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Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing review – the superhuman hits you like a thunderbolt

Museums across the UK
These drawings from the Royal Collection – dispersed around Britain – are like pure, clear windows on to the extraordinary mind of this enigmatic and visionary genius

It was in Cardiff that I finally cracked the Da Vinci Code. For years I’ve been searching for the clues that would explain this weird and wonderful genius. I’ve visited the Tuscan hill town Vinci, where an illegitimate boy called Leonardo was born in 1452, and Amboise in the Loire Valley, where he died on 2 May 1519, looking for traces of his secret self. Yet it was on an icy afternoon in the Welsh capital that I finally found the killer clue to a real Leonardo da Vinci mystery: his sex life.

Leonardo’s inky fingerprint has been found – it’s just barely visible with the naked eye – on his drawing The Cardiovascular System and Principal Organs of a Woman, done c.1509-10, yet this is not the revelation. This big, bold graphic dissection of a female body is a window on Leonardo’s emotions. He has drawn a female nude then transposed against her rounded breasts a complex machinery of tubes and pumps, bags and balloons. Her uterus looks like an alien creature. As an image of the female form it isn’t exactly intimate, let alone lustful. At the National Museum Wales, you can look straight from this to a far more sensual portrayal of the human body that he drew in about 1504: a scintillating study of a naked man from behind. Leonardo’s muscular model stands at attention, showing us his curly locks and rippling back. His hands seem to visibly shake with contained energy. His stance is potent. Leonardo uses red chalk to give this nude a carnal warmth: its softness lets him delicately model every bulge and recess of taut skin. The man’s buttocks are ripe ovals of perfection.

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from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Gbyv3o
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