Out of disegno invention is born” — Drawing a ...

"Out of Disegno Invention is Born" - Drawing a Convinc- 

ing Figure in Renaissance Italian Art, 

PAUL VAN DEN AKKER 

Vakgroep Kunstgeschiedenis 

De Boelelaan 1105 

1081 HV Amsterdam 

The Netherlands 

ABSTRACT: An important artistic topic of Italian Renaissance painting was the 

rendering of the human figure. As leading actors in a painted narrative, figures had to 

convince beholders of the reality of the matter depicted with appropriated attitudes and 

gestures. This article is about two ways of drawing or rather constructing the human 

figure artists developed to achieve this goal. The first was only an adaptation to an old 

method: because of the rather simple and coarse elements used, constructions often 

resulted in faulty pictures and were for that matter often criticized. As this article will 

show, the second method involved a new and very successful drawing skill, which not 

just required a different kind of knowledge of visual forms but of procedures of moving 

the hand, too. 

In Renaissance Italy artists and theoreticians were concerned with the difficult 

but challenging question of how to render the human figure in a lifelike and 

convincing way. Figures played the leading roles in painted narratives. Their 

appearance, attitudes and gestures were meant to persuade the beholder of the 

reality of the matter depicted. How artists managed to do this and particularly 

which skills they developed has rarely been the topic of serious art-historical 

inquiry. 2 The skill to which I am referring concerns the qualities which give the 

visual arts a history of their own, distinct from, say, literature, philosophy or 

rhetoric. Painting is perhaps all too often compared to these non-visual arts at 

the expense of understanding what makes art visual. 

Of course there are similarities, such as the interest attached to invention 

(invenzione). Alberti, for example, had stated in his treatise on painting, De 

Pictura of 1436, that for painters: 

it will be of advantage if they take pleasure in poets and orators, for these have many 

ornaments in common with the painter. Literary men, who are full of information 

about many subjects, will be of great assistance in preparing the composition of a 

'historia', and the great virtue of this consists primarily in its invention. Indeed, 

invention is such that even by itself and without pictorial representation it can give 

pleasure. 3 

More than a hundred years later, in the biography of a painter named Lippo in 

the 1568 edition of his Lives, Vasari even termed invention "the truest mother of 

architecture, painting and poetry, as well as of all the superior arts and of all the 

Argumentation 7: 45-66, 1993. 

© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

46 PAUL VAN DEN AKKER 

marvels produced by man. ''4 But Vasari also realized that it takes two parents to 

produce children. In his short treatise on learning the art of drawing, he charac- 

terized disegno (i.e. drawing), as others had already done, as "the father of our 

three arts, Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting". 5 Vasari defined disegno as the 

reflection of a kind of knowledge (cognizione) or mental blueprint (concerto 

nell'animo) of the artist. This knowledge relates to the visual forms of objects, 

especially of human figures, their parts and structure. After learning the body 

parts and their interrelationship, "attitudes in any position can be drawn by help 

of the imagination without one's having the living forms in view.". 6 And, Vasari 

continues, "out of this invention is born" (e da c~o nasce l'invenzione), so he 

changed the metaphor unless he meant that father disegno makes it possible for 

invention to bring forth her offspring: "Out of this invention is born, which 

groups figures in fours, sixes, tens, twenties, in such a manner as to represent 

battles and other great subjects of art.". 7 

While the term invention is shared with poets and orators, disegno as a term 

originated in the province of the artist. 8 Vasari was right, I think, in contending 

that the artist's ability to invent narrative compositions depended mainly on his 

knowledge of drawing and of constructing the human figure. In this article I will 

explain the new kind of disegno, or method of drawing and of constructing the 

human figure, that was developed in Renaissance Italy in order to fulfill the new 

task of persuading the viewer of the reality of the scene. 

Before going into this, I would like first to briefly explain the method employed 

prior to the fifteenth century. Although our knowledge of it is limited by the 

scarcity of late medieval drawings, some idea can be formed through the 

analysis of finished paintings. Take for example Duccio's Annunciation of the 

death of Mary, a panel that once was part of his Maest?t, the great altarpiece he 

made for the High Altar of Siena Cathedral between 1309 and 1311 (Figure 1). 

