Scotland

This is an excellent exhibition, inspiring, beautifully curated, and quietly revelatory. Drawing the Italian Renaissance does something deceptively simple but profoundly effective, it brings us closer to the act of thinking itself, as revealed through the drawn line. But first, a little historical background – on paper. Far from being the boring commodity that Ricky Gervais parodies in the iconic The Office, paper was exciting and new and suddenly abundant. Before the Renaissance, drawing was constrained as much by material as by imagination. Paper, though known in Europe from the medieval period, was scarce and relatively expensive, and artists instead relied on vellum, made from animal skin, which was costly and ill-suited to exploratory or repetitive work. From the mid-fifteenth cent...