Vivante Drawings

Red earth has been used in painting for millennia. Sinopia was the Italian word for this pigment and it was used for the underdrawing in fresco painting. The drawings themselves are now known as sinopia, much like the word oil can stand for painting. Sinopia color was also used in the fresco itself and in panel paintings, particularly for painting flesh.  The example from Todi just below, shows a fresco, and at the left, where the intonaco or final layer has fallen, a section with the sinopia on the coarser layer of plaster called the arriccia. This fresco is from about 1380, when paper was still not very available.

Anon. Umbrian Painter | Fresco and Sinopia Fragment | St. John and Feast of Herod Chapel | c. 1380 | San Fortunato | Todi

As paper became more common, fresco design could be done on paper and then transferred by pricking and pouncing to the plaster. However, the much later Ligozzi example below shows that artists even in 1600 liked to use sinopia for fresco preparation.

Jacopo Ligozzi | Detail from St. Francis Distributing Bread Sinopia | 1599-1600 | Santa Croce Museum | Florence

Sinopia takes its name from Sinop, a cape and port town on Turkey’s Black Sea coast. A bustling trade in the pigment took place in Sinop, though the color was mined to the south in Cappodocia. Cennino Cennini writes about sinopia in his Libro dell’Arte (available in Italian as a pdf and in English posted online). Cennini talks of going with his father, also a painter, and finding sinopia and other colors in the Colle di Val d’Elsa area of Tuscany.

E pervegnendo in uno vallicello, in una grotta molta salvatica, e raschiando la grotta con una zappa, io vidi vene di più ragioni colori: cioè ocria, sinopia scura e chiara, azzurro e bianco, e ‘l tenni il maggior miracolo del mondo, che bianco possa essere di vena terrigna, ricordandoti che io ne feci la prova di questo bianco, e trava’lo grasso, che non è da incarnazione.

And coming into a little valley, in a very wild grotto, and after scraping the grotto with a hoe, I saw many veins of color, that is, ochre, dark and light sinopia, blue, and white, and I thought that finding white in the earth was the greatest miracle in the world. I’ll remind you that I tried using the white and found it too fat and it couldn’t be used for flesh tones.

Cennino Cennini | Il Libro Dell’Arte | Chapter 45

What Cennini writes made me think that Italy’s artistic output, enough to stock museums all over the world and still have so much left within the country, must, at least in part, have something to do with the Italy’s rich geology––so many minerals for making pigments and so much stone for sculpture.

Counterproofs of drawings are made by dampening a sheet of blank paper and placing it against a chalk or crayon drawing (which might also be moistened) and rubbing, or, ideally, running it through a press, so that the chalk will transfer to the blank page. A mirror image of the original is created this way. Counterproofs are also known as offsets. In the example illustrated below, Nicolaes Pietersz. Berchem (1622 – 1683) created the drawing (right) and counterproof (left) on the same sheet. More commonly, a drawing and its counterproof would be on two different sheets of paper.  The counterproof would have aided Berchem in his preparation of the etching plate. Berchem’s 1652 etching, for which the drawing and counterproof were used, is also illustrated below.

Nicolaes Berchem | Study of a Cow and Sheep for the 1652 etching Shepherd and Spinner | Red chalk (right) and counterproof (left) on laid paper| 132 x 197 mm. | Sotheby's NY 23 Jan. 2001, lot 159

Nicolaes Berchem | Shepherd and Spinner | 1652 | Etching | 262 x 209 mm. | Rijksmuseum | Amsterdam

Counterproofs are mostly used by artists involved in printmaking. Counterproofs of prints must be made immediately after the print is taken off the press, while the ink is still wet. Counterproofs of drawings can be taken decades and hundreds of years later–as was the case in the 18th century when counterproofs were made of earlier drawings, even 16th century drawings. At least some of these counterproofs were meant to deceive and were sold as original drawings. Others would have been innocently made–with the thinking that having two great images is better than having just one. The trouble is that drawings are weakened through the process of counterproofing–chalk dust is transferred away from the drawing to the counterproof.  The 18th century artists Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 – 1806) and Hubert Robert (1733 – 1808) often made counterproofs of their own drawings and would then rework the counterproof and, sometimes, the original. Collectors far prefer an original to a counterproof, even a reworked counterproof.

