Jeannine O'Grody spoke Wednesday, April 22 in Biggin Hall about the process of getting original Leonardo da Vinci drawings to Birmingham and setting up a nationally acclaimed art exhibit.
The 500-plus-year-old works were in Birmingham's "Leonardo da Vinci: Drawings from the Biblioteca Reale in Turin" exhibit from Sept. 28 through Nov. 9. It featured 11 drawings and a "Codex on the Flight of Birds" that had never been allowed to leave Italy as a group.
O'Grody said she was interested for a while when a chance meeting with a colleague informed her the Biblioteca Reale might be willing to be approached. After addressing political issues with Rome, she began working out a series of negotiations leading from two drawing to the final 11.
This eventually led her to being escorted by machine-gun armed Italian security to the airport to depart for Birmingham. But not before filling out tedious "condition reports" in a tiny room of the Biblioteca Reale Library.
"I had to look at them, a colleague of mine had to look at them, two Italian conservators had to look at them and then a representative of the royal library had to look at them," O'Grody said. "We had to detail every issue we saw on these drawings because the works were valued at hundreds of millions of dollars."
They used "Clima-boxes" to ship the works. The boxes have state-of-the-art devices on them to maintain humidity and temperature and had never been used before.
"We were in this tiny, enclosed room and tensions began rising because the boxes were not working," O'Grody said. "And the drawings were not going to travel until they worked."
After hours of unrest, the problem was determined to be the environment they were being loaded in and, finally, they were ready to come to the US under the watch of an Italian conservator, an American conservator and Italian security.
"In the US, our security was to be as under the radar as possible," O'Grody said. "In Italy they had the police travel with us with machine guns."
They spent hours inspecting, upon arrival in Birmingham, to make sure everything had arrived in the same state as it left. Then they were carefully unloaded, hung and the drawings remained protected under pieces of paper from any additional light hitting the drawings outside of exhibition times.
The entrance was set up like an airlock to further insure the stability of humidity and temperature and, after entering, the museum gave a magnifying glass to every visitor.
"Handing that out you don't have to say anything," O'Grody said. "You don't have to say look carefully."
At the end of the exhibit was a special education gallery.
"She said they had software that digitized every single page in the codex so you could flip through them and see everything in the book," said Melissa Redmond, junior in industrial design. "That was amazing. It would animate the drawings with one click so you could understand his thoughts behind them."
O'Grody said it turned out to be the most powerful interpretive technologies they've ever used.
They also had programs like the history of flight day to relate daVinci's interest in flight and animal anatomy to a wide age range.
"We had police on horses come into the parking lot so children could draw from the horses and people from the zoo with birds so children could draw from the birds," O'Grody said.
The exhibition was free to the public.
"It was open 36 days and over 40,000 people visited," according to the Birmingham Business Journal Web site.
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