Book Description

First published in 1998, this volume twelve scholars explore ways in which drawings were employed and appreciated in various European Cities form late medieval times, through the Renaissance and Reformation periods and into the early seventeenth century. The essayists examine the relationship between preparatory sketches and finished artworks in more durable and expensive materials, and consider the roles played by various drawing types, such as studies from different kinds of model and student copies from a master’s exemplar. They also investigate how drawings and their mechanically- reproduced equivalents- engravings, etchings and other forms of print – came to be collected for both practical and connoisseurial purposes, and how iconographical and stylistic inventiveness were linked to imaginative artistic interpretations of traditional subjects and to technical innovations in drawing and printmaking. Through diverse approaches to the study of artists’ attitudes and ambitions, the essays in Drawing 1400-1600 offer ways of appreciating the complex and fascinating history of the practice and theory of drawing over two centuries during which the expressive potential of the medium was realized in some of the greatest artistic statements of all time.