Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci and his circle - Public Collections in France (Collection) Facsimile Edition

The Département des Arts Graphiques near the Musée du Louvre in Paris guards probably the most important collection of drawings of Leonardo and his circle in Europe after the one preserved in the Royal Library in Windsor. Together with the other French collections, the Louvre one offers an irreplaceable panning of the graphics of Leonardo, of which he underlines techniques and stylistic changes: from the first drawings with brush, realized on thin cloths of flax, remembered by Vasari, to the drawings with pen and ink referring to the Adorazione dei Magi and to the Madonnas of his first maturity, to the dawings in red pencil of the first Milanese period, up to the very famous drawing called Ritratto di Isabella d’Este and to the studies for the Sant'Anna.

Techniques that are reflected in the sketches of the first students and the followers – not only lombardi – of the maestro (Giovanni Ambrogio de' Predis, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Giovanni Agostino da Lodi, Bernardino Luini, Cesare da Sesto, Giampietrino and more). This imposing graphic corpus (around forty original drawings of Leonardo, other fifty school drawings and a selection of copies from the paintings of Leonardo, for a total of 114 numbers), not only represents a review of exceptional importance for the study of the graphic corpus of Leonardo, but also of its reflexes in the northern art between 1400 and 1600.