By Associated Press
Birmingham AL – A 500-year-old group of chalk, metalpoint and ink drawings from Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks were on display Friday at the Birmingham Museum of Art, some 5,000 miles from their home museum in Italy.
The exhibit was the first time the drawings have been collectively shown outside the Biblioteca Reale, and the display couldn't have been done without months of planning and some high-tech help in the form of climate-controlled frames.
"Leonardo da Vinci: Drawings from the Biblioteca Reale in Turin" opens to the public Sunday and runs through Nov. 9 in Birmingham before traveling to the San Francisco Museum of Art, where it will be shown Nov. 15-Jan. 4.
The exhibit includes 11 drawings and Leonardo's Codex on the Flight of Birds, an 18-page notebook which had never been shown in the United States. Thick magnifying glasses are available for visitors to truly get a sense of the detail Leonardo packed into the drawings, some of which are nearly complete and others that seem like quick doodles.
"It's the first time that virtually every single Leonardo in this collection has traveled so that added to the trepidation," Biblioteca Reale director Clara Vitulo said through an interpreter. "The collection of Leonardos is the most important collection for the Reale."
The group of drawings is the latest coup for the Birmingham museum, which was host to a 15-week blockbuster Pompeii exhibit last year that helped it recoup its $1 million budget.
Director Gail Andrews said the Leonardo show, which cost more than $420,000, will be free. She hopes that will draw more people to see what could be a once-in-lifetime event.
Knowing that Birmingham has been entrusted with some of Italy's treasures is humbling, she said.
"We're not so much nervous that something would happen, but just very aware of the magnitude of this project. Any museum in the world would be proud to have this exhibition," Andrews said.
After their San Francisco run, the drawings will return to Italy and be stored for at least a year as part of the preservation process, Vitulo said.
Visitors peered through the magnifying glasses Friday, studying the works in the dimly lit exhibit hall where the lights are turned down to help preserve the pieces. The drawings are grouped into four sections Leonardo's study of the human face, of the human body, of horses and studies of flight.
Drawings of the latter are mostly seen in the Codex. One of the show's highlights is software that brings the Codex to life with transcription and translation of Leonardo's famous backward writing in the notebook and an easy-to-use application that brings his sketches to life with the point of a cursor and click of a computer mouse.
A preliminary sketch for da Vinci's The Virgin of the Rocks opens the exhibit and a visitor might be unable to tell if their goosebumps are caused by the room's chilly art-friendly temperature or the beautifully serene young woman drawn with metalpoint.
The two drawings that aren't included from the Reale are Leonardo's self portrait, which was deemed too fragile to travel after its 2003 showing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Battle of Anghiari, which was already committed to another show.
The exhibit would not have been possible without the use of specially designed high-tech frames. Each of the 11 pages is displayed in a frame that regulates temperature and humidity. Rome's minister of culture was not comfortable with the works traveling otherwise, Vitulo said.
"Given the anxiety about lending the group as a whole, the minister of culture feels their priority is number one preservation of the drawings and number two to allow them to be shared," she said. "The works are their own ambassador for Italian arts and culture."