British Museum announces Italian Renaissance drawings exhibition

Delicate works by artists from Fra Angelico to Leonardo to include loans from the Uffizi in Florence.

The British Museum’s collection of Italian Renaissance drawings is so fragile that its masterpieces are exhibited only once in a generation.

Next summer a chance to see these delicate objects will finally come around, as the museum launches an exhibition, in partnership with the Uffizi in Florence, of works on paper by artists from Fra Angelico to Leonardo.

The 100 or so works will span the period 1400-1510 and artists including Jacopo and Gentile Bellini, Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, Mantegna, Michelangelo and Raphael.

About half of the works will come from Florence, and some have never been shown in the UK before. Bringing the drawings from Florence together with those from London, said British Museum director Neil MacGregor, will “together allow a different reading of draughtsmanship from the period. It will allow a new engagement with this part of the Italian Renaissance.”

In typical British Museum style, the message is “only connect”; for the museum will at the same time mount an exhibition of West African sculpture of the same period. Works from the kingdom of Ife – a powerful, cosmopolitan city state in what is now Nigeria that flourished from the 12th to the 15th centuries – will form the focus of an exhibition for the first time outside Africa.