August 22nd, 2010 §
Long before Etienne de Silhouette (1709-67), whose name was appropriated for black cut-out images, collectors were snipping the outlines of drawings. The father of all old master drawing collectors, Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), engaged in what nowadays would be called vandalism. The Filippino Lippi (c. 1457-1504) drawing of an angel below was cut out from a drawing and pasted on one of the few intact pages from his Libro de’ Disegni (8+ albums).
Filippino Lippi | An Angel Carrying a Torch | Pen and brown ink, brush and gray wash on laid paper | Silhouetted and Mounted by Vasari | 206 x 130 mm. | National Gallery of Art | United States
Page from Giorgio Vasari's Libro de' Disegni | Drawings by Filippino Lippi, Botticelli, and Rafaellino del Garbo | 567 x 457 mm. | National Gallery of Art | United States
The formatting of the album pages is so architectural, that a better word for their being taken apart might be dismantling or razing. The angel is used, along with a pair of snipped angels at the right, to create a symmetrical confection, framing the central child. It also has to be said that it is a magnificent sheet, that Vasari mostly left his drawings intact, and he did much more to conserve drawings than not.
Another drawing by Filippino Lippi, said to be from Vasari’s Libro (the ornament looks later to me), shows a male figure, carefully cut along the contour. I’m posting this drawing because the silhouetting makes the reading of the drawing ambiguous.
Filippino Lippi | Man Hanging from His Foot | Pen and brown ink on gray-blue laid paper | Silhouetted and Mounted | 289 x 166 mm. | Musée du Louvre | Paris
Filippino Lippi | Man Hanging from His Foot | Pen and brown ink on gray-blue laid paper | Silhouetted and Mounted | 289 x 166 mm. | Musée du Louvre | Paris
There are those that see it as a man hanged upside by his right foot, as in tortured, and those who see it as a performer. The facial expression could be seen as a grimace of pain or the exaggerated mask of a performer. Its being silhouetted, and taken from its context, makes it difficult to decide for certain.
In Sweden’s National Museum, there are a group of early drawings created in France which have been silhouetted. The Frog Man, probably a study for a performance or spectacle costume, below, is by Niccolò dell’Abbate (c. 1509-71 c.).
Niccolò dell'Abbate | Frog Man | Scan of B/W Image | Pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash on laid paper | Silhouetted and Mounted | 355 x 248 mm. | National Museum | Sweden
The silhouetting treatment was also used on drawings by Antoine Caron (c. 1527-99), Jacques Bellange (active c. 1600-16), and Georges Lallemand (1575-1636). The drawings have the same provenance, Prince Victor-Amédée de Carignan (1680-1741) to Carl Gustaf Tessin (1695-1770). I haven’t read an explanation of why this was done, but it probably has to do with wanting to see these drawings as a group, to create a visual link between the works.
Drawings weren’t the only snipped works. Medieval manuscripts have been clipped, even for making lampshades. Starting in the early 18th century prints were trimmed, glued to furniture and decorative objects, then varnished, creating the look of lacquered items. Sometimes the prints were made on purpose to be cut out for decorative projects. The descriptive word decoupage was the name for it and the leisure class took it up as a pass time–crafting for fun. The following is from an entertaining article by D.O. Kisluk-Grosheide of the Metropolitan Museum, where she quotes Charlotte Aïssé (1693-1733), a letter-writer whose letters were edited by Voltaire, on decoupage:
“We are here in the height of a new passion for cutting up coloured engravings…Everyone, great and small, is snipping away. These cuttings are pasted on sheets of cardboard and then varnished. They are made into wall panels, screens, and fire boards. There are books and engravings costing up to 200 livres; women are mad enough to cut up engravings worth 100 livres apiece. If this fashion continues, they will cut up Raphaels!”
Etienne de Silhouette, the budget-minded Controller General of France’s Finances (1759) was known for cost cutting, to the point of calling for pocketless trousers. His name became associated with frugality and “à la silhouette” meant something that was no-frills. The cut-outs, generally portraits, were first known as “portraits à la silhouette,” then simply as silhouetttes. The big difference is that blank paper was used. This example just below is by an anonymous cutter and is of Gerard van Swieten (1700-72), the personal doctor of Maria Theresa (1717-80), an important figure in developing the University of Vienna’s Medical School and a debunker of belief in vampires.
