The Leonardos in The Royal Collection have been together as a group since the artist's death
they've been together for five hundred years and they've been in The Royal Collection since the 17th century.
We wanted to mark the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Leonardo.
In the spring of 2019 there will be twelve fantastic Leonardo exhibitions across the UK
and it's a tremendously exciting moment.
Well it's a hugely ambitious exhibition and each venue will show twelve drawings,
so it's the widest showing of Leonardo, certainly in my lifetime.
Each drawing has so many interpretations, possibilities,
you enter Leonardo's worlds and you're with him, you're looking over his shoulder as he's drawing.
The Leonardo Drawings are one of the greatest treasures of The Royal Collection.
We have more the 550 sheets covering all aspects of Leonardo's many different activities.
Studies for painting, for sculpture, architecture. Studies of anatomy and botany and map making
the whole range of Leonardo's work.
And this Star of Bethlehem that will be exhibited in Glasgow.
shows Leonardo trying to understand the swirling, whirlpool-like nature of the plant's leaves.
It's a drawing that probably surpasses anything that you'll see
in a scientific, botanical treatise of the period.
For Leonardo it was just a study for a painting,
but it shows the extreme care with which he prepared all of his projects.
These drawings are so personal, they're his private papers.
They were not intended for anybody else to see, they were for his eyes alone.
And so through these drawings, the centuries fall away
and we can really get a connection to Leonardo, the man, and how his mind worked.
This is a map, done by Leonardo in about 1503, 1504, it's a map of Southern Tuscany.
And it seems he was commissioned because of his skills as a cartographer
as somebody who could survey and could produce maps
and as someone who could come up with practical solutions to real engineering problems.
Without this survival, we would have no awareness of this particular aspect of Leonardo's activity.
Leonardo's principle concern was to make knowledge visible and on his drawings,
on these sheets of paper you can see sketches and notes working in combination with each other.
They're beautifully lucid in the way in which he sets forth information.
And they're about the most accessible drawings that survived from The Renaissance.
In the Ulster museum, we have wonderful collections of
art, also history and also science, so we are
very well placed to show Leonardo, who would have possibly defined himself as much
as a scientist as he would an artist.
We're looking at Belfast and how engineering and engineering particularly associated with flight,
has formed the industrial development of the city and we will be bringing in engineers
and people associated with those industries to look at Leonardo with their expertise.
Everyone seeing these drawing is going to be part of the great celebration for the five hundredth anniversary
and so we're hoping that the energy of all the different venues will come together
and people throughout the country are going to be aware of, and really interested in, and have the ability
to go and see Leonardo wherever they live.
After the 12 exhibitions have closed at our UK partners, all the drawings will come together
for one big exhibition of 200 of Leonardos drawings at The Queen's Gallery in London in the summer of 2019,
followed by a selection of those, the largest ever exhibition of Leonardo's works in Scotland,
to be held at the Palace of Holyrood House, The Queen's Gallery in Edinburgh in the winter of 2019/20.