The figures of Mary and Gabriel can be separated from the background and 

divided into several smaller elements (head-and-shoulder sections, hands, feet, 

fluttering drapery etc.). These components can then be reused to compose 

another scene. Simply by rearranging them slightly and adding a group of 

figures, all set against the same background, the composition of The Apostles' 

farewell to the Virgin can be constructed. Only a few elements need be omitted 

or added to do this; the form of each separate component is not altered to any 

great degree (Figure 2). This is what Duccio seems to have done in this work 

(Figure 3), and a similar analysis could be made of other representations from 

the Maest?t. That artists really did think of figures as constructions of such rather 

fiat elements can be seen in a rare early fourteenth-century Florentine model 

drawing. In addition to whole figures the anonymous artist also drew bits of 

drapery and a head-and-shoulder section, probably to provide a repertory of 

pictorial motifs on which he could draw in the future (Figure 4). 

Varying the attitudes of the figures was therefore primarily a matter of 

rearranging the head, a bit of drapery, or the hands and feet. It was a satisfactory 

method as long as realism was not yet the norm in the art of painting. But as I

OUT OF DISEGNO INVENTION IS BORN 47 

Fig. 1 Duccio, Annunciation of the death of Mary, panel, 1308-1311, Siena, 

Cathedral Museum. 

have already pointed out, from the beginning of the fifteenth century realistic 

representation became a requisite. At first glance it looks very much as if 

drawing individual heads, feet, hands or draperies was still normal procedure for 

Renaissance artists. Many preparatory studies of such elements have been 

preserved. Moreover, the published drawing manuals, which appeared from the 

sixteenth century onward, consisted of pages mainly filled with prints of such 

motifs. These books were in fact intended as primers for the abecedarian in 

drawing (Figure 5). 9 These first steps in the learning process are didactically 

visualized in one of Federico Zuccaro's (1540/41-1609) drawings from the 

beautiful series he dedicated to his brother's training and career as an artist 

(Figure 6). As the text on the step informs us, the young Taddeo (1529 -1566) is 

found drawing by moonlight in a room in the house of Calavrese, his first 

master. In his notations in the margins of the 1568 edition of Vasari's Vite, 

Federico Zuccaro wrote about Taddeo: 

When he was living in the house of Calavrese he could never make drawings in the 

daytime and hardly ever in the evenings, and at night he had to go to bed in the dark 

because he was grudged even a drop of oil for a lamp; but his desire was so great that 

he would get up and draw by moonlight on the shutters.", l° 

Federico's sheet illustrates the type of drawings he imagined would comprise his


Fig. 2. Alternative arrangement of elements of Fig. 1. 

brother's first efforts toward becoming a great painter: represented on the left 

shutter of the window are the elements of a figure drawing. 

Later on, but still following Renaissance tradition, Giacomo Franco stated that 

learning the different components of the human figure is like learning the letters 

of the alphabet. In his drawing manual De excellentia et nobilitate delineationis 

libri duo from 1611 he directly likens his teaching method to that of a writing 

master. 11 Just as a calligrapher would not teach his pupils to write complete 

sentences at once, but rather first their letters, then syllables and finally words 

and sentences, Franco says that an artist should not confront his pupils im- 

mediately with the task of drawing a complete human figure, but rather should 

direct them to first attempt its individual parts. This comparison between the two 

teaching methods - already made by Alberti in his treatise De Pictura of 1435 (I 

will return to this later) - is indicative of the advantage of splitting up a figure 

drawing into subordinate elements. Only a very limited number of characters is 

needed to form all conceivable words, which taxes our memory far less than 

having to learn a separate sign for each word. Every new word is composed of 

familiar elements, even though one has never encountered it before. A similar 

advantage ought to hold for the above drawing method: the draftsman has only 

to master a comparatively small alphabet in order to invent countless new 

figures, or so it seems. 

This advantage did not only apply to the process of learning. As painters were


Fig. 3. Duccio, The Apostles'farewell to the Virgin, panel, 1308-1311, 

Siena, Cathedral Museum. 

used to thinking in terms of elements, this method was especially beneficial at 

the stage of devising a convincing arrangement of figures. Lelio Orsi 

(1511-1587), for example, varied his compositions both by transposing whole 

figures and by replacing certain components of them without changing others. 

This can be clearly seen in his preparatory drawings for a Conversion of St. 

Paul. The study for the group of the fallen saint raised from the ground by one 

of his companions (Figure 7), for example, is a free copy in reverse after the 

group in Michelangelo's famous fresco in the Vatican. At the lower right Orsi 

drew another head for the figure of St. Paul, which when placed upon the trunk 

of the figure turns out to fit it perfectly. Probably Orsi was testing this change in 

the position of the head because he wanted to clarify the relationship between St. 

