Vivante Drawings

Morelli and Some Verrocchio Ears

May 2nd, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Giovanni Morelli (1816 – 1891) trained as a doctor in Germany, but never practiced. Instead he was drawn to art and aesthetics, and to government. He served 4 terms in Italy’s newly formed government, helping to draft laws curtailing the export of art. Morelli was a collector of paintings and drawings, and his collection was left to the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, his native city. It wasn’t until after his political career, at the age of 60, that he started publishing on what’s known as the Morellian Method, where art works are linked by seemingly small details. The 1911 Brittanica has a good entry on Morelli written by Constance Jocelyn Foulkes, a translator of Morelli’s work. In it she says of Morelli:

Studying one day in the Uffizi, it suddenly struck him that in a picture by Botticelli containing several figures the drawing of the hands was remarkably similar in all; that the same characteristic but plebeian type, with bony fingers, broad square nails, and dark outlines, was repeated in every figure. Turning to the ears, he observed that they also were drawn in an individual manner, and that in the numerous figures in which the ear was visible the same typical form recurred. Having noted these fundamental forms, he proceeded to an examination of other works by this painter, and found that the same forms were exactly repeated, together with other individual traits which seemed distinctive of the master: the characteristic type of head and expression, the drawing of the nostrils, the vitality of movement, the disposition of drapery, harmony of colour (where it had not been tampered with by the restorer), and quality of landscape.

Verrocchio and Morelli were on the same plane in their thinking on isolating parts of the body for study. Vasari tells of Verrocchio’s casting hands, feet, knees, legs, arms, and torsos.

I thought I’d see how this Morellian Method works by assembling some Andrea del Verrocchio ears. Pretty early on I realized it would be important to know the words to describe an ear, so here’s a link to a diagram of an ear. Morelli’s study of medicine and anatomy, of course, helped him a lot with this. The one thing I can really say about the ears below is that Verrocchio liked nicely round antitraguses.

	"Head of a Young Woman" at Christ Church, Oxford LINK
	"Grotesque Dancer" at Uffizi, Florence LINK
	"Old Man Dancing" at Uffizi, Florence LINK
	"Four Nude Babies and the Head of Baby" at the Louvre, Paris LINK
	"Madonna and Child" in Gemäldegalerie, Berlin LINK
	"Madonna and Child" in Gemäldegalerie, Berlin LINK
	"Putto with Dolphin" at Palazzo Vecchio, Florence LINK

Gold Heightening

April 13th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

A friend was talking about the word lumeggiare in a libretto they were working on, and so this post. Lumeggiature and rialzi are both used in Italian for the word heightening. Artists generally use lead white paint or white chalk for heightening. The purpose is to create a greater sense of reality by showing a light source, and to highlight an area. Gold heightening could also be used to create a hierarchy or as a straightforward sumptuous decoration. Drawings with gold were probably meant to be sold, given away, or used as a temptation to a patron thinking of a panel picture or other project.

Illuminated manuscripts are full of gold backgrounds and decoration, and, in fact, the artist most associated with gold heightening in drawings is Jacopo Ligozzi (1547 -1637), who had his start as a miniaturist. For over fifty years he worked for the Medici on natural history drawings, alongside panel pictures, decorations ranging from fabrics to pageants, frescoes and more. Just below is one of Ligozzi’s scientific drawings made for the Medici. The fish’s scales are made with liquid gold.

When a drawing has gold heightening, Ligozzi’s name springs to mind. Gold is so much associated with Ligozzi that the drawing below by Palma Giovane (1548/50 – 1628) was once attributed to Ligozzi.

Jacopo Negretti (Palma Giovane) | Entombment of Christ Detail | Pen and brown ink, brush and wash, heightened with gold, on blue-green laid paper | 223 x 140 mm | Art Institute of Chicago

A friend was talking about the word lumeggiare in a libretto they were writing, and so this post. Lumeggaiture and Rialzi are are both used used in Italian for the word heightening. Artists generally use lead white paint or white chalk for heightening or highlighting. The purpose is to brighten an area. Gold and other metals can also be used. Illuminated manuscripts are full of gold backgrounds and decoration. So, I was trying to think of artists who used gold in their drawings.