Evenness of tone, faintness, hatching direction, backwards lettering, and creased paper are telltale signs of counterproofs. The greatest proof is seeing the stronger original in the opposite direction.

Old master drawings disgorge in museums just as surely as rivers flow into the sea. Collectors donate their collections to museums for mankind, tax deductions, recognition, and to spite their ungrateful children. Once in museums, it’s over for the trade, mostly. Deaccessioning does happen, but is frowned upon and discourages future donations. Without much supply, dealers and collectors (include myself here) are working with what they have, and that means upgrading attributions.  Museum curators do this too. There is no way they can make the brilliant acquisitions of past curators because of simple lack of supply and the hideous cost of whatever little there is left.  So, art works get reevaluated up, and seldom down, much like Moody’s ratings of instruments in the financial world. (The growing number of Caravaggio pictures, whether in the private realm or museums, is particularly puzzling.)

Newspapers, fed by what seems a PR machine, have been reporting the recent upgrade of an anonymous 19th century drawing to Leonardo. Right out, I am very doubtful.  However, it is always wonderful when something that is thought to be late, is instead very early.  This was the case of a drawing of peonies, in an auction as anonymous, what seemed like another beautiful botanical illustration, and instead turned out to be a preparatory drawing by Dürer’s idol, Martin Schongauer.

Leonardo ? | Portrait of a Young Woman | Pen and brown ink, bodycolor, and colored chalks on vellum | 330 x 239 mm. | Paris ?

The drawing in question is of a young woman, bust length and in absolute profile to the left. The drawing measures 330 x 239 mm, and is executed  in pen and brown ink, brush and bodycolor, and colored chalks on vellum.  The names of Bianca Maria Sforza (1472-1510) and Bianca Giovanna Sforza (1482-1496) have been advanced for the sitter, although this is conjecture. (Lodovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, was Leonardo’s patron from 1482 to 1499 and the idea is to keep it in the family.) If it’s Bianca Maria, the hair and eye color, for starters, don’t match up with a portrait in the Washington’s National Gallery of an older Sforza by Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis. I haven’t read enough about the Profile to know how this is reconciled by the owner’s expert team. Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis’s portrait of an unknown woman in the Ambrosiana, illustrated below, and which shows a scarily similar hairdo (minus the coazzone, coazzone is the name of the braid in Milanese dialect) and knotted hairnet, was once attributed to Leonardo. It wouldn’t be entirely surprising to me if we start gearing up for an upgrade of this picture back to Leonardo if any trace of left-handed hatching (more about this below) can be found.

Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis | Bianca Maria Sforza | Oil on Panel | 51 x 32.5 cm. | National Gallery | Washington

Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis | Portrait of a Woman | Tempera and Oil on Panel | 51 x 34 cm. | Ambrosiana | Milan

Martin Kemp and Carlo Pedretti, two towering figures in the Leonardo world, are convinced the drawing is by Leonardo. Kemp’s writing/written a book on the drawing. Nicholas Turner, known for his seriousness and excellent eye, is also convinced of the attribution to Leonardo. His essay, download available here, from the site of Lumiere Technology, a Paris firm involved in high high resolution imaging. Turner writing in 2008, anticipates what critics will find hard to square: that there are no Leonardo drawings on vellum and that the mixture of media–pen and brown ink, bodycolor, and colored chalks, in combination and so highly finished–isn’t found in other drawings of the master. He also carefully ties what Leonardo writes about art, and writes about ideal beauty, to the drawing. Skeptics will say this is being done because the visual evidence–other drawings–is so scanty.

The owner, pushing hard to make the case for his Leonardo, and not wanting to rely solely on connoisseurship, has had the vellum carbon dated to between 1440 and 1650 and had fingerprint analysis done by one Peter Paul Biro.  A scientific study of the pigments will also be interesting. In writing this post, I tried to find out about Biro and it seems his reputation in the fingerprint community is not great. Here is a video of a detective and fingerprint expert named Tom Hanley from Long Island poking holes in one of Biro’s prior projects involving Jackson Pollock fingerprints. Hanley in the video is circumspect, but it seems Biro was enhancing and reading into the fingerprints when there was insufficient evidence.