Anonymous Cutter | Profile Bust of Gerard Van Sweiten | Black paper silhouette mounted on cream paper | 124 x 114 mm. | Private Collection
It wasn’t just the inexpensiveness that made silhouettes attractive. The raison d’être was that people in the 18th and 19th centuries had a great fascination with profiles, believing that a profile was a window to character. In reading period novels, profiles come right after income prospects in importance when choosing a marriage partner.
While most silhouettes are portrait profiles, if I were to think of two of the most well known artists engaged in silhouetting, they would be Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810) and the contemporary Kara Walker. Runge, although he did portraits and genre scenes, he is best known for silhouettes of flowers, see below, and Kara Walker (born 1969) for scenes of injustice. Here is a link to Walker’s gallery.
Philipp Otto Runge | Fire Lily | White Paper silhouette mounted on black paper | 650 x 500 mm. | Hamburg Kunsthalle
July 30th, 2010 §
Borrowdale’s Seathwaite Mine is a graphite mine in England’s Lake District. Its commercial run ended in the mid 19th century, after some 300 years, but it continues to be of interest to geologists because of the extraordinary purity of its graphite. From the 13th century to the 16th, the mine belonged to Furness Abbey and an account book lists graphite as sheep oodde, a substance to mark sheep. A peculiarity of the Borrowdale mine graphite is that it sometimes takes the form of egg shaped lumps–perfect for drawing bold marks on the coats of sheep. Graphite is a bit oily and impervious to rain or water.
Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot | Landscape | Page from Louvre's Corot Album No. 12, folio 19 | Graphite on white paper | 115 x 180 mm. | Musée du Louvre | Paris
By the 16th century the mine had passed to the crown and was leased out. Since the graphite was so pure, sticks could be sawn and used as is or used in a holder and this excellent drawing material found favor throughout Europe. It wasn’t known as graphite, but as plumbago, referring to lead. Of all drawing media, graphite’s line most closely resembles that produced with leadpoints. It was not until the 18th century that it was proved that graphite was not a type of lead, but carbon (diamonds are also a carbon form and both have the hottest melting points). The Bankes family, builders and owners of Kingston Lacy, now a National Trust property, owe some of their wealth to the Seathwaite Mine. It is amusing to think that their Sebastiano del Piombo was financed by graphite money. Graphite was also used as a lubricant in molds for armaments, producing greater financial rewards than art supplies.
Early on, artists used graphite principally for underdrawing, to faintly mark out forms and space before putting down marks in the central medium. Ferrante Imperato, a Neapolitan scholar of natural history wrote of graphite in his 28 book work Dell’Historia Naturale:
Il grafio piombino si preferisce a tutte le materie que preparino il disegno, alla penna e l’inchiostro, percioche facilmente, usandovi industria, si cancella; e non volendo cancellarlo si conserva. Non da impedimento al maneggio della penna, il che fa il piombo per un modo, et il carbone per un’altro; si tirano con questo sottolissimi lineamenti, ne si puo stimar materia per inventioni da far in carta, que se la possa aggualiare; è untuoso al tutto, et al fuoco sommamente indurisce.
Graphite is to be preferred above all other materials for the underdrawing in pen and ink drawings because it can, with a little industry, be erased and, if you don’t want to erase it, it lasts. It doesn’t interfere with the handling of the pen, the way lead does on the one hand or the way charcoal does on the other. With graphite one can draw the finest of lines and one can’t imagine a finer material for creations on paper. It is also oily and when placed in the fire, it becomes extremely hard.
– Ferrante Imperato, Dell’Historia Naturale, Naples, 1599. Book IV, chapter 43, p. 122.
Drawings referred to as plumbagos are portraits, usually small in scale, and done in graphite on a vellum support. The type originated with printmakers in late 16th century Holland, who made drawings in graphite in preparation of engraved portraits. Plumbagos became popular in England after 1660, when the monarchy was restored and exiled artists returned from Holland. After a time, plumbagos were thought of as finished works of art in themselves, and no prints were made from the drawings. The Victoria & Albert have a nice group of these portraits, visible at this link.