Two Drawings

April 1st, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink

A couple of drawings to talk about here. The first, in the Uffizi, is a drawing of a standing male nude. It has been variously attributed to Stefano da Verona or his circle. While we’re no closer to a firm attribution, there has been some convincing work, showing the subject to be JFK. The search for a fragment with Ms. Monroe is currently underway.

The other, a much later drawing, shows Thomas Bewick at work on his banged up MacBook Pro. His pet duck is playing possum.

Johnny Millais | Portrait of Thomas Berwick | 1891 | Photo of book plate showing brown ink repro of 250 x 178 mm drawing

Blue Paper | Carta Azzurra

February 18th, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink

Soon after the introduction of paper, artists were applying chalky colored grounds to create metalpoints and tinting the surface of paper for ink and chalk drawings. The earliest European papers are white or cream or ivory, depending on how one sees them. The earliest drawing on a piece of blue paper, blue through and through, is a drawing in Dresden (detail below). The drawing is by Giovanni da Modena, who, most notably, painted frescoes in Bologna’s San Petronio. It’s dated to around 1410-20 and has been gone over, or reinforced, by later hands. Still, there’s a lot to the drawing. It’s on a single piece of paper, measuring 460 mm across, which makes it extraordinarily large.

Ceninno Cennini was writing his manual for artists shortly before the Giovanni da Modena drawing was made, and speaks at length about carta tinta, but not about dyed paper. His method for tinting paper blue, what he termed carta di tinta indica involves mixing white with indigo, 2 fava bean size lumps of indigo. Indigo, as it sounds, was imported from India, and had been since antiquity. The Giovanni da Modena drawing’s blue also comes from indigo. Other sources of blue dye available then came from the woad plant and litmus, made from lichens. The earliest blue paper might have come from ragged blue clothes, and dye a later refinement.The photograph just below is of two blue overalls hanging to dry in a nearby piazza, and it would be nice to think that their ancestors were recycled into drawing paper. Synthetic indigo was introduced by Adolf Bayer in 1880.

Blue Work Clothes | Rome

Carta azzurra is most associated with Venice. Vittore Carpaccio was an early user of blue paper. Albrecht Dürer took up using blue paper for his drawings during his 1505-07 stay in Venice and is credited with introducing the paper to artists over the alps. The Venetian printer and publisher Aldus Manutius was the first to print books on blue paper. Blue paper, really any colored paper, is often used with two media, such as black ink and white liquid heightening, or black chalk with white chalk heightening. The blue is the middle value which the dark and light play off. Since it’s such an appealing color for drawings, artists everywhere have used blue paper.

Recording Images

January 31st, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

With digital photography so easy (and essentially without cost once you have the machines), I sometimes think that I’m spending too much time snapping pictures, and not enough time looking at drawings, paintings, architecture etc. There’s a strong desire to take the picture and then have a record forever.

While invention is what most people appreciate about drawings, a very large number of drawings have to do with copying or recording other works of art. Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724-1780) and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1820-1897) were two of the worlds great recorders. Saint-Aubin was an artist; and Cavalcaselle, an art historian.

“Un priapisme de dessin” is what Greuze, a contemporary, is supposed to have said of Saint-Aubin. I guess this means he was constantly aroused to draw. (Greuze also produced a prodigious number of drawings.) Saint-Aubin filled catalogues with margin drawings illustrating the offerings he saw coming up at Paris auctions, and what was being shown at the Salons. At his death, there were some 100 catalogues filled with margin drawings, and about a third remain. The pages below are from a Salon booklet and an auction catalogue, both in the collection of France’s Bibliothèque Nationale.