If the vellum is from 1440 – 1650, as one test has shown, the drawing is probably not from the 19th century (it would be worth investigating when forgers started using period paper, vellum, panels etc.).  Early paper is easily had from the end papers of books and the drawing forger Eric Hebborn made full use of such paper. Vellum too could be easily recycled from book covers, say account books, which are often not tooled and loosely cover boards. For what it’s worth, it doesn’t look like a Hebborn, at least the ones I remember illustrated in his memoir. Hebborn’s normally draws sheets of studies, often attempting to show the thought process of the artist, and to boost credibility, he includes inscriptions and collection marks. His use of inscriptions was pointed out to me by Konrad Oberhuber, whom Hebborn hated for first identifying his forgeries, and in childish repayment Hebborn misspelled Oberhuber’s name in his memoir–something Oberhuber found very amusing.

Many drawings purported to be by Leonardo, a left-handed artist,  have been discounted because of telltale right-handedness, a characteristic most easily seen in shading or hatching. Left-handed draftsmen  shade \\\ and right-handed artists like this ///. The draftsman of the Profile is left-handed and this is considered a pivotal point in attributing the drawing to Leonardo. The hatching can be seen just outside the profile. A clear example of Leonardo’s hatching can be seen in this study in Turin.

Leonardo | Study for Angel - Virgin of the Rocks | Metalpoint, brush and white heightening on prepared paper | 181 x 159 mm. | Biblioteca Reale | Turin

None of Leonardo’s followers were left-handed and this makes differentiating Leonardo drawings from those of his followers fairly easy. Only fairly easy because they sometimes copied the left-handed shading, probably by turning the paper upside down. (Followers of Leonardo, and artists ever since, have copied works of the master as part of their training. That there are no copies of the Profile should be taken into account. ) Nowadays, about one in ten people are left-handed, but in the past people were discouraged from writing or drawing with their left, or sinister hand. Still, there have been plenty of left-handed artists (I hope eventually to post a table of these draftsmen).  Also, those who were left-handed and adapted to fully using their right hand, might well be considered ambidextrous and be able to shade with either hand.

Some clever people commenting on the blog the Daily Kos have said that the sitter looks like Kirsten Dunst, the American actress. There is a definite resemblance. And this is where the drawing fails to convince me. The sitter conforms much more to a 19th or 20th century ideal of what a Renaissance beauty should look like, rather than a 15th century ideal, and much more to a Northern European than to an Italian ideal.  (Yes, what Errol Morris was talking about in his Hans van Meegeren and Vermeer series of articles in the NYT.) At times I feel like I’m looking at Rapunzel.  The Louvre’s Leonardo portrait of Isabella d’Este, a cartoon in colored chalks, with anything approaching the finish of the Profile, is very different. Very different.  The d’Este portrait, with the body turned out to the viewer, is far more innovative–and what one would expect from Leonardo– than the strict Profile, where the pose looks back to an earlier 15th century type which Pisanello, Piero della Francesca, and the Pollaiolo, had so famously exploited.

Leonardo | Isabella d'Este | Preparatory cartoon in black, red, and ochre chalks, heightened with white, on prepared white paper and pricked for transfer | 610 x 465 mm. | Louvre | Paris

I can’t keep but thinking that draftsman who executed this had seen not only the portraits of Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis, but was also informed of Hans Holbein the Younger (left-handed draftsman). What would be interesting is to see the early 19th century German drawings Kate Ganz, a former owner of the drawing, and the experts at Christie’s (OMD NY 30 January 1998, lot 402) based their ideas upon. After some looking, I have to say that I can’t find any similar 19th century portraits.  Maybe it is by Leonardo, but it would then be like the Michelangelo painting after Schongauer which recently caused a stir, an anomaly. Another possibility is that an earlier drawing was colored and reworked in the 19th century, the fate of too many drawings, and then everyone could be right at the same time.

I’ve always hoped to see an exhibition of metalpoint drawings across time and geography, from Van Eyck to Raphael and Durer, and from Rembrandt to Picasso. It’s unlikely to happen. Exhibitions center around individual artists or schools and this makes good scholarly sense. If there were an exhibition it would be intensely beautiful and we’d see a full range of subjects: portraits, figure studies, landscapes, drawings of animals and flowers, and compositional drawings from the greatest masters. Even though it’s considered an unforgiving medium because mistakes can’t be erased, the artists who’ve used it haven’t used it in a strained and precise way. Or, at least, the best ones haven’t.

