The Scottish National Gallery houses one of the finest collections of drawings in Great Britain, developed and nurtured over many years by a succession of distinguished keepers and expert curators. These holdings include many superb Italian drawings, but this sheet is one of the highlights.

There is no single label that could ever adequately describe the legendary genius of Leonardo, the painter, sculptor, phi­losopher, inventor and scientist. Sheets like this are especially precious as they demonstrate how drawing was his route to understanding and analysing the natural world. Leonardo repeatedly stated that art should be based on the closest study of nature, not just to evoke a convincing real­ity but also to convey a sense of religious emotion, revealing what he described as the work of ‘the great inventor’ that underlies the mysteries of the universe.

Our sheet may originally have come from one of the artist’s notebooks. The exact date of these studies is not known but they may have been made at the end of Leonardo’s first period in Florence in the 1480s. In earlier literature, there was some confusion about the identity of the animal in the drawings and the paws were often described as belonging to a bear. There is a series of drawings of a dissected bear’s paw in the Royal Library in Windsor Castle and our drawing came from a collection which also included a study of a bear’s head. However, the paws have now been definitively identified as canine. To judge from the rapid sketchy style we assume that they were made from a living animal. Leonardo’s fascination with animals is well known. At one stage in the 1490s he planned to make a comparative study of animals and men,  including their movements and feet, ‘to show in what ways they vary’. Here, he depicts the paw from several angles, even from below, as he attempts to understand its form and texture. 

The technique of metalpoint, probably a silver stylus, allows for great precision, but what is especially remarkable in these studies is the rapid searching quality of the draughtsmanship. Leonardo brilliantly captures the play of light across the paws, detailing the wisps of fur between claws and pads while also suggesting the underlying structure of joints, bones and tissue.

Only a fraction of Leonardo’s output as a draughtsman has survived and much of it is now distributed between two great collections, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan and the Royal Library at Windsor. It is comparatively rare for a separate sheet to have remained in private hands. Our drawing once formed part of one of the greatest collections of drawings ever amassed by an artist; the faint stamp TLin the lower left confirms that this sheet belonged to the British portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence who owned as many as seventeen drawings by Leonardo. After the dispersal of Lawrence’s collection in 1860 our drawing disappeared from view until it resurfaced in a British private collection in the 1930s. It was acquired by the Galleries in 1991 by private treaty and remains the only work by Leonardo in the Scottish national collection.
 

This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.