Paul and the figure of God (who according to other preparatory drawings was to 

hover in the sky). A detail from one of the studies for the complete composition 

is illustrated here (Figure 8). In this case even more elements of the figure have 

been modified, but again without effecting alterations to the rest. Orsi added an 

outstretched lower leg to the (unchanged) fight upper leg and replaced the right 

arm with a different one, which however was connected to the trunk at the same 

location. 

During the sixteenth century this manner of constructing a figure was by no


Fig. 4. Anonymous Florentine, Model drawing (detail), second quarter of the 14th 

century, pencil, pen and ink, with traces of color, ca. 320 x 150 mm. (whole drawing), 

New York, Janos Scholz collection. 

ODOARDO FIALETTi 

• j,'.3~ ) 

Fig. 5. Odoardo Fialetti, Torsos, print from Tutte le parti del corpo humano 

diviso in piu pezzi, 1608.


Fig. 6. Federico Zuccaro, Taddeo Zuccaro drawing in the house of Calavrese, 1570s or 

1590s, black chalk, pen and ink with washes, 421 x 171 ram, private collection.


Fig. 7. Lelio Orsi, St. Paul Being Raised from the Ground; in the lower right comer: 

St. Paul's head, 1560s, pen and ink, 156 x 194 ram., London, British Museum. 

means unusual. One is reminded of one of Armenini's 'true precepts', as he 

would call them himself, for making a picture. In his treatise on the art of 

painting, De'veri precetti della pittura, which dates from 1587, Armenini 

describes approvingly how artists like Perino del Vaga (1500-1547) borrowed 

other artists' figures. From Perino' s drawings, many of which Armenini claimed 

to have seen, his ability to borrow and transform figures into his own inventions 

is evident. Armenini cites Perino del Vaga as a good example even for less 

inventive artists; as long as they complied with the rules, such a method of 

borrowing was both permissible and helpful. Let me quote Armenini at length as 

regards these rules: 

Since, now, as many believe, it is impossible to create anything which has not already 

been found and made, it follows that one can and must use another's inventions, 

provided one takes care to adapt them with some changes and has the ability to make 

them appear as if born of, and created by, one's own mind. This may be done by 

making sure that other parts are different and conform to one's own style as best as 

one can, and with the intention of surpassing these borrowed inventions in quality and 

form, which can be achieved easily by many. The original form of any figure is


Fig. 8. Lelio Orsi, The Conversion of St. Paul (detail), 1560s, pen and ink, 

457 x 301 mm., Oxford, Ashmolean Museum. 

altered greatly by a small change in any member, as by reversing members, changing 

the head slightly, raising an arm, taking away a drape or adding drapes in another 

portion of the work or in presenting them differently, reversing the drawing or 

blurring it for the sake of expediency, or by imagining it in round relief. All these 

devices result in its no longer seeming the same figure. Consider well how and in how 

many ways such alterations can vary a single attitude of a single figure. And the 

change will be greater in the case of a composition with several figures. Therefore, we 

sanction this practice as giving great aid and power to an artist of weak intellectual 

capacity. But it is necessary that these changes be made in such a manner that the 

figures do not appear to be borrowed, and one must be careful to place them well in 

easy and natural attitudes and remember that the figures must gracefully and aptly 

complement each other. How all this is to be done, we shall say elsewhere. Rarely is it 

a good pose when, for example, in a standing figure the fight leg juts out together with 

the right shoulder; it is much better perhaps if the right shoulder remains back and the 

left projects, with the head properly positioned. Certainly, nature clearly teaches us 

this twisting and balancing, so that we see that grace and liveliness are to be given to 

all the limbs [...].12 

And yet, this advice to vary the pose of a borrowed figure by moving, replacing 

or adding parts and at the same time retain the figure's easy and natural attitude 

was probably easier to give than to follow. Borrowing and transforming a figure 

was risky. If one takes seriously Giacomo Franco's comparison of the 

draftsman's (or drawing pupil's) method with that of the calligrapher, one could 

still raise the objection that a letter is fiat, whereas a body part is not: a limb 

changes its visible form with every movement. Thus an artist must in fact

54 PAULVAN DEN AKKER 

possess either a great stock of drawings or a very good memory if he is to 

successfully alter the attitude of a figure by changing one or two limbs and 

simultaneously preserve the rest of the image intact. After all, he had to discover 

exactly that form of a limb or body section which not only is persuasively 

naturalistic in itself, but which also connects to the rest of the body in an 

anatomically correct manner. In addition, he had to take care that his figures 

complement one another in the composition as a whole, as Armenini rightly but 

perhaps all too casually remarked. 

The modern viewer may no longer be accustomed to criticizing old master 

paintings by these standards. Often he has been trained to evaluate them 

aesthetically, by looking at forms, colors or divisions of surface as if dealing 

with abstract art avant la lettre. Upon visiting many sixteenth-century Italian 

buildings decorated with frescoes displaying lifesize figures however, even this 

modern viewer must admit that these figures often went wrong. That the 

problem was specifically one of construction is exemplified by the drawings of 

Pomarancio (c. 1536-c. 1598). While the coherence between the legs and the 

upper body of one of his soldiers (Figure 9) just falls within the realm of 

acceptability, the junction of the same sections of another figure (Figure 10) 

leaves much to be desired. Each body part in itself was drawn well, but together 

they do not form a cohesive whole. 

Such mistakes did not go unnoticed during the Renaissance. The painter 

Battista Franco (1498-1561) for example was characterized by Vasari in his 

1568 biography as an artist who knew perfectly well how to render individual 

limbs and other body parts, but not how to unite them to form a convincing 

figure. "One can thus conclude", so Vasari says: 

that those are in error who rely by working by that method on their ability to make a 

torso, an arm and a leg, or another member with exactly the right muscles, thinking 

that to understand those parts is everything. For it is a part and not the whole work. 

And he who after making the members well knows how to combine them together 

proportionately, is the one who is working perfectly and in a beautiful and good 

manner.". 13 

Thinking once again about Giacomo's comparison between limbs and written 

characters, it is evident by now that the success of his method could only be 

guaranteed if an artist possessed an enormous repertory of drawings of limbs - 

either actual drawings or learned drawing routines. But in that case the ad- 

vantage of the method, that is, the wonderful compactness of the alphabet, is no 

longer applicable. 

Earlier, Leonardo da Vinci had stated that to him it seemed "impossible for 

any memory to retain all the aspects or changes of any member of any animal 

whatsoever.". 14 A hand, foot or an arm can have many appearances, or as he 

writes: 

The attitudes of the head and arms are infinite in number and so I shall not undertake 

to give any rule for them, but simply say that they should be easy and agreeable with 

different inclinations, and the joints that are there should be united intelligently, so 

that they will not seem to be pieces of wood.". 15


Fig. 9. 

This method of constructing a figure from its parts was in fact, as I have already 

explained, a continuation of fourteenth-century practice. 16 One can compare this 

method to baking a cake from a commercial mix, which is only a matter of 

mixing the contents of the prepared packets in the fight order. But if one were 

asked to bake cakes of varying flavors he would need more and more packets to 

satisfy gourmet tastes. That is probably why there was an increase in model 

drawings and drawing manuals containing parts of figures. But this was neither 

the most economical nor the most successful way of drawing figures. As every 

cook knows (or should know), if one wants to vary and refine dishes one should 

use separate ingredients instead of ready-made packets. This same logic applies 

to rendering figures, and indeed, like good cooks, some artists and theoreticians 

seem to have realized this. They drew attention to another way of constructing 

the human figure, namely employing much smaller ingredients than ready-made 

limbs. This was a completely new way of drawing, which facilitated the 

invention of figures in all conceivable attitudes and poses and made it possible 

to draw them from memory.


Fig. 9 + 10. Attributed to Pomarancio, Soldiers (details from preparatory drawings for 

unknown frescoes), second quarter of the 16th century, 269 x 162 mm., resp 248 x 171 

mm. (whole drawing), Oxford, Christ Church. 

This insight had its inception at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Alberti 

(c.1404-1472) was the first to point out that a figure was to be seen as composed 

of much smaller parts than the torso, head, arms and legs. He based his opinion 

on a mathematical theory concerning human perception which he unfolds in the 

first book of his little treatise on painting, De Pictura. According to Alberti, in 

the real world three-dimensional forms are apprehensible to our eye as construc- 

tions of units and sub-units, each being visually perceptible as a unit because of 

the relationship of the light beams it reflects. 17 Alberti describes the figure as a 

hierarchical construction (in decreasing magnitude) of limbs, surfaces, lines and 

dots. Alberti's theory is simple yet lucid and it concerns perception as well as 

drawing. 18 A painter who is familiar with mathematics is able to deceive the eye 

of the beholder by constructing an illusion with the aid of drawn dots, lines and 

surfaces: thin lines can be perceptually interpreted as the real outlines of a 

tangible form. 19 

From a number of fifteenth-century drawings we can tell that even before 

artists began to seriously study human anatomy, they must already have hit upon


the idea of composing a figure from tiny movable sections as a better way of 

creating lifelike and varied attitudes (Figure 11). When working by this method, 

which I call the interrupted, or broken drawing method, the contour is divided 

into line segments. 2° 

Fig, 11. Antonio Rossellino or Desiderio da Settignano, Putti, second quarter of the 15th 

century, pen and ink, Florence, Uffizi. 

Although, compared to modern theories, Alberti's ideas on the perception of 

form may not sound very sophisticated, they are anything but naive. Experi- 

ments on the so-called 'saccadic eye movements' have shown that lines or 

contours do play an important part in our recognition of forms. These rapid 

unconscious eye movements allow the fovea to move across the visual field and 

fix the eye repeatedly on one point. These movements turn out to be directed 

primarily at the locations manifesting the strongest transitions in light intensity, 

that is, the outlines. 21 

Now an artist whose aim it was to invent varied attitudes had to know all the 

units and sub-units, as well as the rules that govern their various arrangements. 

The problem was to find the right points where one line segment stops and a 

new one starts; in other words where the contour changes its direction. This 

made artists search for a standard by which to assess the correct interrelation- 

ships and arrangements of these parts. From the last quarter of the fifteenth 

century onward they found it in the study of human anatomy. 

Again, modern research into visual perception affords us some insight into the 

practical usefulness of the study of anatomy. It seems that our eye movements


are attracted not only to contour lines but especially to the angles formed within 

them. In an easy but effective experiment the contours of a cat are selected 

wherever they meet to form a sharp angle. The selected thirty-eight angles are 

then transferred to a drawing and connected by straight lines, resulting in a 

recognizable picture. The two authors from whom I borrow this example 

conclude "that angles and other informative details are the features selected by 

the brain for remembering and recognizing an object". 22 1 think this conclusion 

is even more convincing if one does not draw the connecting lines but only the 

angles: particularly when you look at the paper while fluttering your eyelids you 

still recognize the drawing as a picture of a cat (Figure 12). 

J 

r% 

( J 

k.._ j 

Fig. 12. Picture of a cat. After Noton and Stark (see note 22). 

One could construct a recognizable picture of a human figure in a similar way. 

As an experiment I divided the contour of the Farnese Hercules, the famous 

classical sculpture, into line segments which indicate the changes in direction 

(Figure 13a). After this I rearranged the points of intersection at which the 

angles were formed. Without having a real life model and, I must confess, with 

only a poor and very general knowledge of human anatomy, I here and there 

changed the length and the curvature of the lines between the points. This 

resulted in a recognizable figure in another position (Figure 13b). Of course this 

drawing is aesthetically worthless. Nevertheless it makes manifest the advantage 

of this new drawing method. What I have done is very much similar to the way 

Antonio Campi, for example, tried out two different poses in which to represent 

the fallen St. Paul (Figure 14). One only has to recall the 'ancient' method Orsi 

used (Figures 6 and 7) to recognize the difference. 

Thus the study of anatomy taught the artist that the contours of a real body are 

determined by its muscles. When the muscles move, their relationship to one 

another is altered. This does not mean that at the stage of inventing or designing 

f


f 

,/)z


Fig. 14. Antonio Carnpi, The Conversion of St. Paul, 1564, pen and ink, 144 x 181 mm., 

Venice, Gallerie dell'Academia. 

a figure, artists always aspired to an anatomically accurate representation. The 

interrupted drawing method had rather a more structural or grammatical 

similarity to anatomy, as it was primarily concerned with the possibility of 

varying the positions of the body. This is especially exemplified by the drawings 

of Raphael, for example, his famous study of the Virgin and Child in the British 

Museum, and by the beautiful drawings of Tintoretto (Figure 15). 

Alberti stated that artists should learn figure drawing in the same manner as 

they did a style of handwriting. 23 I think Alberti was referring to italic script, a 

way of forming letters that was invented at the beginning of the fifteenth century 

and used by Alberti himself. In my opinion, Alberti was talking about a more 

basic connection between these two skills than Giacomo Franco did later. 

Thanks to modern research, we know a little bit about the complex mechanisms 

of human motor development and hand-and-eye coordination. Combined with 

art-historical knowledge about the way Renaissance artists were trained, this 

research elucidates to some extent the nature of the new skill at which Alberti in


Fig. 15. Jacopo Tintoretto, Man with a child, black chalk, 334 x 225 mm., Rotterdam, 

Museum Boymans-van Beuningen. 

fact was already hinting. Of course he did not have the advantage of twentieth- 

century research, but one does not necessarily have to know exactly how a 

mechanism works in order to explore its potential. 24 

The learning process for both italic script and figure drawing began in the 

fifteenth century with one line, meaning one movement. With practice artists 

and calligraphers were to learn how to make this movement automatically and to 

use it as a basis upon which to develop a complex skill. By first dividing an 

action into small increments we can learn how to make ever more complicated 

or composite movements that require little or no further mental effort. A penman 

learns to make letters and words automatically from essentially identical curves 

ordered in a specific way. 25 With practice the execution of movements can 

become a conditioned reflex; our 'mind' is thereby free to consider the follow- 

ing stages of the activity concerned before they are implemented. It is in the 

same manner, I believe, that a draftsman learns to form the contours of a figure 

by joining curved line segments. As I have demonstrated above, an artist capable


of drawing the Farnese Hercules by heart would have memorized those points in 

the contour that mark the beginning and the end of the muscles. These are the 

locations he needs to remember: they function respectively as the points of 

initiation and termination for the movement of his hand. A drawing of a torso 

viewed from the back by Jacopo Zanguidi, called il Bertoja, for example, is 

composed of separate and sometimes linked strokes of the pen (Figure 16). 

Fig. 16. Jacopo Zanguidi, called il Bertoia, Figure seen from the back (detail), pen and 

ink, 369 x 228 mm. (whole drawing), London, British Museum. 

Neither the exact speed nor the order of the movements can ever be 

reconstructed. But a close examination of the drawing creates the impression 

that the artist very probably did not have to think consciously about every detail 

of every movement he made: in fact Jacopo Zanguidi thought only about where 

to begin and end his elementary curves. The way the few lines which describe 

the right buttock are joined together without the pen ever having to leave the 

paper - very much like the fluent linking of letters in italic handwriting - 

suggests that these are the tracings of a few basic movements combined 

immediately by practice and routine into a specific order. Sketches like this one 

therefore still reflect the learning process. During the course of the sixteenth 

century the calligraphic elegance which had originally been a side effect of this 

style of drawing became an aesthetic quality in its own right for which artists 

consciously strove (Figure 17). 26 

Just as in handwriting, lots of practice - which in this case primarily involved


Fig. 17. Anonymous, Figures, heads and limbs, pen and ink, 142 x 323 ram., Besan~on, 

Mus6e des Beaux-Arts et d'Arch6ologie. 

the study of human anatomy - could eventually give an artist an entirely free 

hand to concentrate on the expressiveness of the figural pose instead of on the 

mechanics of his own hand movements. As Vasari wrote in his short treatise on 

learning the art of drawing, 

the best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by 

constant exercise the muscles of the torso, back, legs, arms, and knees, with the bones 

underneath. Then one may be sure that through much study attitudes in any position 

can be drawn by help of the imagination without one's having the living forms in 

view.". 27 

As I stated at the beginning of this article, in Vasari's opinion, it was this 

proficiency that finally made it possible to invent a narrative containing groups 

of people. 

The advantage of the interrupted drawing method, like that of italic script, 

was and still is enormous: the more dextrous we become, the more freedom we 

have to direct our thoughts toward the content of the drawing or text. Yet 

learning to write script or make a drawing in this manner was not a matter of 

course but rather an extremely innovative development. Like italic script, the 

interrupted drawing method was a new and very succesful invention of the 

Renaissance. It was however not employed by all artists. According to Ar- 

menini, whom I quoted above, many artists found learning this method too time- 

consuming. Why not make use of ready-made, successful examples if these 

were readily available? The examples Armenini was thinking of were figures 

from classical statuary, after the works of Raphael (1483-1520), Michelangelo 

(1475-1564) and the now relatively lesser-known but once very famous 

Polidoro da Caravaggio (c.1499-1543). 28 On this point he was diametrically 

opposed to Vincenzio Danti, author of another treatise on the art of drawing 

which dates from 1567. Danti thought that only a thorough and extensive study 

of anatomy could insure reasonable proficiency in drawing. 29 Armenini, 

however, described a technique that was frequently employed alongside the


interrupted drawing method. 

