Art review Comforting duds help bring us closer to dazzling masters

The sculptor, goldsmith and murderer Benvenuto Cellini found himself alone one day on a Florentine piazza facing his rival Baccio Bandinelli, whose statues he thought looked like sacks of squashes topped by melons for heads. He fingered his dagger, getting ready to deliver the ultimate killer review. Then he took pity on this pathetic figure sitting on a donkey and stayed his hand.

- Jonathan Jones

The Royal Collection too has compassion for Bandinelli. It includes him in this often tremendous if slightly baggy show from its huge holdings of Italian Renaissance drawings, alongside Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. You see immediately why his sculptures are so terrible, for in a section with some of the greatest nudes ever sketched, Bandinelli's study of a posing male figure has still got his clothes on. No wonder his hulking statues lack anatomical conviction.

Michelangelo did not have that problem. His black chalk drawing of The Risen Christ is a male nude leaping from the grave, arms flung up, his muscles flowing with energy, rippling with joyful resurrected life.

The close knowledge of human anatomy underpinning this thrilling holy nude is illuminated by rangy dissection drawings that Michelangelo did in about 1520. These examinations of the muscles and tendons of a flayed human leg prove Leonardo was not the only Renaissance artist ready to spend his nights among dissected corpses.