BB.AA MUSEUM. Saint Pius V, 9
To appreciate beauty it is necessary to know ugliness, because one would not exist without the other. Leonardo da Vinci understood this perfectly., who was interested like no artist of his time in portraying the ugliness and deformation of real people, of flesh and blood. Therefore, I didn't draw cartoons (The genre was born as such in the 17th century and lived through times of splendor in German Expressionism of, For example, George Grosz and Otto Dix), but faithful reproductions of old and toothless men, progenitors, hook-nosed, deformed head, wrinkled, with warts, goiter and lipped lips, what, in a somewhat twisted way, they were attractive. The engravings shown in the exhibition Grotesque heads in the Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia are mostly copies that the 17th century artist Wenzel Hollar - inventor of the etching technique- made from the portraits sketched by da Vinci in the notebook he always carried with him. The historical and documentary value of some of these copies has its reason because they have left us drawings by the genius that have been lost along the way.. S.M.
