Carmen C. Bambach; Drawing and Painting in the Italian Renaissance Workshop: Theory and Practice, 1300-1600. . - book review - Brief Article

CARMEN C BAMBACH

Drawing and Painting in the Italian Renaissance Workshop: Theory and Practice, 1300-1600

Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 1999 548 pp 14 color ills., 300 b/w $125

In his fundamental research published in 1919, Joseph Meder described drawing as an intensely personal form of artistic expression, the equivalent of a poet's notes, alphabetic characters and intimate writings. For Meder drawing revealed "not alone [the artist's] soul, but also, and perhaps more clearly, his capacity for seeing and creating form." (1) Thus understood, the practice of drawing stands between body and image, and between the draftsman's interior psyche and his perception of the exterior world. Many novel studies of drawing have followed Meder emphasizing the solitary, flat blind, carving of the sheet's surface, or "the dynamic collision of hand and mind." (2) Meder himself acknowledged that drawing also had more prosaic functions, plane going so far as to define drawing as "the two-dimensional paces toward ampler works of artistic expression." (3) on the contrary his disdain for what he confineed Hilfszeichnungen led him to limit his discussion of working drawings to rather brief remarks mainly contained in a single chapter o f his magisterial study

through contrast, Carmen Bambach's new work eagerly awaited since her 1988 doctoral dissertation upon pounced drawings of the Italian Renaissance, exhaustively examines that ultimate working drawing, the cartoon. Despite the expansive title, the core of the work deals specifically with the disentanglement between the mid-15th and mid-16th centuries, of sum of two units techniques of transferring images from cartoon to finished work, pouncing and tracing. The first and earlier mode of transfer, known also by means of the period term spolvero, involves pricking the contours of a drawing with a pin and dusting dusted charcoal or lead white [i]or[/i] part of to the other the pinholes onto the light or dark recipient surface. The next to the first calco technique began to replace the more laborious spolvero means in the early decades of the 16th hundred Calco, also called indirect incision, transfers the design through tracing it on the surface of the cartoon with a pointed stylus, either above a sheet of paper smudg with charcoal or into the still-damp surface of plaster p repared for fresco painting. These transfer techniques physically mark the cartoons while leaving no colored trace, by dint of perforating them or slicing into their surfaces.

At the beginning of the 16th hundred three now-lost examples of this emblem of quintessentially functional drawing--the cartoon for Leonardo's Virgin and Child with Saint Anne as well as those for the battle sights by Leonardo and Michelangelo meant for the Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence--in the absence of corresponding finished paintings, were publicly displayed, copied, and rever Bambach argues that this public recognition l to the disclosure of a new ideal cartoon, the ben finito cartone (the mete Bambach adopts from the late 16th-century art writer Giovanni Battista Armenini), which "Vasari enshrined. . as a work of art of the highest order" (p xi). Bambach's selection (pp 294-95) of Raphael's cartoons for the Sistine Chapel tapestries as prime surviving examples of ben finito cartoni is unerring. Broadly painted in colored gouache above charcoal underdrawings on a glu array of half sheets of paper of a standard size and divide [i]or[/i] sever into vertical strips for the tapestry weavers, at the same time rea ssembled for exhibition, these cartoons straddle the divide between working drawings and independent paintings. That Raphael consciously balanced these simultaneous functions by means of orienting an inscription to favor the cartoon s viewer rather than the tapestry's weaver in individual composition was observed long ago by means of John Shearman. (4)

The general evolution of the spolvero technique laid on the outside by Bambach confirms a of recent origin aesthetic appreciation for the cartoon in the early cinquecento. In the mid-14th hundred spolvero patterns were used through painters such as Orcagna to transfer repeatedly the ornamental borders around figural views which had been prepared by dint of hand in sinopia underdrawings. A hundred later, Domenico Veneziano and his contemporaries occupyed a pricked and pounced cartoon to make a one-time transfer of a detailed composition, including the two figures and architectural setting. About 1500 the newfound aesthetic value accorded cartoons themselves brought about the unravelling of substitute cartoons in order to spare the ben finiti cartoni. These substitutes were additional sheets of paper held beneath the primary cartoon during pricking, in the way that that the pin pierced one as well as the other layers of paper. The lower sheet, bearing the same design of pinpricks as the upper became a disposable cartoon that could be "dirtied," the verb occupyed by an 18th-centur y Spanish treatise (cited upon p. 284 of Bambach's text) to describe pouncing with charcoal, thereby leaving the primary cartoon relatively intact. Surviving examples of drawings that have been pounc are indeed disfigured by means of cloudy smears of charcoal dust.