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| Anonymous Florentine artist Drapery study, kneeling figure ca. 1520-40 drawing British Museum |
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| Pellegrino Tibaldi Drapery study for Christ at the Last Judgment ca. 1550-55 drawing Teylers Museum, Haarlem |
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| Federico Barocci Drapery study for St Catherine of Alexandria ca. 1560 drawing British Museum |
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| Bernardino Campi Drapery study from the back ca. 1570 drawing Royal Collection, Great Britain |
"The Cremonese painter, Bernardino Campi, who gives one of the most detailed accounts of how such 'modelli' were made and configured, recommended in 1584 that the figurines should be attached to the notional 'floor' by 'touching a hot iron stylus', implying that they were made from wax, a medium that he and many other artists preferred for its malleability and ease of reworking – unlike clay, its shape could be altered after soaking in hot water. In his treatise on painting of 1587, Campi's friend Giovanni Battista Armenini (1530-1609) similarly highlighted the advantages of wax as a modelling material: not only could its consistency be altered by adding fat, turpentine and linseed oil, but a range of different pigments such as red ochre, soot and lead white could be added to vary the colour. Once firmly affixed to the supporting board, these miniature mise-en-scènes could be viewed at different levels and angles to ensure that effects of foreshortening, light and shadow (and therefore colour) could be effectively recreated in compositional drawings and, eventually, the finished work. Others, notably Jacopo Tintoretto and Nicolas Poussin, developed variants on Campi's construction in the form of a box, with apertures cut in its side to represent the architectural interiors – palace, church or grand salone – in which the protagonists of their istoria were placed."
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| Annibale Carracci Drapery study from the side before 1605 drawing Royal Collection, Great Britain |
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| Annibale Carracci Drapery study for kneeling prophet before 1605 drawing Royal Collection, Great Britain |
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| Annibale Carracci Drapery study before 1605 drawing Royal Collection, Great Britain |
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| Annibale Carracci Drapery study for the Virgin before 1605 drawing Royal Collection, Great Britain |
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| Nicolas Poussin Sacrament of Extreme Unction ca. 1638-40 oil on canvas (commissioned by Cassiano dal Pozzo) Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
"While Poussin's biographers confirm his use of wax figures as a means of developing preliminary compositional drawings, their accounts give varying, sometimes conflicting, details about the devices which Poussin used to construct a three-dimensional setting. Bellori described the small wax models as being about 'half a palm' (that is, about 11 centimeters) high, which Poussin would dispose in positions that replicated those in his intended pictorial narrative. He would then make large figures, covering them with small pieces of fine canvas or cambric, to help him map out areas of light and shade and to achieve a balance of colors. Complemented by studies made from the living model, this procedure allowed him to develop a composition through a series of preliminary drawings [as below] which, if summary in execution, contained all the elements of movement and expression that would appear in the final painting [as above]. An account by the German painter, Joachim von Sandrart (1606-1688), who knew Poussin between 1628 and 1635, suggests that the latter adapted the, by then, well-established practice of 'dressing' his wax figurines in damp paper or fine taffeta, which he would position on 'a board laid out with flagstones', using taut strings to mark the perspective so that the figures could be set in convincing relationships to one another. Only the painter Antoine Leblond de Latour, writing four years after Poussin's death in 1665, mentions Poussin's 'invention' of a 'grande machine', that consisted of a 'planche barlongue' (that is, a board or piece of wood, longer on one side than the other, possibly trapezoid in shape), on top of which he arranged suitably clothed figurines, and covered with a box made of an unknown material and closed on all five sides. Holes were then cut on the side of the box to illuminate the scene from the outside, and another, smaller hole cut in the front to allow Poussin to observe 'the whole tableau from a distance', and from this to make a compositional drawing to be worked up in the painting."
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| Nicolas Poussin Study for Holy Family in the Temple ca. 1641-43 drawing Royal Collection, Great Britain |
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| Nicolas Poussin Study for Holy Family on the Steps ca. 1648 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
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| Carlo Maratti Drapery study of genuflecting figure ca. 1685 drawing Royal Collection, Great Britain |
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| Giambattista Tiepolo Drapery study for St Pascal Baylon ca. 1767-69 drawing on blue paper Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf |
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| Giambattista Tiepolo Drapery study with cloak before 1770 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
– 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