THE winter show at The King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, brings together some 150 Italian drawings from the Renaissance. A small display on the formation of the Royal Collection of these in the Nash Vestibule reminds us that the collection holds some 2000 drawings, many of them once owned by Charles II. With more than 500 sheets by Leonardo, it is the most important collection of his drawings to be found together since his death in 1519.

It is as unpardonable as it is unhelpful that this exhibition is not accompanied by a catalogue. There is, however, a rather good sketchbook with an opening preface by the curator, Martin Clayton, with images of some drawings with blank or squared-up pages to encourage our own attempts. Pencils and paper are also available in the gallery rooms, but the works are hung so closely together (in splendid matching frames) that spending time looking at or drawing them is not going to be easy.

The time spans from a graphic attributed to Fra Angelico (c.1400-55), depicting the bust of a cleric, which was previously thought to have been drawn by his pupil Benozzo Gozzoli as a study for St Laurence (RCIN 912812), to drawings by later 16th-century artists, among them Federico Barocci (c.1535-1612): a drawing of the Virgin’s head for the Annunciation altarpiece for the Duke of Urbino’s chapel in the basilica in Loreto, one of 13 studies of heads by him owned by George III; Agostino Carracci (The Return of the Prodigal Son, 1587-90); Camillo Procaccini (c.1555-1629), whose Transfiguration (oil on paper) from the last decade of the Seicento adumbrates William Blake’s poetic shapes (RCIN 991220); and Domenico Cresti, “Il Passignano”, who did not die until 1638.

Museum of Fine Arts, BudapestRaphael, The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist (“The Esterhazy Madonna”) (c.1508), tempera and oil on panel, on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, for the RA exhibition

While there are bound to be some works less deserving of inclusion than others, the exhibition goes well beyond the Titans of the period: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian. Grouped in several sections, the exhibition moves from figure studies to portrait heads, observing Nature (Titian (?) drawing an ostrich; a copyist of Gentile Bellini’s dromedary and a surrealist “Landscape with a lobster and nutcrackers” (Annibale Carracci RCIN 901514)), and provides designs for the decorative arts, for frescoes and for altarpieces, as well as sacred and secular subjects.

Severally, I was taken back to the head of a young man (attributed to Pietro Faccini, c.1590), turning indifferently away from us with all the carefreeness of his age (RCIN 902244) and that of the self-assurance of the Fra Angelico (?) head of a cleric/St Laurence: I remain intrigued that Queen Victoria bought it for Prince Albert’s birthday in August 1846. Where did she obtain it?

The strong, almost bovine, power captured by an artist in northern Italy or Venice of the curly-headed man with a beard (RCIN 990088), here tentatively attributed to Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo (c.1480-c.1548), and, alongside, Ghirlandaio’s metal point drawing of the pensive face of one of the Tornabuoni’s older ladies in waiting (for the fresco cycle in Santa Maria Novella), once mistakenly attributed to Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475-1564), demonstrate the artists’ insight in portraying their models.

This comprehensive show would not be complete without some of the best known works of Michelangelo (The Virgin and Child with the Young Baptist dates to 1532); Leonardo (his costumed figure for a masque is now dated to 1517-18, before his last years in France, whereas previously it was associated with the court festivities in Milan in 1513 after its capture by the French, or the celebrations of 1513 or 1515 for the visits of Pope Leo X to Florence) and Raphael, whose Three Graces are a study for a ceiling that Agostino Chigi commissioned for his Tiberside villa in Rome (now the Villa Farnesina).

A short walk across Green Park, and one comes to the Royal Academy, where the exhibition “Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence c.1504” opened a week later. This is a much smaller exhibition, centred on significant works by each of the artists in three different media which are usually seen for free.

Michelangelo’s marble relief “The Taddei Tondo” (c.1504-05) is at the RA; Leonardo’s cartoon, a large (141.5×104.6cm) charcoal and white-chalk drawing for an altarpiece of St Anne with the Virgin and Child and the infant John, is in London’s National Gallery; and, from the National Galleries of Scotland, Raphael’s “Bridgewater Madonna” (c.1507-08), loaned by the Duke of Sutherland.

© Hamburger Kunsthalle/bpk. Photography: Christoph Irrgang  Michelangelo Buonarroti, Studies of Male Heads, Helmets for Soldiers and Facial Features (c.1504), pen and brown ink and black chalk on paper,on loan from the Kupferstichkabinett, Hamburger Kunsthalle, for the RA exhibition  

The wriggling Christ Child in his mother’s lap suggests that the 21-year-old Raphael (1483-1520) must have known the sculpted roundel that the older artist Michelangelo was carving for the wool merchant Taddeo Taddei the year when he arrived in Florence from his native Urbino.