Graphite, albeit of a poorer quality than the Borrowdale graphite, was present throughout Europe. Refinements were necessary to make the continental graphite usable. In 1662 pencils were produced in Nuremberg, the pencils combined graphite, sulphur, and antimony. The sulphur would have created an unpleasant smell. The big breakthrough in pencil making occurred in 1795 when Frenchman Nicolas-Jacques Conté (1755 – 1805) received a patent for his pencil. The pencil was made by baking ground graphite with clay and this continues to be the way pencils are produced today. The more clay in the mixture, the softer the pencil. He was also the inventor of the conté crayon, a waxy pencil. Conté’s pencil improvement was prompted by the war between France and England, when the French were no longer able to import the Borrowdale graphite. Because of Conté’s invention, the early 19th century saw a huge increase in pencil production. As an example, the naturalist Henry David Thoreau’s father was one of 8 pencil makers in Concord, Mass. By the time the Borrowdale mine ceased producing, the new manner of making pencils meant that Borrowdale’s closing wasn’t felt.
Ingres’ portraits of the early 19th century are considered some of the most brilliant drawings in graphite. Graphite lends itself to works of great detail and precision. This drawing of Corot’s, shown above, is not at all precise. It shows, however, the possibilities of the shimmery silver of graphite.
June 22nd, 2010 §
Alessandro Kokocinski is a painter, sculptor and draftsman. I visit with him in his studio in Tuscania, in the medieval church of San Biagio. The space is divided into two immense rooms and works that are part polychrome sculpture and part painting fill the studio. For some years he worked in theatre, designing sets, costumes and lighting for the performances of Lina Sastri, an actress and singer with whom he had a long relationship. As a young man he worked in the circus as an acrobat. It is pretty clear that his work in the performing arts has informed his paintings, sculptures, and drawings. Kokocinski’s website contains galleries for each of his art forms. In the fall he’ll go to Argentina for an exhibition of his work and for commissions for public spaces, a monument to the “Desaparecidos” (he himself was briefly imprisoned in the 1970s in Italy at the behest of Argentina’s military dictatorship, who wanted him extradited), and to start work on a monument for the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, commissioned to honor those who died in the 1992 bombing of that embassy. Next year he’ll have exhibitions in Salzburg and Perugia. Kokocinski is a fascinating person and artist, maybe more fascinating than the reason I go over to Tuscania to speak to him: Eric Hebborn.
Alessandro Kokocinski in his Studio | Tuscania | 15 June 2010
For those who don’t know about Eric Hebborn, the following is a brief biography. He was born in the suburbs of London in 1934. After a difficult childhood and youth, he went to the Royal Academy Art Schools, where he was a student between 1954 and 1959. Here is a portrait of Eric Hebborn in the Royal Academy’s collection, painted by his teacher Peter Greenham in about 1960. Hebborn was awarded a scholarship to the British School at Rome. He spent most of his life in Italy and made a living faking old and modern master drawings, and to a lesser extent paintings and sculptures. He sold his falsifications through Pannini Galleries, a gallery he owned briefly in Rome; to dealers; and through the London auction houses. Hebborn also produced Hebborns in various media. He published two books, Drawn to Trouble : The Forging of An Artist (Edinburgh:Mainstream, 1991 and New York: Random House, 1993) and Il Manuale del Falsario (Vicenza: N. Pozza, 1995). The English version, The Faker’s Handbook (London: Cassell) came out posthumously in 1997. He died, perhaps mysteriously, on 10 January 1996, at the age of 61.
Kokocinski met Hebborn in about 1974 at Anticoli Corrado (province of Rome), where they both lived, and they remained friends until Hebborn’s death in 1996. Anticoli Corrado is east of Tivoli, and less than an hour from Rome. While Alessandro was born in Italy, his parents soon afterward moved to South America, and that is where he grew up. Almost immediately after coming back to Italy in 1974, he went to Anticoli Corrado because of the Spanish poet and artist Rafael Alberti, who was a summer resident of the town. It is a hill town that has attracted artists for years, even centuries. The town was known for its particularly beautiful people, mostly women, who would work as models. (Not just women though. My Italian grandmother would tell the story of Lord Leighton, who hired a model from Anticoli Corrado and brought him to London, for his looks and stamina, to pose as the martyred St. Peter, upside down on a cross.)
