Sunday, June 11, 2017

Renaissance Drawings from the 1400s and early 1500s

Domenico Ghirlandaio
Head of an Old Man
ca. 1490
drawing
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Pisanello
Allegory of Luxuria
ca. 1426
drawing
Albertina, Vienna

"Eyes, nose, mouth, ears and hands are primarily means of representing distinct human features, but they are also the fictitious organs by means of which figures are represented interacting.  One can observe another convergence between the rudiments of early modern figural representation and the medieval and Renaissance iconography of the five senses in which these five organs symbolize each sense."

"After the organs comes the body.  Very much like the Christ of late medieval meditation literature, the human figure that Renaissance painters learned to imagine and depict is a sensitive animate entity made of imaginary bones, muscles and flesh.  The earliest written accounts of this practice go back to the Della Pittura of the humanist Leon Battista Alberti (1436), the first modern theoretical text on painting.  Here Alberti describes how to imagine the human figure, starting from the skeleton, gradually adding layers of muscles, skin and clothes. . . . For apprentices it is a means towards acquiring a fluent figural vocabulary.  For this purpose, to quote Vasari, 'the best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by constant exercise, the muscles of the torso, back, legs, arms and knees, and the bones underneath.  Then one may be sure that through much study attitudes in any position can be drawn by help of the imagination without one's having the living forms in view.'"  

 from The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art by François Quiviger (Reaktion Books, 2010) 


attributed to Alessandro Allori
Three Anatomical Studies of the Foot
ca. 1550-1600
drawing
Royal Collection, Windsor


Filippino Lippi
Youth and Apostle
1480-82
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden

Pisanello
Two male figure-studies and St Peter
ca. 1430-35
drawing on vellum
Kupferstichkabinett,Berlin

Filippino Lippi
Kneeling Magdalene and standing Christ
ca. 1499
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

Michelangelo
Three standing men in wide cloaks
ca. 1492-96
drawing
Albertina, Vienna

Antonio del Pollaiuolo
Study for equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza
ca. 1480-85
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Donato Bramante
St Christopher with Christ Child
ca. 1490
drawing
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Raphael
Prophets Hosea and Jonah with Angel
ca. 1510
drawing
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Anonymous Italian artist
Kneeling Angel (pricked for transfer to wall)
ca. 1510-1525
drawing
Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Leonardo da Vinci
Head of the Madonna
ca. 1510-15
drawing
Royal Collection, Windsor

Fra Bartolomeo
Drapery study of kneeling woman
before 1517
drawing
Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Jacopo Pontormo
Nude figures gazing into a mirror
ca. 1515-20
drawing
Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt

Giovanni Antonio Sogliani
St John the Baptist
ca. 1515-20
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin

"The demands of late medieval religion, centered as it was on a suffering human god, undoubtedly inspired this emphasis on the human figure in art, but the impact spilled beyond the field of religion.  Renaissance artists and their public increasingly considered the human figure the principal element of art and consequently the focal point for display and appreciation of artistic skill, regardless of the subject illustrated.  Of this we find economic evidence in the fact that artists were often remunerated according to the number of figures a picture contained."

 from The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art by François Quiviger (Reaktion Books, 2010)

". . . we must record the uncompromising rigidity with which Guercino enforced his own practice of charging a certain sum for every figure painted: 'As my ordinary price for each figure is 125 ducats,' he wrote to one of his most enthusiastic patrons, 'and as Your Excellency has restricted Yourself to 80 ducats, you will have just a bit more than half of one figure.'"

 from Patrons and Painters by Francis Haskell (Yale University Press, 1980)