Gabriel de Saint-Aubin | 1761 Salon du Louvre Booklet, p.7 | Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Photography was in its infancy when Cavalcaselle was going about recording the pictures he was seeing. One of the striking things about the drawings, now housed in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, is the huge number of notes. Cavalcaselle collaborated with Joseph A. Crowe in producing a survey of Italian art, and other more narrowly focused books. The drawings must have been invaluable in keeping track of so much material. Just below is Cavalcaselle’s drawing of Raphael’s Galatea fresco at the Farnesina in Rome.

Cavalcaselle's Drawing of Raphael's Galatea fresco at the Farnesina | Biblioteca Marciana | Venice

One wonders if Saint-Aubin and Cavalcaselle ever worried that they were spending too much time committing the works to paper and not looking.

Palazzo Farnese Exhibition | 17 December 2010 to 27 April 2011

January 15th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

There’s a certain amount of resentment against the French for their possession of two of Rome’s most beautiful buildings, the Villa Medici and the Palazzo Farnese. Their cultural program at the Villa Medici, or L’Académie de France à Rome, is the most lively and engaging of the Academies in Rome. In other words, the outreach is great, and this goes a long way in dampening jealous feelings. While Villa Medici was bought outright by Napoleon in 1803, the Italian government, for a token sum, leases the Palazzo Farnese to France. In exchange, the Italians are leased an 18th century building (w. Gobelin tapestries designed by Jean-François de Troy and murals by the relatively unknown Cignaroli) for their embassy in Paris. The long-term leases started in 1936 and last for 99 years.

Palazzo Farnese Exhibition Banner

Since the Palazzo Farnese is an embassy, it has been very difficult to visit, and especially so in recent years. (Interestingly, the idea for the exhibition came from Ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sablière.) Tourists have had to content themselves with admiring the building from the outside; peering up at the Salviati and Zuccaro frescoes, partly visible from the piazza; and looking at the didactic display cradled in plastic to the right of the main entrance. Now, for a few months, the palace is open for the exhibition Palazzo Farnèse (note the accent). On view is the building itself, preparatory drawings for the building and its decoration, antiquities and other artworks from the Farnese collections, and images of the building over time. The exhibition opened on 17 December 2010 and runs through 27 April 2011. Here is the link to the exhibition website.

The Farneses were collectors of drawings. The cartoons of Raphael and Michelangelo, now in Naples at the Capodimonte Museum, were laid down on canvas, framed in walnut, and hung in Palazzo Farnese. These did not travel up to Rome for the show. Smaller drawings were kept in fasci or bundles. There are a pair of beautiful Parmigianino drawings with Farnese provenance in the show. One wishes there were more drawings from their collection on view.

Palazzo Farnese with Exhibition Banner

What is most remarkable is to see the Annibale and Agostino Carracci cartoons for the Camerino dell’ Ercole and Galleria dei Carracci so close to the frescoes. In the case of the Camerino, the drawings are in cases within the same room. With the Galleria, the drawings are in an anteroom. When I was there looking back and forth between the drawings and the frescoes, I had this feeling of being the luckiest person alive. I couldn’t help but daydream of the brothers working, and imagined them drawing at large tables and then climbing scaffolding. The drawing just below of an amorino in the Camerino came from Windsor. The cartoon shows some incision marks, and was a near final cartoon. Seeing the drawings just under the complex design of the ceiling also makes it absolutely clear how important drawings are for fresco painting. The Carracci drawings in the exhibition were not owned by the Farnese. Instead, they were kept by the artist, who left them to his pupil Domenichino, and then handed down to other artists including Maratti.

Carracci | Detail of Camerino Ceiling Fresco | Palazzo Farnese | Rome

The exhibition also features drawings by Architect Antonio da Sangallo Giovane for the palace. These make one dislike AutoCAD productions all the more.

