval, so that is strongly suggestive of a Florentine connection.

The council chamber altarpiece had initially been commissioned in 1498 from Filippino Lippi, however he died in 1504 earlier than he had even began it. Leonardo’s submission, in round 1507, was rejected, in all probability due to his repute as an artist who delayed finishing his work. Rumberg admits that he had “a monitor file for not ending issues”.

In 1510 Fra Bartolommeo was given the fee, however he acquired no additional than making a full-size monochrome underpainting (now on the Museo di San Marco, Florence) for the uncompleted altarpiece. Fra Bartolommeo’s underpainting is on a panel almost 4.5m excessive and in his composition the 4 figures of the Virgin and Christ Youngster, St Anne and St John are nearly the identical measurement as these of the Burlington Home Cartoon. With the autumn of the Florentine Republic in 1512, Fra Bartolommeo’s mission was deserted.

Though Leonardo’s try and win the fee had failed, his cartoon had an instantaneous impression. As Rumberg places it, it was unveiled in a “one-picture blockbuster exhibition” in Florence, in all probability in 1507. Rumberg cites Giorgio Vasari, the Seventeenth-century artwork historian, who wrote that Leonardo exhibited a cartoon. “Women and men, younger and outdated, continued for 2 days to flock for a sight of it to the room the place it was, as if to a solemn competition, with a view to gaze on the marvels of Leonardo, which prompted all these folks to be amazed,” he wrote.

Till now this occasion has been related to one other misplaced Leonardo cartoon. However Rumberg is satisfied that this passage refers back to the Burlington Home Cartoon. He believes that the spectators would have been astonished by the fragile modelling of the faces.

At Leonardo’s dying in 1519 the cartoon in all probability handed to his shut artist buddy Francesco Melzi. It then went to the painter Bernardino Luini and the sculptor Pompeo Leoni. In 1614 it was acquired by the aristocratic Milanese collector Galeazzo Arconati and later handed to the Sagredo household in Venice.

How the cartoon got here to London

The cartoon was purchased in Venice in 1762 by the Scottish brothers John and Robert Udny. By 1779 it had entered the gathering of the RA and in 1868 it was moved to its new house in Burlington Home, in Piccadilly.

In 1962 the RA confronted a funding disaster and, as a final resort, it offered the cartoon to the Nationwide Gallery for £800,000. There it was vandalised in 1987 when a person took a shotgun into the gallery and shot the Leonardo Cartoon at shut vary. This harm was rigorously repaired by conservators.

Since its arrival on the gallery, greater than 60 years in the past, the cartoon has been lent solely twice, on each events to the Musée du Louvre in Paris, in 2012 and 2019.

Rumberg has a foot in each camps in London. It was when he was a curator on the RA that he deliberate the exhibition, so it fell upon him to formulate the mortgage request. Then in November final 12 months he moved to the Nationwide Gallery to develop into the top of its curatorial division, so he’s now liable for the mortgage to the RA. Rumberg has continued because the RA exhibition co-curator, together with Scott Nethersole of Radboud College in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Within the RA exhibition the cartoon will play a starring position, being introduced as the only object within the central gallery of the three-room present, in an try and recreate the cartoon’s unique show in Florence in 1507. It would even be a homecoming, with the Burlington Home Cartoon returning to the very constructing that gave it its title.