Masterful Drawings

Though separated by more than the chasm of centuries, avant-garde action painting and old-master drawing share one compelling attraction: the you-are-there appeal of looking over the artist's shoulder while his hand and mind work at top speed. Last week Manhattan got a chance to study the techniques of the masters courtesy of the Italian government, which, to celebrate its centennial of unification, is sponsoring a collection of 154 master drawings by Da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo and 82 other Italians. The drawings have already attracted throngs in Washington, Boston and Chicago, and are on final display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art before returning to Italy.

The Look of a Leg. In time, the collection ranges from a 14th century silver point* miniature drawing of an elephant and a mouse by an anonymous artist to works of the Goyaesque Felice Giani, who died in Rome in 1823 after an artistic career that included decorating the apartments in the Tuileries for Josephine Bonaparte. In scope, the collection runs from Paolo Uccello's geometric sketch of the 32 surfaces of the mazzocchio, a circular wicker framework used by Florentines as a base for their characteristic cloth headpieces, to an intricately executed sketch by Artist-Author Giorgio Vasari (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects) of a battle scene to be reproduced in epic proportions in a Florentine palace. In subject, the galaxy includes saints and schoolboys, allegories and rustic landscapes, anatomical studies and exquisite faces.

In one of three drawings by Michelangelo, the sculptor struggles to discover the proper angle for a tensely muscular leg, later carved in marble for the famous figure Night in the Medici Chapel of San Lorenzo in Florence. Titian is represented by a study of legs done in thick black chalk a decade before the resulting painting, Martyrdom of St. Lorenzo, was hung in the church of the Jesuits in Venice. On a sheet of paper measuring 5 1/4 in. by 5 3/4 in., Leonardo da Vinci crammed almost two dozen men and half a dozen horses in two detailed, swirling battle scenes. And in a drawing measuring 11 in. by 16 in., Pontormo roughly sketched a single man on horseback that, though deliberately unfinished, bulges with expressive power. Tiepolo's luminous imagination shines in chiaroscuro in the violent Martyrdom of a Saint.

The Horrid, the Domestic. Many of the drawings are rooted in time through subject and costume. But some are amazingly modern, such as the watercolor of a gate near a 17th century Roman villa that is so filled with blinding light that its details are seen as in an overexposed photograph. It is rustic yet somehow eerie, the perfect expression of Artist Salvator Rosa, who confessed himself in search of an "extravagant mixture of the horrid and of the domestic, of the plain and of the precipice," which artists centuries later are still seeking.

* A stylus with a point of silver that flakes off on paper specially treated with a mixture of bone and glue.

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