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Natural beauty

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 26th March 2008

Amazing Rare Things
The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 28 September

Do not be put off by the title of this show: in its barrow-boy eagerness to pull in the punters, such a naff title undermines the essential dignity of the exhibits (Leonardo is here, after all), and discounts the high quality of art on display. The Queen’s Gallery does not need to be so determinedly populist in approach, though I can understand that marketing people would not consider the exhibition’s theme — ‘The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery’ — to be sufficiently sexy. So we are lumbered with this teen-dream title. Ignore it, for your own good. There really are marvels to be seen.

The Age of Discovery referred to is a broad one, stretching from the late 15th century to the early 18th, during which time enormous advances in learning were made as the world was opened up by explorers. Great collections began to be formed, particularly of zoological and botanical specimens, and species were identified and recorded with increasing zeal. In those blessed centuries before photography, specimens had to be drawn or painted, and the art of what might be called scientific illustration reached new heights. This exhibition makes a striking selection of drawings and watercolours from the Royal Library, chosen by curators from the Royal Collection in collaboration with Sir David Attenborough. For once, art and nature are in collusion, and the results are spectacular.

The first room of the show is devoted to Leonardo. That great genius is shown here to real advantage: 18 drawings of breath-taking beauty on a variety of subjects done in a range of materials. This is what drawing is all about — discovery as much as description, and the making of a thing of beauty in its own right. Whether your taste is for the delicate (yet tough) rendering of a spray of blackberries in red chalk, or the stylised pen-and-ink undulations of a Star of Bethlehem plant like the waves of the sea, or a horse seen head-on, gently limned in silverpoint on blue prepared paper, these are images to savour. Here is Leonardo the artist, but also the inquiring scientist, drawing rock formations to understand their structure, or the anatomy of a bear’s foot. Here, too, is the valued observer, recording for the first time in Italy Job’s Tears, a grass from eastern Asia lately imported to Europe. There are four sheets of horse drawings in all, and a page of cats. Another sheet depicts horses, St George and the Dragon and a lion, all densely worked in pen and ink on rough paper. The drawings of an oak with dyer’s greenweed (Genista tinctoria) in red chalk, of the seed-heads of two rushes in pen and ink, and of a tree standing alone, again in red chalk, are pure joy.

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