Leonardo tapped in to computers

GALLERIES Leigh Hatts
NEXT Monday is St James's Day which will be celebrated at the South Bank Centre with two concerts.
Dr Mary Remnant is giving one of her popular lecture recitals illustrated with paintings on The Musical Road to Santiago de Compostela, to be followed by the New London Consort's musical journey through northern Spain. But the South Bank pilgrims (who will include members of the Confraternity of St James) will have to wait until next January before Leonardo da Vinci's study for St James The Greater is brought to the Hayward Gallery.
This red chalk, pen and ink drawing, now in Windsor Castle, is the study for the figure in Leonardo's Last Supper painted on the refectory wall of the Dominican Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan. Computer graphics will explore the perspective of that masterpiece.
Drawings are to be at the heart of the exhibition and The Queen has agreed to lend 87 other drawings from the Royal Library at Windsor. In the corner of St James study there is a mysterious architectural doodle and such buildings will be another feature of the displays when the exhibition opens early in 1989.
Announcing the exhibition, Professor Martin Kemp suggested that it will be the greatest assembly of Leonardo's work. Certainly it is 30 years since a large scale show in Britain was devoted to his genius in the field of art and science.
The money for this ambitious effort will be coming from the South Bank Centre's neighbour IBM who are giving £200,000 and a very large amount of the computer graphic work which should bring Leonardo's theories to life. "He would have loved the exhibition" claims Professor Kemp who says that he can sense Leonardo's frustration at being without film in the 15th century.
But this did not prevent Leonardo from working on many fronts including manpowered flight. A model of a flying machine based on Leonardo's drawings is being constructed for the South Bank. It would be the greatest tribute to take the model outside the Hayward for a flight along the Thames.
At the Victoria & Albert Museum Textiles of The Arts and Crafts Movement has already opened (daily until September 4; free) although it is hard to find in the miles of corridor. One section is in the new Henry Cole wing, whilst the other is to be found in the old building's first floor. You should make your way past the lecture theatre and when you find the wonderful collection of European censers and incense boats you will know that you are almost there. Just turn right by the 16th-century warming pans. (How could James II's son have ever been in one?)
The exhibition is an attempt to mark the centenary of the first Arts & Crafts show in Regent Street which heralded the birth of a new artistic movement. Proof that the movement is still influential comes from the sponsor, Habitat, who next month launch soft furnishing designs reproduced in original colours. During the first exhibition one could buy a tapestry kit, designed by BurneJones and William Morris, to be completed at home.
The Orchard Tapestry was woven at Merton Abbey in 1890 with a design adapted from a Morris cartoon for a ceiling painting in Jesus College, Cambridge. Another Merton tapestry is the Angeli Laudantes which shows two Burne-Jones angels based on windows made by Morris & Co for Salisbury Cathedral. The background and beautiful leaf and fruit border is
by J H Dearle. Morris's assistant and eventual successor.
There is much delightful work by May Morris both among the tapestries and in the church furnishings room. She and Philip Webb designed a superfrontal for the Rochester Deaconesses chapel. With Charles Ricketts she produced two pairs of extraordinary liturgical gloves. Minute christening gloves for a baby are laid next to an impressive pair of bishop's gloves embroidered in silks on linen.
Westminster Abbey has lent a 1910 dalmatic in non-liturgical blue velvet with applied embroidery panels worked with silks and showing birds, butterflies and garlanded toddlers. Apparently it was intended for use at children's services. The sisters of St Peter's Community, Woking, have given the V&A an altar frontal worked by their predecessors at Kilburn who were trained in Belgium.
In the same room is a carpet design by Charles Voysey but to see his Alice in Wonderland wallpaper you must find the other half of the exhibition. The House that Jack Built curtains feature buildings similar to his own style which the congregation at St John Fisher, Chorleywood will recognise. The church is a converted Voysey house.