Word: silverpoints
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Throughout the show one sees an absolute mastery of the processes of drawing: the making of marks but also the making of the instruments with which to make them. In the 15th century one did not walk into a shop and buy a pencil. One had to make the silverpoint or the twig of charcoal. One had to cut the pen and shape its nib from a quill. All of this was wound in with the technique of drawing and helped to determine its intensity. That is one of the reasons why small drawings (and most of Leonardo's drawings...
What mesmerizes one, at first, is the technique. Most of the sheets are very small, and the detail in some of them is carried out at an almost microscopic level-a difficult enough feat with "hard" tools like pen or silverpoint, but an impossible one (or so one would suppose) with red crayon. One of the minor technical mysteries surrounding Leonardo's work was how he made his chalk hard enough to hold a needle point when sharpened. The steadiness of his hand was almost inhuman-helped, no doubt, by the diet of fruit and water he was always...
...paper since the death of Giacometti. Arikha's drawings of landscapes, old shoes and coats, his own face or that of a friend like Samuel Beckett, may seem frustrating at first. They look messy and disclose themselves slowly. None of the hard, wiry line of pen or silverpoint here; the brush (the kind used in Japan for sumi-e or ink painting) flits and stumbles across the roughly textured page, leaving behind tiny marks that seem knitted or crocheted together...
...duke always tended to encourage the more progressive trends in painting. This, in practice, meant Italian influence. One of the Morgan Library's treasures, a small book of silverpoint sketches on boxwood, probably done by the duke's favorite miniaturist, Jacquemart de Hesdin, is permeated by the Italian trecento-the Madonna stately and subtle as a virgin by Simone Martini. But the greatest impact of Italy was on the artist who was also the greatest of the Berry circle: the Boucicaut Master. An illumination of the Garden of Eden, with Boccaccio sitting reading outside the wall, is full...
...expression than drawing. To judge from 16th century copies of his now lost Leda and the Swan, he could depict sensuous nudes when he chose. But the drawing that survives of Leda's head shows a lady ethereal and detached. Surviving also are the austere and delicate silverpoint studies of hands, believed to have been made for the portrait of Ginevra dei Benci. The painting itself, in Washington's National Gallery, has been cut off just below the shoulders (though no one knows in which century the damage was done...