New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is staging an exhibition featuring forty-two masterpieces of Central and Southern Italian Renaissance drawing from the Robert Lehman collection, one of the most distinguished privately assembled art collections in the United States.
The selection ranges from 'bozzetti', preliminary sketches, to highly finished compositional drawings and several pieces bear physical evidence of their use in the workshop.
The exhibition explores the evolving role of drawings during the Renaissance. While initially they had simply a practical role as tools in the workshop of Renaissance artists and weren't given much value or importance, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, they began to considered as expressions of artists' creative processes becoming highly prized objects worthy of collecting.
Drawings from Florentine artists include Leonardo da Vinci's depiction of a bear walking and Antonio Pollaiuolo's study for the equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, while those from Southern Italian maestri include a rare sheet attributed to Antonello da Messina.
Italian Renaissance Drawings from the Robert Lehman Collection is open until 1 September, 2014
