DRAWING

the art or technique of producing images on a surface, usually paper, by means of marks, usually of ink, graphite, chalk, charcoal, or crayon. Drawing is distinguished from painting by an emphasis on form, or shape, rather than mass and colour and from other graphic arts such as lithography and etching by the direct relationship between production and result. A brief account of drawing follows. For full treatment, see Drawing. Line has at times been considered the essential ingredient of drawing. While many drawings are indeed pure outline and most are based on line, it cannot be considered the specific quality of drawing, for some drawings have no lines at all but only areas of tone, such as Georges Seurat's studies in chalk or John Constable's in sepia. Most drawings are monochromatic, but various media such as coloured crayon or colour washes may be employed. Drawing is often a stage preliminary to work in a more substantial medium, such as painting, sculpture, or architecture. Full-size drawings or plans are a usual part of making artifacts, from furniture to machinery. Drawings of this preparatory sort are practically all that survive from before the Renaissance, and there are few even of them. Partly because of the perishable nature of most drawing materials, but also because, during the Middle Ages, preparatory drawings were commonly done to standard designs and collected in pattern books, there was no call for every artist to provide his own. The best known pattern book is by Villard de Honnecourt and shows how to design people and animals around geometrical shapes. Even the drawings that he notes as done from life are highly conventionalized. Under the influence of Giotto's naturalism, drawing techniques changed; the stylized outlines of the pattern books gave way to drawings done from nature, in which forms within the outline are given solidity by hatching (fine lines drawn close together, chiefly to give an effect of shading) and highlighting. Cennino Cennini, in Il libro dell'arte (1437; The Craftsman's Handbook, 1933), recommends drawing from nature as well as from the masters. Drawing, during the Italian Renaissance, started to become an independent technique and to acquire its importance in the theory of art. It is associated especially with Florentine art, in contrast to the more painterly style of Venice, and the dominance of fresco painting in Florence shaped Florentine ideas of drawing. Leon Battista Alberti, writing in 1435, identified drawing with circumscription, or outline, and although he allowed that a good drawing is often very pleasing on its own account, he defined it in terms of painting, as the first of painting's three parts: Outline will be that which describes the going around of the edge in painting. Indeed, such outlines for fresco painting, sometimes pricked for tracing onto the wall, were a common type of drawing in the Renaissance. Alberti's second part of painting was composition, that method by which the parts of the things seen are put together in the picture, and Piero della Francesca, writing about 50 years later, more or less encompassed both parts in his larger definition: By drawing we mean profiles and outlines placed proportionately in their places. His younger contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci, writing in his notebooks, called for a fresh approach to drawings, likening them to rough drafts for a poem. His own are technically experimental and often independent of paintingsobservations or flights of imagination that are an end in themselves. Raphael (who was influenced by Leonardo's drawings) and Michelangelo used drawing as a means of working out relations between figures and of modelling forms within them; Michelangelo developed a style of close hatching for this purpose that invites comparison with the chiselling methods of sculpture. His admirer Giorgio Vasari had the idea of collecting the drawings of the masters to demonstrate their different manners; it is in his writings that we find the meaning of drawing greatly elevated and extended. Vasari's word is disegno, which means design as well as drawing, and much else. It is, according to Vasari, the foundation of the three arts (painting, sculpture, and architecture), not only in the traditional sense of providing preparatory drawings for them but in a new Platonist sense of being the idea behind their creation, implanted in the artist's mind by God; it is the animating principle of all creative processes. The adherents of this point of view naturally believed in using drawings at all stages of planning their compositions, and the gulf widened between them and the Venetians, who painted without reliance on outline or, apparently, on closely followed preliminary drawing. This divergence of opinion and practice regarding the role of drawing continued to surface between rival schools of painting during the following centuries. The insistence on drawing as the foundation of art came to be associated in the 16th century with the Academy of Annibale Carracci, where artists met to draw from life. Meanwhile, drawing had achieved greater autonomy; it was recognized as a means of recording, for example, the features of the great, as in the portrait drawings by Albrecht Drer, Hans Holbein, or the French court artists of the 16th century, some of which correspond to no known paintings. Rembrandt, a prolific draughtsman, seldom used his drawings for preparing paintings or etchings but treated them as an independent form. By the 17th century, drawings had definite market value; connoisseurs specialized in collecting them, and forgers began to exploit the demand. The great collections of drawings in the British and the Ashmolean museums are based on those of 17th- and 18th-century artists and connoisseurs. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the old debate about drawing and painting revived in the rivalry between Classical and Romantic schools of painting. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the master of pure line drawing, maintained that drawing is the probity of art; line drawing is everything. In England, later in the 19th century, John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites had similar views; but the Impressionists, a generation later, used drawing side by side with painting, rather than as the basis of it. In the 20th century, the drawing became fully autonomous as an art form, figuring significantly among the works of virtually every major artist, and the line itself was exploited both for its representational and its purely expressive qualities. also called Drafting, in yarn manufacture, process of attenuating the loose assemblage of fibres called sliver (q.v.) by passing it through a series of rollers, thus straightening the individual fibres and making them more parallel. Each pair of rollers spins faster than the previous one. Drawing reduces a soft mass of fibre to a firm uniform strand of usable size. In the production of man-made fibres, drawing is a stretching process applied to fibres in the plastic state, increasing orientation and reducing size. the art or technique of producing images on a surface, usually paper, by means of marks, usually of ink, graphite, chalk, charcoal, or crayon. Drawing as formal artistic creation might be defined as the primarily linear rendition of objects in the visible world, as well as of concepts, thoughts, attitudes, emotions, and fantasies given visual form, of symbols and even of abstract forms. This definition, however, applies to all graphic arts and techniques that are characterized by an emphasis on form or shape rather than mass and colour, as in painting. Drawing as such differs from graphic printing processes in that a direct relationship exists between production and result. Drawing, in short, is the end product of a successive effort applied directly to the carrier. Whereas a drawing may form the basis for reproduction or copying, it is nonetheless unique by its very nature. Although not every artwork has been preceded by a drawing in the form of a preliminary sketch, drawing is in effect the basis of all visual arts. Often the drawing is absorbed by the completed work or destroyed in the course of completion. Thus, the usefulness of a ground plan drawing of a building that is to be erected decreases as the building goes up. Similarly, points and lines marked on a raw stone block represent auxiliary drawings for the sculpture that will be hewn out of the material. Essentially, every painting is built up of lines and pre-sketched in its main contours; only as the work proceeds is it consolidated into coloured surfaces. As shown by an increasing number of findings and investigations, drawings form the material basis of mural, panel, and book paintings. Such preliminary sketches may merely indicate the main contours or may predetermine the final execution down to exact details. They may also be mere probing sketches. Long before the appearance of actual small-scale drawing, this procedure was much used for monumental murals. With sinopiathe preliminary sketch found on a layer of its own on the wall underneath the fresco, or painting on freshly spread, moist plasterone reaches the point at which a work that merely served as technical preparation becomes a formal drawing expressing an artistic intention. Not until the late 14th century, however, did drawing come into its ownno longer necessarily subordinate, conceptually or materially, to another art form. Autonomous, or independent, drawings, as the name implies, are themselves the ultimate aim of an artistic effort; therefore, they are usually characterized by a pictorial structure and by precise execution down to details. Formally, drawing offers the widest possible scope for the expression of artistic intentions. Bodies, space, depth, substantiality, and even motion can be made visible through drawing. Furthermore, because of the immediacy of its statement, drawing expresses the draftsman's personality spontaneously in the flow of the line; it is, in fact, the most personal of all artistic statements. It is thus plausible that the esteem in which drawing was held should have developed parallel to the value placed on individual artistic talent. Ever since the Renaissance, drawing has gradually been losing its anonymous and utilitarian status in the eyes of artists and the public, and its documents have been increasingly valued and collected. This article deals with the aesthetic characteristics, the mediums of expression, the subject matter, and the history of drawing. Additional reading Joseph Meder, The Mastery of Drawing, trans. and rev. by Winslow Ames, 2 vol. (1978; originally published in German, 1919; 2nd ed., 1923), a voluminous work that remains the basic treatment of the history and techniques of drawing. Another treatment, more concise in every respect, is Heinrich Leporini, Die Knstlerzeichnung, 2nd ed. (1955). Arthur E. Popham published an introduction to drawing in A Handbook to the Drawings and Watercolours in the Department of Prints and Drawings of the British Museum (1939), based on the ample materials held by the British Museum. Walter Koschatzky, Die Kunst der Zeichung: Technik, Geschichte, Meisterwerke (1977), is a survey of the history, functions, and techniques of drawing, from the beginnings to modern art, based on excellent examples chosen mainly from the Graphische Sammlung Albertina in Vienna. Charles De Tolnay in History and Technique of Old Master Drawings (1943, reprinted 1972); and James Watrous in The Craft of Old-Master Drawings (1957), deal, from different points of view, with the history and techniques of the old masters; while Heribert Hutter in Drawing: History and Technique (1968; originally published in German, 1966), stresses the artistic function of drawing and includes modern works. Daniel M. Mendelowitz, Mendelowitz's Guide to Drawing, 3rd ed. rev. by Duane A. Wakeham (1982), provides a historical rsum, with reference to the artistic elements and technical means of drawing; in the supplement to the 1st ed., Drawing: A Study Guide (1967), he offers practical instructions for drawing techniques and their application; as does Robert Beverly Hale in Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters (1964, reprinted 1974). Jakob Rosenberg illustrates the possibilities of drawing in Great Draughtsmen from Pisanello to Picasso, rev. ed. (1974), with samples from the works of eight great artists. Great Drawings of All Time, ed. by Ira Moskowitz and Victoria Thorston, 5 vol. in 6 (196279), contains a summary with comments by leading authorities. M.W. Evans, Medieval Drawings (1969), is useful for the early history of the art of drawing; Paul J. Sachs, Modern Prints and Drawings: A Guide to a Better Understanding of Modern Draughtsmanship (1954), for more recent developments. Hermann Boekhoff and Fritz Winzer, Das grosse Buch der Graphik (1968), gives the history of the 24 best known collections, with comments by the various curators and the basic catalog of each collection. Interesting information can be found in catalogs of many exhibitions and collections, such as Bernice Rose, Drawing Now (1976), which discusses contemporary types of drawing. The number of detailed investigations in regard to individual countries, periods, and artists is too large to be listed in this bibliography. One that can be especially recommended, however, is Edward J. Olszewski, The Draftsman's Eye: Late Italian Renaissance Schools and Styles (1981). Luigi Grassi, Storia del disegno (1947), is very valuable for the role of drawing in the historical theories of art, including the elucidation of the original sources for further study. Unsurpassed in method and fundamental for an intensive study of this subtle theme is Bernhard Degenhart's essay Zur Graphologie der Handzeichnung, in Jahrbuch der Hertziana, vol. 1 (1937). Heribert R. Hutter