A wire of lead, silver, gold, copper, zinc, or alloys of these metals inserted in a holder, usually of wood, is known as a metal stylus. Lead by itself will grip and draw on paper or parchment without a ground. The other metals require grounds and these are made from ground bone or chalk and glue or gum arabic. When the metals scratch the surface, trace amounts of the metals are left and form the limpid lines of metalpoints.

Rembrandt | Thatched Houses | Metalpoint on White Grounded Vellum | 109 x 192 mm. | Staatliche Museen | Berlin

Cennino Cennini gives instructions in his early 15th century work the Libro dell’Arte in how to draw with a metalpoint. The work is conveniently posted in English on the internet here: The Craftsman’s Handbook. He describes different carriers, from box and fig woods to parchment and paper and gives recipes for grounds. His recipes call for bones baked white (chicken or lamb) that are then pulverized and mixed with spittle or glue. He gives a few recipes for tinted papers, where he sets out that the color should be applied in four or five coats, letting each coat dry before applying the next. The colors of the grounds, sometimes with the paintbrush marks visible, are another huge attraction. While the preparation is lengthy, once the paper or vellum is ready it can be used without the encumbrance of brushes and ink pots, making it a suitable medium for out of doors and journeys.

Just below are some metalpoints it would be wonderful to see in a comprehensive metalpoint exhibition.

[View with PicLens]

Detached Fresco | Style II | House of the Cryptoporticus | Pompeii | 40 – 30 BC

Below the garlands there are examples of Roman graffiti and I’m posting three photographs showing just a small part of the graffiti. The scratched (getting back to the meaning of the word graffiti) drawings are of animals, hunted animals. Because the graffiti is low down on the wall, there has been thought that they were done by children, but a seated adult seems just as reasonable. When the graffiti was made is unknown, but it would have been before the earthquake of 62 AD.

Graffiti of a Deer and Horse | Detail of Detached Fresco from House of the Cryptoporticus | Pompeii | Before 62 AD

Graffiti of a Goat (?) Detail of Detached Fresco | House of Cryptoporticus | Before 62 AD | Pompeii

Graffiti of a Boar | Detail from Detached Fresco | House of the Cryptoporticus | Pompeii | Before 62 AD

With Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom we can change the color of iron gall ink drawings from brown to black and see, at least vaguely, how the drawings would have originally appeared. When an artist uses iron gall ink it starts out gray, quickly oxidizes to blue-black, and over years changes to brown. It is hard to grasp that so many of the warm brown drawings we know were conceived in black.

Gall Apples on an Oak Tree | Bomarzo

Gall Apple on an Oak Tree | Bomarzo

The color in iron gall ink comes from gall and vitriol–yes, a negative ring. Recipes call for ground wasp’s galls (tannic acid), iron or copper filings (vitriol or sulfuric acid), gum arabic, and water or wine. The photographs of the galls here are on oak trees in Italy.  Galls, also called gall apples, are nests built by wasps for their larvae.  This kind of ink was made in antiquity and again starting in the 13th century. It was the most commonly used ink until the 19th century. Part of its appeal was that it was indelible, unlike carbon ink. Since it eats into the paper, it could not be altered, a positive attribute for scribes with their official documents.

Most old master drawings in brown ink were created with iron gall ink. The other important brown inks are bister and sepia, both of them more stable.  One easy, and unfortunate, way to tell the difference between these inks, is that the iron gall ink bites into the paper, making it look seared or burnt. Some greatly damaged drawings appear lacy with all their holes. In this example by the artist Mola, we can see how the areas with concentrations of ink, especially in the eye and cuff sections, are weakening the paper. This is the action of the acid in the ink.

Pier Francesco Mola (1612 - 1666) | Caricature | Pen and Iron Gall Ink on Cream Laid Paper | 14.7 x 17.8 cm. | National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

The Ink Corrosion Website details the scope of the problem of deteriorating documents, drawings, and music scores created with iron gall ink and has information on what conservators are doing about it. The excellent site also gives recipes for the ink.