In paintings we can see that Armenini's method was often used. The 

sixteenth-century viewer was however surely not expected to do so. In the 

quotation given above, Armenini advised the painter to conceal his technique, 

just as Vasari, in his life of Battista Franco, had done when he defined a good 

painting as one "in which the things borrowed from others" - that is, figures and 

body parts - "[were] so treated as not to be easily recognized.". 3° 

Perhaps Armenini was right when he said that this method required less 

training and perhaps it was more efficient in most cases. In my opinion there 

must nevertheless have been another artistic reason for the endurance of this 

method. Since the Renaissance the ability to depict lifelike figures had become 

an important subject of artistic competition. It therefore follows that painting 

more figures would have meant a greater demonstration of skill. In fact, a 

predilection for turning "compositions into veritable 'shop-windows' full of 

figures", as Stumpel has stated, manifested itself during the sixteenth century. 3t 

Painters at that time were also required to display their skill in combining 

figures to create a persuasive narrative. But in this regard the power to convince 

not only depended on the ability to render a pictorial illusion. Illusion is only 

one requisite of persuasiveness, a good design to guide the eye of the beholder 

on a fiat surface is another important element. The more figures there are, the 

more complicated is the task of making a good design (unless, of course, chaos 

is desired). The persistence of Armenini's method should perhaps be understood 

in this context; while torsos, arms and legs are the units from which figures are 

constructed, they also turned out to be very useful as building blocks upon 

which to base the entire composition. I think that Smyth was correct when in his 

famous article he remarked that in Mannerist paintings, "the compositional units 

are the body's members". 32 He did not go into this matter any further; I myself 

hope to adress it on another occasion. 

NOTES 

This article is a summary of the central thesis of my dissertation Sporen van vaar- 

digheid. De ontwerpmethode voor de figuurhouding in de Italiaanse tekenkunst van de 

renaissance, Abcoude 1991, which was published only in Dutch. I would like to thank 

A.Gasten for her help in translating the text of this article. 

2 An important exception is of course the work of E. H. Gombrich, in particular his book 

Art and illusion. A study in the paychology of pictorial representation, London 1960. See 

also J. Stumpel, The province of painting. Theories of Italian Renaissance art, Utrecht 

1990. 

3 Translation taken from L. B. Alberti, On painting, trans. C. Grayson; introduction and 

notes by M. Kemp, London 1991, p. 88. For the Latin version, see L. B. Alberti, 'De 

Pictura', Opera volgari, vol. 3, ed. C. Grayson, Rome & Bari 1973, p. 93. 

4 Translation (slightly altered) taken from G. Vasari, The lives of the painters, sculptors 

and architects, vol. 1, trans. A. B. Hinds, ed. W. Gaunt, New York 1980, p. 186. For the 

Italian version, see G. Vasari, Levite de'piu ecceUenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. 

G. Milanesi, 9 vols., Florence 1981 (facsimile of the 1906 edition), vol. 2, p. 11.


5 G. Vasari, Vite, ibid., vol. 1, pp. 168-169. 

6 Translation taken from G. Vasari, Vasari on Technique, trans. L. S. Maclehose, New 

York 1960, p. 210. For the Italian version, see G. Vasari, Vite, op. cir. (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 

172-173. 

7 Ibid. 

8 It was especially F. Zuccaro who stated in his L'ldea de'Pittori, ScuItori e Architetti 

from 1607 that for all human activities man needs a mental blueprint ('disegno interno'). 

On this theory, see G. Kieft, 'Zuccari, Scaligero e Panofsky', Mitteilungen des Kunsthis- 

torischen Institutes in Florenz 33 (1989) nr. 2-3, pp. 355-368. 

9 E.H. Gombrich, op. cir. (note 2), chap. 5; J. Bolten, Method and practice. Dutch and 

Flemish drawing books 1600-1750, Landau 1985; H. Dickel, Deutsche Zeichenbiicher 

des Barock. Eine Studie zur Geschichte der KiinstIerausbildung, Hildesheim, Z~irich & 

New York 1987. For the Renaissance tradition of drawing the classical torso, see P. van 

den Akker, op. cit. (note 1), chap. 8. 

10 Auct. cat. The life of Taddeo Zuccaro by Federico Zuccaro, from the collection of the 

British Rail Pension Fund, New York (Sotheby's), 11-1-1990, intr. and cat. entries by 

J.A. Gere, esp. cat. nr. 9. On the place this drawing occupies within the series and the 

learning process it reflects, see also P. van den Akker, op. cit. (note 1), chap. 1. 

