New scholarship by authors under 40 is the focus of the annual Master Drawings Symposium, returning in 2026 for its tenth year. The journal awards the Ricciardi Prize to the most groundbreaking contributions by young scholars and offers the winners and runners up the opportunity to present their findings in front of drawings enthusiasts.

This year, Master Drawings is pleased to award the prize to Giovanni Lusi, author of Behind Abstraction: Cy Twombly and Leonardo da Vinci’s Drawings. Lusi, a Ph.D. student at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, brilliantly presents the intense relationship Twombly had with the drawings and notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, notably during the early phase of his career, in 1959 and 1960.  The opportunity to consult Twombly’s private library, together with the rediscovery of important archival materials, have allowed the author to trace the sources of the artist’s often-surprising reinterpretation of Leonardo’s model. The research reveals the remarkable role the dialogue with the Renaissance master had on the invention of Twombly’s pictorial language.

The symposium also features 2025 prize runner-up Femke Speelberg, who will discuss her fascinating analysis of a rare, monumental design for a sacrament house attributed to the Late-Gothic German architect Lorenz Lechler. In focusing on Lechler’s design, and its immediate context, Speelberg, Curator of Historic Ornament, Design, and Architecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, illuminates the little understood but fundamental role of drawing in the design practice of Gothic artists and craftsmen across a range of disciplines.

Please join us for a dynamic afternoon of talks.

The Master Drawings Symposium celebrates recipients of the Ricciardi Prize. Learn more about the prize and the past winners here.

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This DRAWINGS WEEK 2026 event was organized by The Drawing Foundation and Master Drawings, and in association with Master Drawings New York 2025. 

This event was made possible through the generous support of the Tavolozza Foundation. 

Image: Lorenz Lechler and workshop, Design for a Monumental Sacrament House (detail), 1502. Pen and two types of ink (carbon black and iron gall) over blind ruling, 17th-century inscription in pen and ink, on parchment. Purchase, The Cloisters Collection, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, and Harry G. Sperling Fund, 2022, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York