One Way to Spot a Forgery
And more interesting facts about Leonardo da Vinci that you can find on Getty.edu
Caricature of a Man with Bushy Hair, about 1494, Leonardo da Vinci. Pen and brown ink, 2 5/8 x 2 1/8 in. Getty Museum, 84.GA.647
Body Content
“Leonardo da Vinci was an anatomist, architect, botanist, engineer, mathematician, painter, scientist, sculptor, and theoretician—and a mancino, Italian slang for ‘lefty.’”
Julian Brooks is senior curator and head of the Department of Drawings at the Getty Museum—and the author of one of our favorite deep dives into Renaissance lefty Leonardo da Vinci.
How can you tell if an artist is left-handed? Try this: quickly sketch a square on a sheet of paper, then shade it with hatching—closely set, parallel lines.
Now, head over to Brooks’s delightful exploration of the sketches of Leonardo, Michelangelo, their students, and even a few would-be forgers.
Caricature of a Man with Bushy Hair, about 1494, Leonardo da Vinci. Pen and brown ink, 2 5/8 x 2 1/8 in. Getty Museum, 84.GA.647
Following Strangers Around
Once upon a time, in Italy circa 1495, if you had an interesting visage, you couldn't be terribly surprised to find Leonardo da Vinci following you around. From one of da Vinci's early biographers, Giorgio Vasari:
Leonardo was “so delighted when he saw curious heads, whether bearded or hairy, that he would follow anyone who had thus attracted his attention for a whole day, acquiring such a clear idea of him that when he went home he would draw the head as well as if the man had been present.”
Caricature of a Man with Bushy Hair is one of numerous drawings of exaggerated facial features that Leonardo called visi monstruosi—“monstrous faces” in English. You can read more about it on the online collection page for this drawing.
And because it’s part of our Open Content collection—more than 88,000 images of artworks from our collection that you can download, meme, or put on a t-shirt—you can set it as your desktop wallpaper, or just keep it handy in case you ever ask someone with truly fabulous hair if you can make a quick sketch.
Gallery view of the now-closed exhibition Michelangelo: Mind of the Master at the Getty Center. Drawings, left to right: Male Head in Profile; Studies of Legs and Feet, 1511; and Seated Male Nude, and a Study of His Right Arm, 1511. Teylers Museum, Haarlem
One Last Thing
A little treat for the art lovers who’ve read this far: Last-Minute Michelangelo with Julian Brooks. This YouTube series was filmed just before the world shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Getty Center exhibition Michelangelo: Mind of the Master had opened only weeks earlier—and was about to close again.
To capture the magic of an exhibition the world was about to miss, curator Julian Brooks walked us through a behind-the-scenes tour that you can watch in full here.