Hebborn, starting in the 60s, rented a villa outside of Anticoli Corrado, a villa where Luigi Pirandello had spent the summer of 1936, visiting with his painter son Fausto, who, like Hebborn, was a long term tenant. Kokocinski says of the Villa San Filippo, “The designer of the garden, in either the early ottocento or late settecento, had also worked on the Vatican gardens and brought many exotic plants there. The garden was very attractive, attractive because the plants were old, at least 150 years old. The garden was more beautiful than the big villa itself.” Later in the conversation I ask Alessandro if Hebborn had a good library and he says that he did and that he was very cultured, adding that he had a beautiful collection of Roman sculptures. Of Hebborn, he says, “He enjoyed living. “Gozzovigliava.” He spent money freely, everyday was a party, excesses in everything.” The way Kokocinski describes the era, it was a party for everybody, not just Hebborn.
Alessandro tells me that he and Hebborn had a joint show mostly of prints, but also drawings, and a few of Hebborn’s sculptures at the villa and that he has a pamphlet somewhere. “Eric taught me how to make engravings. He had a great knowledge of many techniques: sculpture, painting, drawing, and also engraving and etching. He had a small laboratory for printmaking and I learned how to make engravings. I still have some of the material from the show, not mine, but his.” I’m surprised by the fact that they would have the show in a private venue, wondering about the small number of people who could see it. Alessandro says that they did the show for friends, and that they both had a large circle of friends–an international group of artists, writers, theatre people, and dancers who visited. Alessandro remembers these years as being lived intensely, almost communally, with a lively exchange of ideas. “Much that I have now is in large part because of my great friendship with Eric Hebborn, to my maestro Riccardo Tommasi Ferroni, to Rafael Alberti, to Alberto Sughi and many, may others. Giving and taking. The richness in life comes from the exchange of ideas.”
Alessandro says that Hebborn taught him “techniche neoclassiche” in painting and drawing. Now, when he says Neoclassic, I’m sure he does not mean the Neoclassicism of Canova, David, and Flaxman, but more old master or classic art. He still has the two studies after Caravaggio that he made with Hebborn’s help. They’re on old canvas and they’re really very good. A dealer friend of Hebborn’s had asked Kokocinski to make Rembrandts. The dealer would have supplied the “croste” or old paintings which could have been recycled, but Kokocinski had no interest, he was doing them to learn technique.
Hebborn showed Alessandro how he made the inks, how he cut quill pens, he taught him about old paper. Hebborn was a good fourteen years older than Kokocinski and beyond friendship, there must have been something of a teacher/pupil relationship. Kokocinski on Hebborn’s own work “Strangely, when he did his own work as an artist, artist between quotes, the work was not great. It was, let’s say limited. However, when his copies were successful, they were extraordinary.” He goes on to clarify, as Hebborn did, that they weren’t really copies, but works in “the manner of” or inspired by old masters. Hebborn was open about what he was doing and he must of had a certain scorn for dealers and curators. He would say “How expert can these experts be if they can’t tell one of my drawings.” I ask Alessandro whether he remembers ever meeting Anthony Blunt and the name sounds familiar, but he can’t remember for sure. Kokocinski thinks that Hebborn as Hebborn did his best work in sculpture. He remembers that Hebborn had exhibitions of his sculptural work in England.
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Alessandro uses old paper for his drawings. I ask him if he got this from Hebborn, and he says, “Yes, it must have been, even if not consciously.” He says he never makes drawings in preparation for paintings or other art forms. He makes them as finished works. Just below is a watercolor on antique paper of a circus rider. It is from a book of drawings which was published in 2003. Alessandro says that the circus is the only art form that hasn’t been ruined by money. He worked in the circus in South America and his brother has had a life-long career in the circus. Alessandro explains “The circus is still extraordinary, and it has evolved and gotten better over the years. It’s still a virgin art form: the people are doing what they love, as long as their bodies let them, and they’re not in it to cash in as the rest of the art world is.”
Alessandro Kokocinski | At the Hungarian Circus | Watercolor on Antique Paper | 250 x 175 mm.
