It’s “the greatest Old Master drawing in the world” — and we have it here in Oxford. The curators of the sublime Master Drawings exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum where this peerless Raphael is one the stars agreed, “It’s as simple as that. They don’t come better.”

Raphael’s Studies of Two Apostles for the ‘Transfiguration’, a deeply expressive study of heads and hands was made in preparation for an altarpiece in the Vatican. Looking at drawings is an intimate experience of art — taking us as close as possible to the artist’s thinking. Here, we see slight changes he’d made — the position of the hands and thumb, for instance — which never made it to the final painting because, weeks after, Raphael died of a fever.

This Raphael drawing is permanently here in Oxford, of course. It is part of the Ashmolean’s world-class drawings collection, in the Western Art Print Room and easily accessible. But now for 12 weeks until August 18 it is on display alongside 70 other outstanding works on paper as part of the museum’s 330th birthday celebrations.

“It is a star-studded cast, from Grünewald right up to the present day,” said Professor Christopher Brown CBE, director of the Ashmolean. One can only imagine the impassioned debates over choice — how do you decide which to include when you have a 27,000-strong collection of the finest drawings at your fingertips? “Choosing 70 of the best was very enjoyable but not very easy.”

The roughly chronological show starts with early German and Flemish drawings from the Northern Renaissance. Here we find Dürer and Grünewald. Watercolours were a very portable medium, ideally suited for travellers to use, stopping for a night somewhere and sketching what they saw. Which is probably what Dürer did — he was one of the first artists to make watercolour drawings outdoors — sketching this delicate twilight View of the Cembra Valley either on his way to Venice from Nuremberg in autumn 1494 or coming back the following spring.

Portrait of an Elderly Woman with Clasped Hands is, according to senior curator Jon Whitely, “a supreme example of Grünewald’s draughtsmanship.” The tender drawing of a grieving old lady, either the Virgin or the Magdalen, is the only existing Grünewald drawing (of few remaining) to have an authentic signature.

Past Holbein’s graceful young lady tripping along holding up her skirts, past Lucas van Leyden’s magnificently solemn St Jerome, crossing the light-filled bridge to the second gallery, we arrive in Italy. Here, as appropriate when moving from Northern to Southern Renaissance, our eyes need time to adjust to the light.

What treasures we see: to the left, four Michelangelo drawings from early and late in life, including an energetic study for the Sistine ceiling, the boy’s muscular arm reminding us that Michelangelo was a sculptor, while smaller sketches on the same sheet stand testimony to a youthful mind teeming with ideas; going clockwise, two gems from Leonardo, six Raphaels including his delightful little Angel (more usually seen on cards in the shop), and a Study for a Sibyl in swirling robes, likewise drawn in soft expressive red chalk; then Carracci, Guercino, Rembrandt, Watteau, Fragonard and more… and that’s just half of the room!

British artists are represented by JMW Turner, three watercolour sketches chosen from opposite ends of his career to show stylistic changes, from a pen and ink topographical work to a watercolour sketch entirely dependent on colour (Evening: Cloud on Mount Rigi); plus among others William Blake, Samuel Palmer, Gwen and Augustus John, ending with David Hockney and a 1993 Antony Gormley.

This eagerly awaited drawings show is full of old favourites and others that will surely become so. One such, Rembrandt’s wonderful Head Study of an Old Man is drawn with such affection that you feel it has to be his father (his father’s name is inscribed on it in a 17th- century Dutch hand, but that’s not to say Rembrandt wrote it). l “Come draw with me!”, the Ashmolean’s next Live Friday on June 28 from 7pm-10.30pm, has the museum planning to turn its galleries into drawing studios. Find out more by visiting ashmolean.org/LiveFriday

 

Until August 18
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