On the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul, 25 January 1504, the leading artists of Florence met to discuss with the politicians of the Republican government of the city the best location to site Michelangelo’s massive sculpture David. If only the Arts Council in the UK had the same breadth of mind and intelligence to work with artists and the DCMS.

That meeting provides the anchor for the exhibition at the RA, “Florence c.1504” even though each of the three central works comes a little later. For no real reason, the exhibition opens with three of Michelangelo’s earliest known works (copying Giotto), variously dated 1490-94 (from the Louvre, the British Museum, and the Albertina in Vienna).

The exhibition runs on to 1508-9, allowing us the chance to see Raphael’s great (albeit unfinished) devotional work “The Esterházy Madonna”, last shown at the RA in the 2010 exhibition “Treasures from Budapest” (Arts, 15 October 2010), when it was joined by two of the most important head studies devised by Leonardo for soldiers at the battle of Anghiari, sadly not loaned this time.

On 3 October 1503, the 51-year-old Leonardo, who was already working on the portrait of Mona Lisa, had been asked to paint a mural of the Battle of Anghiari (1440) for the Great Council Hall in what is now the Palazzo Vecchio. Later the following year, in September or August, Michelangelo was invited to paint a second battle scene, that of the Battle of Cascina (1364).

By kind permission of the Earl of Leicester and the Trustees of Holkham EstateBastiano da Sangallo, after Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Battle of Cascina (“The Bathers”) (c.1542), oil on panel, on loan from the collection of the Earl of Leicester, Holkham Hall, Norfolk, for the RA exhibition

These victories over the Milanese and the Pisans, respectively, stood out in the Florentine conscience as the nascent republic set out to establish new freedoms. After the yoke of 60 years of Medici rule (1434-94), the city fathers sought to establish a system of more open government which would prevent oligarchies’ and pseudo-monarchies’ seizing power.

To that end, the council of Florence, numbering a staggering 3452 citizens after 1496, which makes our own bloated second House of Lords look like small fry, required a new debating chamber. The hall of the Cinquecento, as it is now called, measures 53m by 22m. At Michelangelo’s suggestion, the ceiling was later (1563-65) raised seven metres to its present height of 18 metres, introducing pictures that celebrated the return of the Medici. In place of the lost commissions of 1503-04, murals undertaken by Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) and his studio, depicting seven battles against Siena and seven against Pisa, now fill the walls.

The memory of Michelangelo is recalled with a single sculpture, “The Genius of Victory” (1530-34). Vasari persuaded Michelangelo’s nephew to give the city the statue that was originally intended by his uncle for the tomb of Pope Julius II and was left unfinished. In its present position, it is somewhat swamped by the massed armies above.

© Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024/Royal Collection TrustMichelangelo Buonarroti, The Virgin and Child with the Young Baptist (c.1532), in the exhibition at The King’s Gallery

Leonardo and Michelangelo, on the other hand, had originally planned monumental narrative scenes with fewer protagonists; Leonardo’s skirmishing horsemen and flurries of horses rout the Milanese on the Tuscan plain some 10km from Sansepolcro, while Michelangelo summons the naked bathers from the banks of the Arno to arms when a trumpet announces the Pisan attack. Although little is known how the two works were to be displayed, the present exhibition brings together for the first time some of their working drawings. To demonstrate their superiority of arms, the Florentine citizenry is likely to have preferred the grandiose scenes that Vasari offered to the original commissions.

The second of the three exhibition rooms in the Royal Academy houses Leonardo da Vinci’s cartoon. Purchased by the National Gallery in 1962, it had been in the Royal Academy’s collection from 1777. The dating and commission remain controversial, but it is argued here for the first time that this may be Leonardo’s plan for an altarpiece for the Sala del Gran Consiglio in the Palazzo Vecchio, after the death of Filippino Lippi in April 1504. If so, he never undertook the painting, and much later (November 1510) the Signoria reassigned the commission to Fra Bartolomeo.

Both centre on St Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, but, whereas Fra Bartolomeo’s composition is angled towards the left of the viewer, Leonardo’s faces right. Placement on a side wall, with the light falling on the central subjects from the south and west, always determined the composition of an altarpiece; so had the city fathers changed their mind about the siting of the altar itself? This and many other questions are left unrealised in the accompanying book (which omits discussion of each work’s provenance and history).

“Drawing the Italian Renaissance” is at The King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London SW1, until 9 March. Phone 0303 123 7301. www.rct.uk

“Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence c.1504” is at the Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries, Burlington Gardens, at the Royal Academy of Arts, London W1, until 16 February. Phone 020 7300 8090. www.royalacademy.org.uk