Alessandro tells of going to a museum in Buenos Aires a couple of years ago. A museum in a converted cigarette factory, where he pays an entrance of 2 or 3 Argentina dollars, which he explains is quite a bit there. “I enter these very beautiful spaces thinking that I would find things that I could admire and which I myself can’t do, to find doors to a universe that is more beautiful than what I see every day. Instead I find myself in this big gallery with old chairs and stuff heaped up on the floor. Also, a video, let’s say pornographic, but sad. If it were beautiful, it might even have excited, but instead it just turned one’s stomach. I say no. I go down to the ticket office and I say ‘Please, I’d like my money back, I paid to see things that I can’t make myself. I have to learn and museums have to open doors to my soul/spirit through which I can see marvelous and beautiful things. Instead I see stuff, dirty clothes. I’m not interested in this and I consider this a swindle. It offends my intelligence.’” They give Alessandro his money back and the story, I think at least, tells a lot about his work. It is most certainly beautiful and it leads to a universe that one doesn’t see everyday.
Alessandro left Italy from 1986 to 1995 and lost touch with Hebborn, but when he returned they started seeing one another in Rome, where they were both living. Hebborn would go to Alessandro’s house once or twice a week for supper. Hebborn by this point had moved from Villa San Filippo to a house he built called Santa Maria, again outside of Anticoli Corrado and he had an apartment in Trastevere, where he was spending most of his time. Hebborn and Edgar had left each other and Alessandro sees this as the point where things started to go downhill for Hebborn. Edgar, a dancer from the Philippines who had performed in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, and Hebborn had been together for some 25 years. Hebborn was drinking more and more. There weren’t the outlets that there used to be for his drawings and he complained that the dealers had made much more money on his fabrications than he had. On the plus side, he remembers Hebborn telling him that he had a good contracts for the books, and Alessandro remembers that Japanese television did a documentary on Hebborn. I ask him about Hebborn’s death and he says what a lot of people in Italy say, that you can’t exclude murder.
Probably the most interesting piece I have read about Eric Hebborn’s death was written by Matteo Collura in a highly recommended 4 May 2008 article published in the newspaper Corriere della Sera. In the article he tries to reconstruct what happened to Hebborn before his death in a Rome hospital on 10 January 1996. It is based on his interviews with people in the Trastevere neighborhood where Hebborn lived, from newspaper accounts, and from hospital and police reports. Hebborn had been seen the evening of 8 January by the proprietor of a wine shop, where he was a regular and where he had stopped for a couple of glasses of wine. The proprietor couldn’t remember whether he was alone, but he did remember that he wasn’t drunk and that he was going to dinner. Vague reports of Hebborn being in the company of another person exist, but nobody comes forth to identify or describe the person. Hours elapse and Hebborn is lying in the rain in Piazza Trilussa. Someone covers him with a raincoat that is not his own. Another unknown, calls for an ambulance and at 2 in the morning he arrives by ambulance at Nuova Regina Margherita Hosptial on Viale Trastevere. Collura writes that Hebborn was taken for a drunken “barbuto” literally “bearded man,” but meaning hobo or homeless. He was wet from rain and left in a corner to sober up, his head wound unnoticed and unattended. His first real care came at about 10 in the morning and Collura points out this was a good 8 hours after he entered the hospital. It’s not clear at which point they find his wallet with ID, money, credit cards. He hadn’t been mugged. It wasn’t until 4 that afternoon, by this time he’d been taken across the river to San Giacomo Hospital, that he had a CAT scan and was operated on. Around midnight his breathing becomes irregular and he dies at 7:40 on 10 January 1996. In general if you talk to people in Rome, they say he was murdered, that the head wound came from the murderer, who must have been a dealer, and not from falling to the pavement. They say the case was never properly investigated to shield powerful people. Another conspiracy theory for this conspiracy rich world.
Six months after Hebborn’s death, the official looking into the Hebborn case, and relying on the autopsy, dismissed it, saying that his death was only hastened by the head wound he suffered from falling, but he would have died from artereosclerosis (a quick check of the Mayo Clinic site shows that this is treatable) and the onset of cirrhosis of the liver. (There is something hypocritical here, since people who are in comas and can’t possibly recover are the objects of dramatic church vigils, their impossible lives prolonged, and their families and medical providers risk legal actions if treatments are discontinued.) What starts running through my mind is that even if you are a homeless drunk, you deserve prompt medical care; even if you are gay, you deserve a thorough investigation into your death. (Pasolini’s mysterious murder and the ensuing investigation are now being scrutinized, some 35 years later.) I also don’t think this is peculiar to Italy.
