Blockbuster premiere of Leonardo drawings

NEW YORK, March 4 (UPI) -- It isn't every day you can take in 118 drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci in one viewing. That's why the Da Vinci exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum is the blockbuster art show of the winter season, rivaled only by a joint exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso at the Museum of Modern Art.

The Met's show is the first comprehensive show of Da Vinci's works on paper to be mounted in America and will travel to the Louvre Museum in Paris in April. The "Matisse Picasso" exhibition at MOMA's temporary home in Queens has already been seen in London and Paris. Both are expected to attract record crowds in New York, and the MOMA show is time-ticketed to avoid crowding.

The show at the Met is open to anyone paying the museum entrance fee without restrictions, but there are special Monday showings for museum members who wish to avoid crowded conditions for a $50 fee. This is a new wrinkle for the museum that has had a policy of not charging anything extra for its blockbuster exhibits but now needs the revenue.

The Da Vinci show is worth whatever the Met would see fit to charge, since it surveys the Renaissance Italian artist's contributions to Western culture as an artist of sublime talent as a draughtsman, scientist, inventor, theorist and teacher. Only one of his 15 paintings that have come down to us is included, and it is an unfinished work -- the Vatican's "Saint Jerome Praying" - included because it shows preliminary sketching and many corrections that illustrate Da Vinci's creative process.

Da Vinci (1452-1519) was a compulsive doodler, filling every bit of paper within reach with sketches, diagrams, notes and even finished drawings, of which some 2,500 have survived the ravages of time. Usually these drawings are considered too fragile to travel, but the Metropolitan has been successful in securing loans from 25 museum and private collections, including those of Queen Elizabeth II and Microsoft's Bill Gates.

The greatest threat to drawings is light-induced fading. Most Da Vincis --including six owned by the Met -- are stored away in airtight containers and never displayed for more than three months at a time. The crimson-walled galleries where the drawings are on view through March 30, are kept dimmer than usual, making some of the small, already faded drawings difficult to see without a magnifying glass, so bring your own.

Met officials claim this is the first Da Vinci exhibition to present a chronological view of his works on paper rather than concentrating on a category of drawings such as sacred subjects, anatomical studies, or sketches of horses. It offers evidence that he was at work on many subjects at the same time, from plans for an equestrian statue or sketches of grotesque heads to military drawings and stage set designs.

The show opens with five sumptuous drawings by Andrea del Verrocchio, the sculptor and painter in whose workshop Da Vinci apprenticed, learning to blend chalk strokes seamlessly ("sfumato" in Italian) to produce smoky tonal qualities for which such later drawings as "Head of the Virgin" are famous. It ends with samples of work by several artists who were Da Vinci's pupils, the most impressive being Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, a highly polished draughtsman.

One of the highlights of the show are eight pages from the Codex Leicester, a notebook of 300 scientific illustrations and textual descriptions purchased by Bill Gates at auction for $30.8 million, five years ago.

The text is in Da Vinci's unique backward handwriting in Italian, readable only in a mirror possibly as a means of keeping his theories a secret. An illegitimate child who was badly educated, he tried but never was able to master Latin, the scientific language of his day. He was also left-handed, considered a negative psychological trait in the 15th century.

Other show-stoppers are 10 large-scale, highly charged studies for the never-completed Florentine mural, "The Battle of Anghiari," brought together for the first time, a study for the lost painting "Leda and the Swan," and the presentation drawing of "Neptune with Seahorses," one of his grander plans for monumental sculpture. The most recently discovered work in the show is Da Vinci's sketches for a Hercules sculpture that was intended to compete with Michelangelo's "David."

Perhaps the smaller sketches give the most pleasure. There is nothing lovelier in the show than his charming and delicate silverpoint drawings of dogs and dogs' paws, cats, and a bear, dating to the 1470s. Unless, of course, you favor his emotionally gripping studies for one of his greatest religious paintings, "Virgin and Child with Saint Anne" or his whimsical series of "Allegories."

Possibly his drawings of the forces of nature unleashed are the most impressive. There are studies of a tidal wave swallowing up tiny villages, just one of a number of drawings attesting to his fascination with water as well as with apocalyptic events. This visionary aspect of Da Vinci's art accompanied him throughout his career, lived out in Florence, Milan, and France, where his last years were spent as court artist to Francis I.

Complimenting the show is hefty book that includes essays by the world's leading Da Vinci scholars and 300 colorplates ("Leonardo da Vinci," Yale University Press, 800 pages, $65).