~1 D. Rosand, 'The Crisis of the Venetian Renaissance Tradition', L'Arte 11 (1970) hr. 

12, pp. 5-53, esp. p. 13. 

12 Translation taken from G. B. Armenini, On the true precepts of the art of painting, 

trans, and ed. E. J. Olzewski, New York 1977, pp. 149-150. For the Italian version, see 

G. B. Armenini, De' veri precetti della pittura, libri tre, (facsimile of the 1587 edition), 

Hildesheim & New York 1971, p. 78. 

13 G. Vasari, Vite, op. cit (note 4), vol. 6, pp. 579-580. 

14 L. da Vinci, Treatise on painting [Codex Urbinas Latinum 1270], 2 vols., trans, and 

annot. A. P. McMahon, intr. L. H. Heydenreich, Princeton 1956, vol. 1, p. 138 (par. 363); 

vol. 2, p. 130 recto. 

15 Ibid., vol. 1,145 (par. 382); vol.2, 114 recto. 

J6 There were of course important differences, for example that the parts now had to 

appear naturalistic and later on had to have the touch of classical art, and that a much 

larger repertoire of the various body parts was required. But the principle remained the 

same. 

17 L.B. Alberti, 'De Pictura', op. cit. (note 3), vol. 3, pp. 5-107 and pp. 299-340. 

18 Leonardo da Vinci later made similar statements, op. cit. (note 13), vol. 1, p. 4 (par. 3); 

vol. 2, p. 1 verso. 

19 L.B. Alberti, 'De Pictura', op. cit. (note 3), vol. 3, p.28. 

20 p. van den Akker, op. cit. (note 1), chaps. 4 and 6. 

21 See for example P. Morasso, 'Understanding cursive script as a trajectory formation 

paradigm', in Graphonomics. Advances in psychology. Contemporary research in 

handwriting, eds. H.S.R. Kao, G. van Galen, and R. Hoosain, Amsterdam 1986, pp. 

137-167. 

22 D. Noton and L. Stark, 'Eye Movements and Visual Perception', Scientific American 

(june, 1971), pp. 34-43. See also I. Biederman, 'Recognition-by-components: a theory of 

human image understanding', Psychological Review 94 (1987) nr. 2, pp. 115-147. 

23 L.B. Alberti, 'De Pictura', op. cir. (note 3), vol. 3, p. 94. 

24 See P. van den Akker, op. cit. (note 1), chaps. 5-7. 

25 j. Denier van der Gon, 'Spontaneity in Motor Expression and the Art of Playing the 

Spinal C(h)ord', in Authentication in the visual arts. A multi-disciplinary symposium, 

Amsterdam, 12th March ]977, eds. H.L.C. Jaffr, J. Storm van Leeuwen and L. H. van der 

Tweel, Amsterdam 1979, pp. 93-102; see also Kao et. al., op. cit. (note 20). 

26 See P. van den Akker, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 167-170. 

27 Translation taken from G. Vasari, Vasari on Technique, op. cit. (note 6), p. 210. For 

the Italian version, see G. Vasari, Vite (note 4), vol. 1, pp. 172-173.


28 Armenini, op. cit. (note 11), esp. chaps. 7 and 8. 

29 V. Danti, 'I1 primo libro del trattato delle perfette proporzioni di tutte le cose che 

imitare e ritrarre si possano con l'arte del disegno', P. Barocchi, Trattati d'arte del 

cinquecentofra manierismo e controriforma, Bari 1960, vol. 1, pp. 207-269. 

30 G. Vasari, Vite, op. cit (note 4), vol. 6, p. 580. Translation taken from G. Vasari, The 

Lives, op. cit (note 4), vol. 4, p. 19. 

31 j. Stumpel, 'Speaking of Manner. Maniera and its meanings', op. cit (note 2), p. 125. 

32 C.H. Smyth, 'Mannerism and Maniera', in The Renaissance and Mannerism. Studies 

in western Art: Acts of the twentieth international congress of the history of Art, vol.2, 

Princeton, New Jersey, 1963, p. 183. Smyth, however, seems to face the question of 

composition and style primarily as a perceptual one and not, as I believe Stumpel rightly 

claims (see note 2), as a problem of construction.

Out of disegno invention is born” — Drawing a ...

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