Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man stars in Venice exhibition showcasing 70 drawings

It is scheduled from April 17 to July 14, 2019, at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci. The Model Man of the World, organized on the five-hundredth anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci (Vinci, 1452 - 1519): the exhibition, curated by Annalisa Perissa Torrini and Valeria Poletto, displays one of Leonardo’s most famous works, the so-called Vitruvian Man, and all the other autograph sheets by Leonardo present in the collections of the Venetian museum (there are twenty-five in all). The important Leonardo collection in the Gallerie dell’Accademia makes it possible to set up an excursus on the production of the artist from Vinci and documents, throughout the entire span of his activity, his scientific research with studies on the proportion of the human body, botany, optics, physics, mechanics, weapons, and with preparatory studies for some paintings such as the famous Battle of Anghiari and St. Anne with the Virgin and Child.

But there will be more than just the Venice folios on display: alongside the drawings from the Gallerie dell’Accademia come other important Leonardo folios, loans from the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, the National Gallery in Washington, and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. In fact, the exhibition’s itinerary intends to retrace, through the graphic examples of the master and his pupils or followers, the essential stages of Leonardo da Vinci’s artistic and scientific career, starting from two Studies for an Adoration of the Shepherds referable to the early period to the Three Dancing Female Figures attributable to the French period, the extreme moment of the artist’s life that ended in Amboise on May 2, 1519.

A special section will be devoted to the study of proportions and anatomy that will have as its centerpiece theVitruvian Man juxtaposed, in addition to important Windsor sheets, with some pages of the Huygens Codex exceptionally from The Morgan Library & Museum in New York. The Huygens Codex is a Renaissance manuscript attributed to Carlo Urbino da Crema (Crema, 1525 - 1585) that reproduces Leonardo’s reflections on the movement of bodies, detecting an underlying thought behind the famous sheet in the Gallerie dell’Accademia and, perhaps, the volume for which the drawing was intended. Further study will also be devoted to the sources and reflections of Leonardo’s studies of proportion and anatomy with the display of ancient editions of Vitruvius’s De architectura, Luca Pacioli’s Divina proportione, Euclid’s Preclarissimus liber elementorum, and Andrea Vesalio’s De Humani corporis Fabrica.

There are more than seventy total works including, as many as thirty-five autographs by Leonardo. The exhibition can be visited during the opening hours of the Galleries: Mondays from 8:15 a.m. to 2 p.m., Tuesdays to Sundays from 8:15 a.m. to 7:15 p.m. Tickets: full price €15; concessionary for EU 18-25 year olds €3.5; free by law. Information can be found at www.mostraleonardo.it.

Pictured: Leonardo da Vinci, The Proportions of the Human Body According to Vitruvius - “Vitruvian Man,” detail (c. 1490; metal point, pen and ink, touches of watercolor on white paper, 34.4 x 24.5 cm; Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia)

Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man stars in Venice exhibition showcasing 70 drawings

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