 |
| Michelangelo Buonarroti Study for Bacchus Sculpture ca. 1501-1502 drawing Musée du Louvre |
 |
| Michelangelo Buonarroti Study for Slave Sculpture ca. 1516-17 drawing Musée du Louvre |
 |
| attributed to Giovanni Angelo del Maino Figure with Cloak ca. 1520 drawing Musée du Louvre |
 |
| attributed to Giovanni Angelo del Maino Figure carrying Columns ca. 1520 drawing Musée du Louvre |
 |
| Baccio Bandinelli Figure Study ca. 1520 drawing Musée du Louvre |
 |
| Michelangelo Anselmi Hercules and Antaeus ca. 1520 drawing Musée du Louvre |
 |
| Giulio Romano Figure throwing Rock ca. 1520-21 drawing Musée du Louvre |
 |
| Giulio Romano Figure with Sword ca. 1524 drawing Musée du Louvre |
 |
| Rosso Fiorentino Mars in Niche 1526 drawing (print study) Musée du Louvre |
 |
| Parmigianino (Francesco Mazzola) Study for Diogenes ca. 1526-27 drawing Musée du Louvre |
 |
| Agnolo Bronzino Figure Study ca. 1565-69 drawing Musée du Louvre |
 |
| Alessandro Allori Pearl Diver ca. 1570 drawing (study for painting, Pearl Fishers) Musée du Louvre |
 |
| Bartolomeo Passarotti Figure Study before 1592 drawing Musée du Louvre |
 |
| Marcantonio Raimondi Figure Study before 1527 drawing Musée du Louvre |
 |
| Anonymous Florentine Artist Figures in Combat 16th century drawing Musée du Louvre |
"It is known that the great Bernini was one of those who refused to grant the Greeks the virtue of portraying either a more perfect nature or an ideal beauty in their figures. He was, furthermore, of the opinion that nature was capable of bestowing on all its parts the necessary amount of beauty, and that the skill of art consisted in finding it. He prided himself on having to overcome his earlier prejudice concerning the charms of the Medicean Venus, since, after painstaking study, he had been able to perceive occasionally these very charms in nature."
"It was the Venus therefore that taught him to discover beauties in nature which he had previously seen only in the statue and which, without the Venus, he would not have sought in nature. Does it not follow then that the beauty of Greek statues is easier to discover than beauty in nature and that thus the former is more inspiring, less diffuse and more harmoniously united than the latter? So the study of nature must be at best a longer and more difficult way to gain knowledge of perfect beauty than the study of antiquity, and Bernini, by directing young artists primarily toward the most beautiful in nature, was not showing them the shortest way."
– Johann Joachim Winckelmann, from Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755), translated by Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton