This morning I went to the Birmingham Museum of Art to see an exhibition of DaVinci drawings. It was absolutely fantastic. The detail of the drawings is amazing, and the confidence of the lines as well as the subtlety of the shading - which is mostly rendered by hatching alone - blew me away. The museum provides magnifying glasses, which I really appreciated. Along with the drawings, they're exhibiting a codex on flight, and they've put together a dvd of the pages, with some of the bird drawings and machine schematics animated. What I saw of it was very well done.

I found it humbling to stand in the presence of these sketches, which are nearly six hundred years old, and still relevant and beautiful to the modern eye. The exhibit will be there until November 9, and is well worth a visit.