From sketches to Sibelius, Paddington to Emily in Paris (on stage)

It's a busy week in London - which is why this is late

A male nude by Annibale Carracci, c1580-5, in Drawing the Italian Renaissance at the King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace

Sorry I’m late! I… forgot. I need a holiday.

What I’ve seen

It’s been a week of scribbles and scratches, with two new exhibitions - Drawing the Italian Renaissance at the King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace, and Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Florence c1504 at the Royal Academy. 

I am a sucker for drawings, especially those Renaissance sketches that are basically throwaway bits of thinking. I love the way that, on scrappy sheets 600 years old, you can practically see the working of these great artistic minds as it plays out directly on the paper. It feels so fresh, even now.

So the King’s Gallery show is of course a huge treat, with sheets ranging from an exquisite chalk study of a woman’s head by Federico Barocci to a lively, wriggling male nude in red chalk by Annibale Carracci, from Raphael’s vigorous pen and ink sketch of Hercules slaying the Hydra to a page by Leonardo covered in studies of writhing cats, lions and a dragon. 

But huge is the word. There are bloody loads of them, which means that you run the risk of exhibition fatigue before you reach the final room. My way through it was to plug into the free audio guide and just sort of wander about, looking at the featured artworks and anything else that caught my eye, without forcing myself to see every damn thing (I also arrived with not quite enough time before closing so I needed a strategy). It worked, and I thought it was gorgeous. That’s on until March 9.

The Florence c1504 show at the RA has the opposite problem, in that it’s rather smaller than you’d like.