Watermarks

December 18th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

S e a s o n ‘ s G r e e t i n g s

Deer's Head Watermark | Briquet 15541 | Brabant 1449

While the Chinese, Arabs, and Spanish all had paper before the Italians, they were the first to watermark paper. Watermarks are areas of the paper where an identifying mark is left by bent wire in the screen mold. The marks range from a simple circle to the most elaborate escutcheons. Almost all catalogues of prints and drawings published in recent years have an appendix with watermarks. Researching watermarks has become easier now that the standard reference books Briquet and Piccard are online. The table below, with links, shows several online resources. For a discussion about the ways of recording watermarks, here is a link to an article published by Nancy E. Nash in an American Institute for Conservation publication. Neil Harris’s work Paper and watermarks, published in 2010 and available online, is very engaging and full of important information and references for the study of watermarks. It seems beta-radiography is one of the best ways of recording watermarks, but this is impractical for most people. With my drawings, I use my laptop as a light table, position a ruler near the drawing, and take a photograph. I should also say that it is very, very seldom that I successfully match a watermark.

Database	Coordinating Organization	Based on Tracings or Film	Detail
Briquet Online	Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Kommission für Schrift- und Buchwesen des Mittelalters (Wien) and the Laboratoire de Médiévistique Occidentale de Paris.	Tracings	Ongoing digitization of Briquet volumes (eventually all 16,112)
Thomas L. Gravell Watermark Collection	University of Delaware and Bibliothèque de Genève	Film and Tracings	Contains 29,000 watermarks from Briquet archive in Geneva which were never published
Le filigrane degli archivi genovesi	Università di Genova	Tracings
NIKI	Nederlands Interuniversitair Kunsthistorisch Instituut - Dutch University Institute for Art History Florence	Film	Sign in as guest, search button in upper right. Watermarks of papers used for prints and drawings from c. 1450 to 1800.
Piccard Online	Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart	Tracings
Watermarks in Incunabula Printed in the Low Countries	Koninklijke Bibliotheek - National Library of the Netherlands	Film

Manuela Belli | Paper Conservator | Rome

December 10th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

Manuela Belli | Conservation Studio | Rome

Manuela Belli has her paper conservation studio in Rome, behind the Palazzo di Giustizia, and not far from Castel Sant’Angelo. Belli studied at Rome’s Tor Vergata University (graduating 2008), with three years at a conservation program in Spoleto (graduating in 2003). The Spoleto program was founded jointly by the European Union, the Italian Cultural Ministry, and the Region of Umbria. Unfortunately, it no longer exists. The program had 15 students and classes were held at the 14th century Rocca Albornoziana. The fortress, named for the Spanish cardinal Aegidius Albornoz, was designed by the architect Matteo Giovanello Gattaponi. The Rocca sits at the top of Spoleto, and can be seen in the photograph below. Also below is a detail of the fresco in the Vatican’s Hall of Maps, showing the town on a fictive piece of paper. The last year of the Spoleto program involved internships in Italy and abroad.

Spoleto's Rocca Albornoziana | Architect Matteo Giovanello Gattaponi | begun 1362

Detail of Spoleto | Vatican's Gallery of Maps | 1580-85 | Rome

It was at Spoleto that Belli met her teacher Christine Borruso, with whom she later collaborated for five or six years, and now has taken over her practice. The Spoleto program mostly concerned books. Borruso, however, taught courses in the conservation of prints and drawings. Borruso, herself, trained to be a paintings conservator in her native Germany. When she moved to Italy, she studied at the Patologia dell Libro program and took classes at ICCROM, the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, based in Rome.

The studio is a large work room with an anteroom containing flat files. As with all the paper conservation studios I’ve seen, it has an immense sink and an immense table for working on large projects or multiple pieces at once. She says that even if the table is large, it never seems large enough. There are beautiful Japanese brushes made from various materials, including palm and horsehair; and fine sieves to strain glues. At one side of the room there was a Japanese karibari, made from layers of paper coated with waterproofing persimmon juice, and used in the flattening of paper. Belli has visited Japan and says there’s a lot to learn from the Japanese about paper conservation. There are also some bright drawings done by Borruso’s grandchildren.

Karibari | Manuela Belli | Conservation Studio | Rome

This past Thursday, I asked Belli some questions about paper conservation. The conversation was in Italian, and the translations below are mine.

LV: Can you talk about your internships?

