Gallery to join elite as da Vinci show tours

Ten of the Royal Collection’s finest drawings will be visiting Brimingham, Bristol, Ulster and Dundee, before concluding in Hull next November, as part of events to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

The drawings have been selected from 600 preserved in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle to show the artist’s extraordinary scope of interest – painting and sculpture, engineering, botany, mapmaking, hydraulics and anatomy – as well as his use of different media such as pen and ink, red and black chalk and metalpoint.

Most of his great projects were never completed leaving his drawings as the main source of knowledge of his achievements.

Leonardo himself maintained that an image transmitted knowledge more accurately than words.

The left-hander wrote his personal notes in mirror-image from left to right, not as has been claimed an attempt to keep his investigations secret, experts at the Royal Collection Trust say, but probably a childhood trick that was never abandoned.

Assistant head of heritage at Hull Council Simon Green said: “This will most definitely be a major highlight of Hull’s cultural calendar next year.”

The drawings include A Study for Equestrian Monument c 1485-90, an early design for a bronze statue for Ludovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan. The statue, intended to show his father Francesco’s horse rearing over a fallen enemy, was to have been three times life-size, and the artist worked on the project for a decade. However, it was never cast.

When French forces invaded Milan in 1499 Leonardo’s huge clay model was used for target practice and was destroyed.

The exhibition starts at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery on January 15. It comes to the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull from November 10 to January 20.