Martin Clayton LVO, FSA
Head of Prints and Drawings, Royal Collection Trust
Speaker's biography
Martin Clayton studied Natural Sciences and the History of Art at Cambridge. Since graduating in 1990, he has worked in the Print Room at Windsor Castle and is now Head of Prints and Drawings for Royal Collection Trust. He has curated many exhibitions on the Italian old master drawings in the Royal Collection, including shows on Raphael, Michelangelo, Poussin, Canaletto, Parmigianino and many others. The focus of his work has been the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci: he has curated exhibitions on Leonardo's anatomical work (1992, 2010 and 2012-13) and his studies of physiognomy (The Divine and the Grotesque, 2002), and for the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death in 2019 he organised a series of 14 exhibitions of the artist’s drawings at venues across the UK that were seen by a total of more than 1,350,000 people. He is currently working on a revised full catalogue of all 600 drawings by Leonardo and his circle in Windsor.