At the Spoleto school, for our third year, all the students had the opportunity to intern at collaborating institutions. I had the good fortune of going to Washington D.C., to the Library of Congress, for three months. I also had another internship at the Museo di Roma in Palazzo Braschi. On my own, I applied to the Folger Shakespeare Library. That was again for three months, just three months because it was too difficult to extend the visa. At the Folger I worked almost exclusively on books. And especially leaf casting.

LV: What is leaf casting?

Manuela Belli: It’s a mechanical means of restoration, where you use a machine, in which you disperse a pulp, made of paper fibers, in water. It’s used prevalently on papers that have insect damage, very many holes and tears. The machine is used because doing it manually would be too time consuming. Using this machine, the fibers are dispersed, with the aid of suction the water is aspirated away and the fibers are deposited where there are holes. It is a very quick way of filling. You tone the pulp, matching the color of the paper, beforehand. You use a computer to calculate how much pulp is necessary. It’s used for big projects, where there is a lot of damage, often worm holes going through all the pages of a book. It requires a lot of preparation, adjusting the parameters: the color, the amount of pulp, but once you’ve done that, the process is very rapid.

Manuela Belli | Japanese Brushes | Conservation Studio | Rome

LV: How does conserving drawings differ from conserving books and prints?

Manuela Belli: I see the distinction more between prints together with drawings, and books. With prints and drawings you want to principally safeguard the aesthetic aspect. You want to restore their legibility/visual appeal after they might have been compromised by the effects of time, the attack of microorganisms, stains, glues etc. Whereas with books, you principally want to give them back their functionality, so they can be read and consulted, and aesthetic concerns are secondary.

LV: What are the differences between doing work for private clients and museums?

Manuela Belli: A private collector or dealer often wants the object to return to its old splendor. It’s often hard to explain to a private that the paper can’t be as white as when the print or drawing was made. Whereas, for museums, you know what you can do, and, what you can’t do.

LV: Can you talk about your most challenging project? And, why was it so challenging?

Manuela Belli: I remember working on a large format work. It was a sacred subject. A print from the late 17th century. It had already been restored, and restored by somebody who wasn’t specialized in paper. The restoration was crude, and the work was compromised. It was almost illegible. I could see that it had initially been affixed to a wooden panel. It was made up of eight sheets. The lowest two were greatly damaged. There were huge holes, it was deformed from the use of too much glue, and a paper that was too thick in comparison to the print. We had to remove all the old restorations. The print had been watercolored, and some of the colors were soluble, making it even more difficult to restore. There were moments when we thought we’d never come to the end. It’s much harder for us to conserve works that have been badly restored. In the end it was very satisfying to see the final result.

LV: What is the process for conserving museum works? Is there a bidding system?

Manuela Belli: If the restoration will cost above a certain amount, they are required by law to publish a notice of a competition for the work. If it’s a small amount, they can go to a conservator, someone they’ve worked with before, and have the work restored. In Italy, museums always have less money, and prevalently what gets restored is what’s needed for a special exhibition. They don’t have money for prevention. What’s been lost is the money for preventive conservation. This is an error in my mind. It’s shortsighted and a waste of effort, and of money, to only do work after the damage has been done.

What are some of the differences between being a conservator in Italy and abroad?

Here conservators are often thought of as artisans. They aren’t recognized as professionals. There’s little recognition of how long people have studied, and the internships they’ve had. One difference, I’ve noticed between the US and Italy, is that in the US conservators are brought in to collaborate, they’re on the same level as the art historians. Here, conservators are close to being the lowest rung on the ladder. I remember in the US when there was to be an exhibition, there would be a kind of round table meeting and each one gave their opinion on what to do. The thoughts of the conservator were taken into account. Here, the conservator is called in last, told what to do, and if something happens, they have to resolve it.

LV: Just what is it that makes drawings so appealing?

Manuela Belli: What first comes to mind is certainly the spontaneity of drawings, the immediacy in the creation of a drawing, which is quite different from a print or a book. It’s the freshness and the immediacy of the artist’s idea in the realization of the image. And, above all, every drawing is unique. A drawing isn’t reproduced the way a print is.

