From 3 March to 22 May 2022 , the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici presents a preview of the Gribouillage / Scarabocchio exhibition-event. From Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly conceived by the two curators Francesca Alberti (Villa Medici) and Diane Bodart (Columbia University), with the collaboration of Philippe-Alain Michaud, as associate curator (Center Pompidou).

The exhibition is developed in two successive presentations, both unpublished and complementary, one in Rome and the other in Paris : the first at Villa Medici, from 3 March to 22 May 2022 , will be followed by the second at the Beaux-Arts in Paris from 19 October 2022 to January 15, 2023.

With around 300 original works ranging from the Renaissance to the contemporary era , this dual presentation highlights one of the most unknown and least controlled aspects of drawing practice. By addressing the multiple facets of scribbling in the artistic field, from the smudged sketches on the back of the paintings to the scribbles that become real work, the exhibition shows how these experimental, transgressive, regressive and liberating graphic practices, which seem to obey no rules, have always marked the history of artistic creation.

The Renaissance, to free itself from the constraints of drawing then called "academic", produced free, instinctive and gestural graphic forms, which evoke the rudimentary drawings of children, the calligraphic digressions on the margins of manuscripts or even the graffiti of anonymous hands that cover the city walls. Picasso, speaking of children, said: “It took me a lifetime to draw like them”; but Michelangelo already enjoyed imitating the characters (puppets) awkwardly drawn on the Florentine facades. The exhibition explores this hidden side of artistic making and invites visitors to shift their gaze to the back of the paintings or to the walls of the workshop, to the margin of the drawings or under the detached frescoes ....