From Da Vinci to Picasso, exhibition in Rome of the scribbles of great artists

Hidden on the back of a canvas or scrawled on a piece of paper: the mummies and sketches have served artists, from Michelangelo to Pablo Picasso, to explore and unleash creativity.

The historic Villa Medicis, which houses the National Academy of France in Rome and which has hosted prestigious artists since the 17th century, invites the public to discover this little-known side of artistic production, through an exhibition that brings together nearly 300 original works by artists who have marked the history of art.

Named “Doodles - From Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly”, the exhibition of this unusual set of designs leads us to discover delicious secrets that were not meant to be seen by the public.

This is evident in the wooden panels of Giovanni Bellini's majestic “Triptych of the Virgin”, whose back hides “a whole series of palimpsest drawings, which have nothing to do with the subject from the front,” Francesca Alberti, curator of the exhibition, explained to AFP.

We can even distinguish in wood “a grotesque figure with his two legs”, a design without limitations full of “irony and play,” he says.

“From the great masters of the Renaissance, we know paintings, perfectly finished drawings (...) but what we show in this exhibition is a series of drawings where the artist's hand is released,” says Alberti.

Those experimental, transgressive, regressive or liberating drawings, which are not subject to the rules and constraints of “official” art, recall the freshness of children's scribbles.

Pablo Picasso himself referred to them: “It took me four years to paint like Rafael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like a child.”

Another source of inspiration has been the graffiti drawn hastily on the walls of big cities. Even the divine Michelangelo (1475-1564) had fun in his time imitating the silhouettes awkwardly painted on some facades of Florence.

- “Out Putin!” -

Less rigid and more spontaneous, these forms represent the hidden side of the artist's work, immersing the visitor in the heart of the creative process.

Villa Medicis's proposal deliberately ignores chronology and cheerfully mixes eras, offering unprecedented connections between great masters (Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian, Bernini...) with modern and contemporary artists (Picasso, Dubuffet, Cy Twombly, Basquiat...).

On the wide staircase of the elegant Villa, originally intended for the entrance of horses, “we present a dialogue between Renaissance drawings and contemporary drawings”, Alberti stresses, showing a sketch of Pontormo (1494—1557) next to two “doodles” made in 1954 in the dark by the American artist Cy Twombly, who died in 2011 in Rome.

In the center of the staircase, a Madonna and Child, by the Mannerist Taddeo Zuccari (1529-1566) “falls apart between scribbled lines as if the artist's hand were completely free”.

For the curator, these sketches and scribbles were “very important” because they allowed “to release the tension accumulated by the drawing”, to “redraw them with the same energy”.

Visitors to the exhibition are also invited to stimulate their own creativity in a room whose walls have been painted anthracite gray.

Some wrote slogans and slogans: “Putin out!” , “Long live peace” or painted blue and yellow striped flags of Ukraine. Others left ironic inscriptions: “Dinosaurs disappeared because no one caressed them, we shouldn't do the same with women.”

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