Manuela Belli can be reached
by cell phone at (+39) 347 092 0091
by email at manu_belli@yahoo.com

Drawings and Olives

October 18th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

I’ve been writing about olive oil, and especially the business of olive oil, for an online publication called the Olive Oil Times, and I thought I’d try a post here about olives and drawings. The image just below is of a vase in the British Museum. The olive oil amphora is from around 520 BC and shows men harvesting olives from very stylized trees (the branches look almost like monkey puzzle branches). It is attributed to the Antimenes Painter (fl. 530-510 BC). Since it’s incised, and since it is very linear, it comes close to drawing, even if most people would see it as painted.

Images of olives are not as common as you would think. It could be that they were so present, and common, that it wouldn’t have made sense to depict them. At least, for Mediterranean artists. Van Gogh, who grew up in the Netherlands, was fascinated by olives. At the Saint-Rémy asylum, he painted them in oils and drew them in ink. Here is a drawing in reed pen and brown ink, with the lines so fluid, they look as if they could be done with a brush.

Olive oil is slow drying, and easily becomes rancid, making it a poor choice for a medium in oil painting. Cennino Cennini in his Libro dell’Arte recipes mentions linseed oil (writing olio di semenza di lino or olio di lin seme) most frequently. In Chapter 25, the only time Cennini uses the word olive (ulivo), he uses olive oil to grease a stone slab in the preparation of tracing paper. In Chapter 187, he calls it edible oil (olio da mangiare) and uses it to grease a wax figure before covering it in gesso, giving the reader the choice of using lampante oil (olio da bruciare). He sometimes tells his readers to use the oil of their choice, and sometimes does not specify what kind of oil should be used.

One thing that olive oil and drawings share, is that they should not be kept in the light. I’ve heard experts in olive oil say that a bottle kept in the light for a week is unfit to eat. So–storage in boxes, drawers, and cupboards for both drawings and olive oil–just miles apart.

Food and Drawings

September 6th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

I was thinking of artworks figuring food, from ancient mural paintings and mosaics to French pastels, and at the same time wondering why there are so few drawings in pen and ink or chalk of food. I was thinking especially of all the brilliant Spanish still-life paintings with fruits, and so many cardoons and sweetmeats that have passed through the auctions in recent years. And, I haven’t seen any preparatory drawings. Maybe there were losses or maybe the artists skipped drawing or maybe I just don’t know of them. I was thinking the same thing about all the long tables full of every kind of food in Dutch paintings and then the mountains of fish in Neapolitan paintings.

There are magnificent drawings in tempera, watercolor, and pastel of fruits and vegetables. Giovanni da Udine, Jacopo Ligozzi, Giovanna Garzoni, Joris Hoefnagel, and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin are some of the artists who worked with these materials. Color makes sense–so much of the appeal of food comes from its color. (Modern grocers know this. See their tricky use of tinted plastic wraps around fruits and vegetables.) Fruits themselves, naturally for millions of years, and through cultivation for thousands of years, have become progressively more colorful and captivating. It is through color that they attract the eater, and spread their seeds. From what little I know of biology, this is the point of living.

Below are a few drawings I found that depict food, and that make limited use of color. The blackberries by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) should probably be considered a natural history study. Leonardo wasn’t thinking of the blackberries so much as something to eat, but was interested in how the flowers transformed themselves into fruit. It seems unlikely that a stem of blackberries would have fully ripened fruit and flowers at the same time. However beautiful it is, it is a scientific drawing.

Leonardo | Spray of Blackberry | Red chalk | 180 x 160 mm. | Windsor Castle

Abraham Bloemaert (1564-1651) often drew cabbages. There is probably nobody in the history of the world who loved cabbages as much, or drew them as well.

When food gets to the table, it is often annoyingly hard to tell what it is they’re eating. Color provides so many clues and just what the satyrs in the drawing by Giandomenico Tiepolo (1727-1804) are supping on is a mystery.

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