Italian Renaissance Drawings

Don't stand on ceremony. In this exhibition it's essential that you can get right up close to the drawings. A handful are so faint that at first glance you seem to be looking at a blank sheet. It's only when you get centimetres away that outlines become clear. Most though are much easier to see than that, even from a distance. All the great Renaissance names are here though it may not be the obvious artists who catch the eye. There's a delicate King David by Fra Angelico; janissaries by Bellini; beautiful female faces by Filippo Lippi and Verrocchio - all alongside drawings by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Botticelli. Cannily there are a couple of useful compare-and-contrasts. Raphael's drawing of St George is displayed alongside the painting (the drawing shows a slightly more aggressive saint) and a film superimposes Carpaccio's St Augustine onto the finished work. Possibly my favourite drawing though - as usual, completely unexpected - was a large, wild, landscape by Piero di Cosimo. That sense of the artist's imagination at work is everywhere in the exhibition but nowhere more than here.