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| Leonardo da Vinci Drapery study ca. 1470-84 drawing Louvre, Paris |
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| Leonardo da Vinci Drapery study ca. 1503-17 drawing Louvre, Paris |
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| Michelangelo Study of draped bending figure ca. 1524-34 drawing Teylers Museum, Haarlem |
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| Michelangelo Drapery study for Erythraean Sibyl ca. 1508-12 drawing British Museum |
"It seems likely that some form of human effigy was used in artists' workshops from the Middle Ages, but the first detailed records of when, and how, they were used occur in fifteenth-century Italy. From the outset, the main purpose of such 'artful' studio implements was to achieve greater naturalism. In his Treatise on Architecture, probably written in Milan between 1461/2 and 1464, the Florentine sculptor, architect and theorist Antonio di Piero Averlino, better known as Il Filarete (c. 1400-c. 1469) advised artists to learn to draw draperies 'di naturali' by using a 'figuretta di legname', a 'little wooden figure' with 'jointed arms, legs and neck'. In every case, clothes – whether ancient or modern – made both the man and the meaning, for by placing of the (linen) draperies or dress so as to suggest a particular series of actions on the posed mannequin, the figure gained a convincing sense of life. Filarete gives no specific instructions about how the dress should be disposed on the figure, beyond 'fix[ing] it up', but does recommend that if the fabric is not of a suitable weight or pliability to hang well, the figure and draperies should be 'bathe[d] . . . well' in melted glue to allow the folds to stiffen into the desired shapes as they dried; this process could be undone by dipping into warm water and reshaping. For a sculptor this sort of preparatory work, supplemented by two-dimensional drawings, might be considered a natural preliminary process of 'sketching out' a composition in tactile form, and indeed Vasari records that many sculptors – including Michelangelo – worked in precisely this way. However, by the end of the fifteenth century, it is clear that the practice was also widespread among painters, such as Piero della Francesca, and particularly those who like Leonardo da Vinci . . . had studied in the workshop of sculptors, or painter-sculptors, such as . . . Andrea Verrocchio."
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| Anonymous Florentine artist Drapery study from the back late 15th century drawing British Museum |
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| Fra Bartolommeo Drapery study before 1517 drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Fra Bartolommeo Drapery study for figure of Christ in the Last Judgment 1499-1500 drawing British Museum |
"These small figures tended to measure a 'braccio' (an arm) or 'half an ell' (ulna or forearm) – which in practice could mean anything between around 18 and 70 centimeters in length – but however useful they proved to be in plotting out a composition, a larger, life-size model was considered necessary to obtain the most convincingly naturalistic effects, and more especially when it came to painting clothing or drapery. In his Vite, Vasari first records the use of a large wooden mannequin by Fra Bartolommeo who worked not only with small-scale figures, but also used a jointed wooden model, 'grande quanto il vivo', specifically in order to paint and draw the folds of drapery, armour 'and such like things' as they were arranged on the conveniently immobile model. While Vasari does no more than specify that Fra Bartolommeo had the figure made, the latter nevertheless passed into the art-historical literature as the 'inventor' of the life-size mannequin, a claim that is at best an exaggeration, if not pure myth. The primary subject of his study of Christ for his fresco of the Last Judgment [directly above] is, of course, Christ's mantle and robe, that fall in elegantly disposed folds from his shoulders and in a weighty inverted triangle between the parted knees. For the purposes of this drawing, the figure, and even Christ's momentous gesture of damnation, are of secondary importance; instead, the torso is delineated as a rigid rectangular form with the barest indications of anatomical detail, clearly indicating the use of a lay figure."
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| Raphael Drapery study for Phrygian Sibyl ca. 1511 drawing British Museum |
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| Andrea del Sarto Drapery study 1528 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
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| Andrea del Sarto Drapery study ca. 1517 drawing Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Albrecht Dürer Study of drapery 1508 drawing Louvre, Paris |
"According to Weixlgärtner, Albrecht Dürer in his Proportionslehre (1528) used articulated mannequins of unspecified size for the principal purpose of studying proportions and the 'mechanics' of motion of the human body, a practice he suggests was common among German artists of the period. Following his master's lead, Dürer's pupil Erhard Schön published a decade later his Instruction on the proportions and positioning of models (1538), a study-book intended as a guide both to the proportions of the human body and to compositional arrangement. To a far greater extent than Dürer's, however, the engraved illustrations in Schön's short treatise betray the mannequin as the ghost in the human machine [directly below], offering convenient geometrical and mechanical means to create a 'natural'-looking figure, without having to refer to nature itself. Published in several editions between 1540 and 1563, Schön's Instruction was primarily directed at the young and inexperienced artist, but it evidently informed the drawing style and compositional pictorial modes of more experienced artists too, including those outside Germany. One of the most striking cases is that of the Genoese painter, Luca Cambiaso, who at the beginning of the 1560s began to conceive his figures in terms of cuboid module forms (a system designated as 'Kubenverfahren', 'cube-proceeding', in contemporary Germany) that he assembled, or perhaps built, into often complex multi-figured compositions. . . . It seems highly probably that Cambiaso would have supplemented his two-dimensional study by 'staging' the compositional arrangement using a group of small mannequins to explore the fall of light and shade and the interaction of figures 'in the round' . . ."
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| Erhard Schön Five figures in a building 1543 woodcut book illustration Cambridge University Library |
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| Luca Cambiaso Rape of the Sabines ca. 1565 drawing National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Luca Cambiaso Conversion of St Paul before 1585 drawing National Galleries of Scotland |
– quoted texts are from Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish by Jane Munro, published by Yale University Press in 2014 to accompany an exhibition organized by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge