In his chapter in Pietro Perugino: Master of the Italian Renaissance, ed. Joseph Antennucci Becherer (Grand Rapids MI Art Museum, 1997), Bruce Cole argues that "Renaissance artists were made, not born. . . . Boys entered a workshop with no experience and came out of it as artists with remarkable technical and formal skills, among the most advanced of any period of European art" (p. 26). In addition to learning how to make brushes, grind pigments, lay plaster for frescoes, prepare gesso, and the like" (p. 27), they were to learn to draw by "strict imitation of style and motif. Apprentices were to copy the work of their master until his style became their own. They were also encouraged to learn from the paintings and drawings of other masters. These works could furnish them with many types of compositions and motifs which would be of considerable benefit to them later on" (p. 27). Vasari's "Life" of Raphael suggests that even a gifted individual could profit from this system: "It is well known that while Raphael was studying Pietro's style he imitated him so exactly in everything that his portraits cannot be distinguished from those of his master" (Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 4 vols., trans. A. B. Hinds (NY: Everyman's Library, 1963; 1970), II: 222). Needless to say, however, Raphael did not continue to turn out "Peruginos" after he left his master's workshop; rather, following this procedure during his career, he moved from model to model until he had established and refined his own style by his continuing explorations of other masters like Leonardo and Michelangelo. Raphael, in turn, presided over a large workshop with masters like Giulio Romano, Perino del Vaga, and others who while they worked for him could help him with the drawings that preceded the paintings of his works. When they in turn came to head their own workshops, they did not continue to turn out more "Raphaels" but instead produced "Giulios" and "Perinos."

If we compare the instructions Michelangelo wrote on a drawing he gave to one of his assistants, Antonio Mini (d. 1533), "Disegnia antonio, disegnia antonio / disegnia e no[n] p[er]der[e] te[m]po" (Draw Antonio, draw Antonio, draw and don't waste time" (Hugo Chapman, Michelangelo [New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006), drawing, figure 27, and detail, figure 28), with Cole's description of how workshops worked, it is clear that something has changed. The drawings were not for works to be realized—many of Michelangelo's later drawings seem to be intended for his own use or as gifts for his friends and were never intended to serve as models of paintings or sculptures—but as a way of thinking about images and their meanings, as opposed to their practical uses. These late drawings are perhaps part devotional, part opportunities for Michelangelo to think about the mechanics of transforming thoughts into images of ideas. According to William Wallace, Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and His Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Michelangelo's friendships with Tommaso de'Cavalieri led to "both a large body of poetry and some of Michelangelo's most beautiful drawings" and "reawakened in Michelangelo those highly focused creative energies that the artist commonly experienced at the beginning of projects" (Wallace, p. 177); the most important of the drawings were probably the Ganymede, the Tityus, The Fall of Phaeton, The Dream of Human Life, Three Labors of Hercules, the Children's Bacchanal, Archers Shooting at a Herm, and a Head in Profile (see Frederick Hartt, Michelangelo Drawings (NY: Abrams, n.d. [1970], figures 352-62). His later friendship with Vittoria Colonna, begun after The Last Judgment for the Sistine Chapel, led him to send her a series of drawings of the Crucifixion and other related pieces (see Hartt, figures 408-430 and possibly figure 437). Hartt's comment on the group for Tommaso Cavalieri is directly pertinent: "A considerable group of drawings by Michelangelo, generally of the highest finish, were done without the customary Renaissance purpose of preparation for works of painting or sculpture, but as complete works of art in themselves" (p. 249). With the example of Michelangelo as a precedent, there can be little doubt that other artists (Veronese and Guercino come quickly to mind) did the same.

Detaching the drawing from the painting or sculpture and looking at it as an independent work of art changes the way drawings might be seen. As Beth L. Holman observes, “Both prints and drawings provide important primary documents of Renaissance designs for objects of ritual and everyday life. In Italy, design–the foundation of art–and drawing–the cornerstone of design–were so intimately linked that they were embraced under the same rubric: disegno. As Federico Zuccaro wrote at the end of the sixteenth century, drawing is the external, physical manifestation [disegno esterno] of an internal, intellectual idea or design [disegno intorno]” (see her introduction to Disegno: Italian Renaissance Designs for the Decorative Arts [Washington DC: Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 1997], p. 10). Michelangelo's liberation of the drawing from something mechanical to something capable of showing viewers truths opens up a new way of looking at drawings. As Holman notes, “The implications of disegno were both broad and profound. Ideation was considered to be paramount in the creation of art. Artists were praised for their invenzione [invention], ingegno [ingenuity], fantasia [imagination], and capriccio [originality]” (p. 11). The artist was no longer merely a craftsman but someone able (and perhaps obligated) to show his or her audience a new world. As Sir Philip Sidney wrote in his Defence of Poetry (c. 1579), "any understanding knoweth the skill of each artificer standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work and not in the work itself. And that the poet hath that idea is manifest, by delivering them forth in such excellency as he had imagined them" (ed. J. A. Van Dorsten [London: Oxford University Press, 1966], p. 24). So in the case of the Michelangelo drawings of the Crucifixion for Vittoria Colonna or the works for Tommaso de'Cavalieri it is not simply the execution that moved viewers but their attempts to seize an understanding of the reasons behind each particular embodiment of that idea at which viewers were astonished (sometimes literally: it is reported that when Pope Paul III first saw the The Last Judgment Michelangelo had painted for him, he sank down to his knees and prayed for several hours as if he were looking not at paint on a wall but seeing the event to come. This notion of "making" leads Sidney to take an old definition of poetry and to transform it via a kind of shot-gun marriage to another one: "Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis–that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth–to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture–with this end, to teach and delight" (p. 25). True makers (and as poetry is a speaking picture, so painting is silent poetry) "imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what, hath been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and what should be" (p. 26). Sidney, more than most Englishmen of the period, had a direct acquaintance with the art of his day. He had been to Venice and visited both Tintoretto and Veronese before deciding to have Veronese paint his portrait so that he could send it to a friend. Sidney, who was fluent in Italian, had also spent time with Federico Zuccaro when Zuccaro was in London discussing possible commissions with the Earl of Leicester, Sidney's uncle, and staying at Leicester House, where Sidney also stayed when he was in London, as he was at that time.

As former teachers of Renaissance literature, we found ourselves drawn to the prints and drawings of the period. This interest (tending at times to obsession), prompted our acquisition of a number of old master drawings, including works by Netherlandish artists like Bernaert van Orley, Maarten de Vos, Jan Baptiste de Wael, Willem Buytewech, Abraham Bloemaert, Peter Paul Rubens, Philipp Sadeler, and Nicolaes Maes; we have also found works by Italian artists like Raphael, Parmigianino, Marcantonio Raimondi, Giulio Romano, Perino del Vaga, Andrea Schiavone, Veronese, Palma Il Giovanni, Matteo Rosselli, Federico Zuccaro, Francesco Vanni, Luca Cambiaso, Alessandro Casolani, Matteo Rosselli, Annibale Carracci, Ludovico Carracci, Domenichino, Francesco Albani, Guercino, Il Morazzone, Simone Cantarini, Pier Francesco Mola, Francesco Vanni, Odoardo Fialetti, Ercole Bazzicaluva, Baldassare Franceschini, Giovanni Battista Vanni, Antonio Busca, Giovanni Lanfranco, Giuseppe Maria Crespi; also in our collection are a growing number of works by German artists like Virgil Solis, Hans von Aachen, and Johann Heinrich Roos and French artists like Charles de la Fosse, Etienne Parrocel "Le Romain," someone close to François Boucher, Jean-François de Neufforge, and Mouricault. Some of these works appear to be finished drawings, others attempts to conceptualize an artistic problem to be solved, still others are models for members of the master's workshop to execute in whole or in part under the master's supervision, and many are drawings of paintings, sculptures, etchings or engravings by their contemporaries of works they wished to study or use in their own works (including works after Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Palma Il Giovane, Agostino Carracci, Hendrik Goltzius, Rembrandt, among others). In addition to artists to whom we can attribute authorship, we have a number of works to which we can more or less confidently attribute only membership in a regional or national school, of which we have a number of the Venetian (16th century), Genoese (17th century), and Bolognese Schools (17th century). Some of these drawings are stunningly beautiful finished works, some are quick sketches, and some are useful for studying how earlier collectors assembled their collections. We have found the study of these possibilities instructive towards our considerations of the art and practise of drawing and their relationship to both the paintings and the prints of the era. Old master prints long preceded old master drawings as objects of desire, and our collection of them goes back over 35 years (at least 5 years before we even dreamed of starting a gallery). Albrecht Durer's prints were our first love and it has been an enduring one; the works of early and mid 16th-century Italy, especially on mythological and religious subjects, began next; the works of the later 16th-century Netherlandish Mannerists, particularly those working with designs by Maerten van Heemskerck, Maarten de Vos, and Hendrik Goltzius (including Goltzius himself), are a more recent love, and we are just beginning to study the works of the early-mid 17th century Dutch artists.

Thinking and looking at our drawing inventory, we began thinking about the variety of our drawings and the various purposes for which they were made. In this show we want not merely to show some extraordinarily beautiful drawings but also to invite viewers to consider some of the many kinds of drawings, the multiplicity of uses of drawings, and the varying degrees of artistry of drawings. Because, particularly in the case of earlier masters, drawings were sometimes intended to be for the use of the artist and his assistants, remaining as valued property of the workshop for years, they are not always clearly identified on the sheet and attribution becomes a matter of interpretation. For one example, see the page on Pier Francesco Mola; for another, we offer the commentary below from Diane De Grazia, Correggio and His Legacy: Sixteenth-Century Emilian Drawings (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1984): "The Brussels drawing is catalogued as a Zuccaro, but Anthony Blunt has suggested that it is the work of Francesco Vanni. However the application of red and black chalk is typical of Federico, and an attribution to him can be made with some security, Although the facial features of the more finished figures reflect those of Corregio, several of the lightly sketched angels in the background betray Federico's hand." As the history of the attribution of Rembrandt's paintings over the past forty years by a select committee trying to establish a definitive canon of his works, in which his numbers first sunk from a total of about 700 down to nearly 300, and have since risen to about 500 suggests, even experts can disagree and often the attributions of old master paintings and drawings may change from decade to decade even within the same museum based upon both the current state of knowledge about both artist and period and upon the changing knowledge of the expert doing the attributing.

After long blocks of text, there will be huge open spaces. Please persevere: images and texts will follow.