A month or two after Hebborn’s death, Kokocinski went to Anticoli Corrado to see what was happening with Santa Maria. He went to the house, found the door open, and the house had been ransacked. There was stuff all over the floor, things had been burnt. To gauge how bad it was, I ask him if it looks like the photos of Francis Bacon’s studio, and he says worse, it looked worse. The pity here is that the papers were not taken in as evidence, when there was thought that Hebborn might have been murdered. Perhaps there would have been clues about his death. There might have been, or almost surely would have been records, maybe one for each drawing, showing where they’d been sold and a lot of doubts could have been lifted from the world of old master drawings.
Kokocinski picked up some papers, really at random, to remember his friend Eric Hebborn. He shares the folder with me. In it there are notes for his book, a letter to Sotheby’s and Christie’s, a couple of Hebborn as Hebborn drawings and various other papers. I scan some pages, and because it takes too long, I start photographing some of the pages. His handwriting can be good to very good. (In 2004 his treatise on calligraphy Italico per Italiani is published by Colla Editore. Hebborn had translated Michaelangelo’s sonnets into English and written them out.) I’m struck by how organized he seems to be. Things are bulleted, and 1.2.3. Alessandro says that he was always very methodical and kept his papers well organized, everything in folders.
What surprises me so much about Hebborn is not so much Hebborn himself (I’ve gotten over that), but that so little work is done to try to isolate his fakes. If you look around at museum databases you’ll see that the British Museum is one of the few that list works of Hebborn. Unaccountably, they don’t provide images of their Hebborns. Others, in fact, most museums don’t want to admit they have any of his works in their collections. What would really be a service, would be if some university/ies would offer seminars, maybe even Sotheby’s, where they have a training program, and have students assemble and publish online the drawing of Hebborn. It would be excellent for them to develop connoisseurship skills and it would help collectors and others in easing their minds about acquisitions. The business of the Hebborn forgeries have cast such a shadow that one would think that Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Colnaghi’s etc. would share their records to clear this business up.
Below are scans and photographs from the file and brief remarks.
Hebborn Drawing of a Seated Woman and Photograph of Hebborn/John Drawing
Drawing by Hebborn’s of a seated woman on common three-hole punch paper and a photograph of his “Augustus John” drawing, published in Drawn to Trouble.
Hebborn | Inscription Back of John Photo
Back of the photograph of “Augustus John” drawing with interesting inscription. In the book Drawn to Trouble he says that the drawing was given to his English landlord in lieu of rent. Here, it seems that he sold the drawing to Howard McCrindle, although the name is misspelled. Eric Hebborn has at least two of his own drawings, Hebborn as Hebborn, published in McCrindle’s review, the Transatlantic Review, one in Dec. 1960 (No. 5) issue and another in Spring 1965 (No. 18) issue.
Hebborn | Draft Letter to Sotheby's and Christie's
Draft of a letter to the chairmen of Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Nice calligraphic handwriting and the amusing detail of how he cancels out the word “purchased” and writes “sold on my behalf.”
Hebborn | Drawing Media and Supports
Hebborn | Sources for Paper and Parchment
Notes for book, outlining drawing media and drawing supports.
Hebborn | Notes for Talk
Notes for a talk.
Hebborn | From Whom Mr. Hebborn Has Made Acquisitions
“From Whom Mr. Hebborn Has Made Acquisitions” is the heading on this typewritten page. It is written in the third person and has a rather legal tone.
Hebborn | Clipped from Newspaper | Carracci – Boy Drinking
A undated clipping from an English newspaper, about a hopping mad Mrs. King. Alessandro says that Carracci was a favorite of Eric Hebborn’s, although this one doesn’t look like it could have been done by Hebborn. There are no notations on the clipping.
April 8th, 2010 §
Penna is the Latin word for feather. The ancient Romans used reed pens and brushes in applying ink to papyrus, but probably not feather pens. By the Middle Ages, bird quills, especially goose quills, were the favored writing implement and the word penna in Italian means both a bird’s feather and a pen. The longest feathers of any number of large flight birds work for feather pens, including swans and crow family birds, but the feathers of the goose were most commonly used–they seem the easiest to collect. The transition from reed to quill pens probably has to do with the movement from writing on papyrus to writing on parchment. Quill pens have more flexibility, more “give” than reed pens and allow for greater detail. By applying pressure, the draftsman can widen and vary a line. Cennino Cennini, the early 15th century artist, gives instructions in cutting a goose quill pen in his Libro dell’Arte (chapter xiv, available in Italian as pdf here and in English here) a kind of manual for young artists. He doesn’t make any mention of reed pens.
