Drawing, 1400-1600: Invention and Innovation

This volume explores the ways in which drawings were employed and appreciated in various European cities from late medieval times, through to the Renaissance and Reformation periods and into the early 17th century. The essays examine the relationship between preparatory sketches and finished artworks in more durable and expensive materials, and consider roles played by various drawing types such as studies from different kinds of model and student copies from a master’s examplar. They also investigate how drawings and their mechanically reproduced equivalents - engravings, etchings, etc - came to be collected for both practical and connoisseurial purposes, and how iconographic and stylistic inventiveness were linked to imaginative artistic interpretations of traditional subjects and to technical innovations in drawings and printmaking.