Jan van Bijlert | Detail – Saint Luke the Evangelist | Oil on Canvas | 93.6 x 77.4 cm. | Christie's Amsterdam 13 April 2010, lot 103
This detail from Jan van Bijlert (Utrecht 1597/8-1671) painting of St. Luke the Evangelist shows the saint using a large knife to make the first cut in making a pen. Penknives, and they are named for cutting quill pens, are now generally known as small folding knives that fit in the pocket, like pocketknives. What’s interesting to me is that the feathers have been cut off, the most decorative part has been removed, for a wholly utilitarian pen. Jacques de Gheyn’s drawing in Berlin, just below, shows both a quill and the knife, crossed on the table. The implication is that one needed the pen to trim the tip on a regular basis.
Jacob de Gheyn II | Woman and Child Looking at a Sketchbook | Pen and brown ink, brush and wash on laid paper| c.1600 | Staatliche Museen | Berlin
Thomas Jefferson, who was carried on a vast correspondence (est. of 20,000 letters) complained of the time involved in readying and repairing his quill pens and was happy when metal pens became available–until he wasn’t because of their rusting. Here is a drawing of Jefferson’s for a machine to make pasta. His handwriting is wonderfully legible, this coming from someone who types everything, even grocery lists since I cannot read my own writing.
Thomas Jefferson | Maccaroni Recipe and Press Design | No date | Library of Congress | Washington, DC
March 20th, 2010 §
The decades of the 50s and 60s constitute the great age of fresco detachment–stacco and strappo are the techniques–and in 1968/69, the Met, together with the Florence Soprintendenza, organized the exhibition “The Great Age of Fresco” which traveled to London and Amsterdam after its NY debut.
War damage, frescoes exposed to the weather, threats of vandalism, and the Arno flooding were all good reasons for the detachment of frescoes. The finding of the sinopie and the ability to crate the works up, to make them portable, and show them around the world were other reasons. (The ancient Romans took murals from Greece as war booty and commonly moved frescoes around Italy.) Now, the practice is frowned upon and frescoes are only detached if they are in imminent danger. And, in truth, it is better to see them where they were created rather than some piece of masonite, looking forlorn, even if we can’t look at the sinopie.
The strappo method of fresco removal involves painting a layer of reversible glue onto the fresco surface and affixing a piece of cloth all over the fresco. Once the glue has dried, the cloth is carefully peeled from the wall, taking the painted surface with it. With the stacco method, the intonaco layer is taken with painted surface, again with glue and cloth. A knife is used to separate the intonaco plaster away from the coarser arriccio layer below. The arriccio is the layer where the sinopie were painted/drawn.
In 2007 I went to a fascinating lecture at the Frick and was very surprised to learn that the great drawings collector Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694 – 1774) used a similar method to split drawings in half. The lecture was given by Kristel Smentek, who wrote her dissertation on Mariette and is now a professor at MIT. Here is a link to a pdf with the slides from a lecture Smentek delivered. It shows drawings from Mariette’s collection, including an Albani drawing he split, and a conservator in the act of splitting a printed sheet in two. The recto and verso of the sheet are covered with glue and paper or cloth (looks like high tech conservation material) and then performing what looks like magic in making one piece of paper into two.
While I hadn’t heard of splitting drawings before Smentek’s lecture, it is not so uncommon. Josef Meder, the early 20th century curator and later director of the Albertina in Vienna, split drawings in that great collection.
February 28th, 2010 §
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 arriccio. 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.
February 13th, 2010 §
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.
January 17th, 2010 §
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.
December 7th, 2009 §
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.
October 28th, 2009 §
In Rome, until 17 January 2010, there is a beautiful exhibition of ancient Roman painting at the Scuderie del Quirinale. The exhibition is called Roma: La Pittura di un Impero. One of the earliest paintings is a detached fresco from Pompeii. It is in the Architectonic or Second Style (combining architectural elements and views) and dates from around 40 – 30 BC.
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 an Oryx | 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
