Demystifying Drawings #18
Saturday, 1 March 2025. Newsletter 18.
Lines of Connection: Drawing and Printmaking 1400-1850
With Edina Adam and Jamie Gabbarelli
While often viewed and studied separately, drawings and prints have always been closely intertwined. They facilitated and generated the production of one another, and in some instances, clear distinctions between the two dissolved. Many artists created drawings specifically intended for translation into print, and an even greater number used prints as a training tool, copying from them to hone drawing skills. This reciprocal relationship goes even deeper, however, as innovative artists made fascinating hybrid works that blurred the boundaries between the two media, pushing against modern definitions and hierarchies.
Lines of Connection charts these historical and geographical continuities for the first time by bringing together works on paper of superb quality, foregrounding issues of artistic process and collaboration, technical innovation, and creative ingenuity. Featuring over 170 prints and drawings by such artists as Albrecht Dürer, Parmigianino, Hendrick Goltzius, Maria Sibylla Merian, Rembrandt van Rijn, and William Blake, this catalogue is a rich narrative introduction to the compelling, yet understudied, relationship between drawing and printmaking.
Hendrick Goltzius, Study of a Right Hand, 1588. Teylers Museum, Haarlem, N 058
Like the relationship between draughtsman and printmaker, this catalogue has been a collaborative effort between two specialists with intertwined skillsets. How did this collaboration enhance your understanding of the subject and what new lines of enquiry did it open?
[JG] Collaborating with each other made us constantly look at the material from a different perspective and reevaluate our initial ideas. For instance, I’ve spent a lot of time learning and thinking about printmaking techniques, their challenges, temporality, and the types of physical movement they involved, but I hadn’t devoted as much attention to how they compared or related to drawing. Including that perspective was eye-opening in both ‘directions’.
As a reference point for the project, which work most succinctly encapsulates the complexity and reciprocity of the relationship between drawing and printmaking, and how does it underscore the importance of discussing the two artforms together?
[JG] There are many great works we could choose! The two drawings of a hand by Hendrick Goltzius are perhaps the most emblematic of the complex relationship between these two media. Goltzius made a calligraphic drawing of a right hand using the visual vocabulary of engraving, and not just any type of engraved hatching, but the elegant system that he himself developed for his technically refined prints. We think that the drawing is Goltzius’s meditation on the intersection of his two principal artistic practices: on the close visual correspondence they can achieve, and at the same time on the profoundly divergent physical experience of producing similar marks in different media. As a supremely talented draftsman and innovative engraver, Goltzius was in the ideal position to reflect upon this relationship. And of course, we love that the drawing exists in two almost identical versions, because the two sheets challenge the conventional understanding of drawing as a unique work. [EA] But let’s not forget about the drawing after Lucas van Leyden’s engraving of a pilgrim family, which was created as a substitute for the impression of the print already rare in the seventeenth century. To approximate the model, the draughtsman behind this work, not only copied its model line by line, but also ran the sheet through a press to create a plate mark. As a result, the drawing was mistaken for a print multiple times, and until very recently it was accessioned as an engraving in the Rijksmuseum.
You adopt the vocabulary of translation studies to describe the relationship between printmaking and drawing. Could you unpack the significance of this choice and how it allowed you to recontextualise the relationship?
[EA] Translation studies allowed us to think about the topic in a holistic manner. For one, treating the process of turning a drawing into a print and vice versa, a translation emphasizes the move from one medium to another and underscores the changes that take place in the process. We also borrowed some basic concepts from translation studies, including different modes of translation and types of correspondence to characterise the relationship between individual objects. Already Roman orators differentiate two basic approaches to translation: one that focuses on formal correspondence and another that strives for a functional one. When looking at a pair of objects, let’s say, Van Sichem’s woodcut after Goltzius’s Portrait of a Man in the Getty, we see the printmaker-connoisseur attempting to formally match his source, instead of interpreting the draughtsman’s shorthand indicating the background architecture or the mantle’s fur trim, he makes his marks identical to the drawn ones. In contrast, Anton Maria Zanetti, the 18th-century collector and amateur printmaker, created chiaroscuro woodcuts after Parmigianino drawings that he owned, but took a great deal of liberty in his translations, filling in and ‘completing’ sketched compositions and experimenting with colour palettes that were foreign to the early sixteenth century.
Peter Paul Rubens and Paulus Pontius, The Assumption of the Virgin, about 1624. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 98.GG.14
Edina, you note that 19th century notions of ‘originality’ led to the emergence of a hierarchy which prioritised drawings over prints. To readdress this comparatively modern phenomenon, you propose to exchange loaded terms such as “reproductive prints” with more neutral ones like “interpretative modelli”. Could you expand on the significance of language and this semantic rebalance.
[EA] Print scholarship is bedeviled by terms that both reflect and reinforce historical prejudices and value judgements in ways that we thought hinder fresh reinterpretations. So we made a conscious effort to avoid terms that reinforced perceived hierarchies and use a more nuanced vocabulary to describe the phenomena we were observing. For instance, we introduced the term “interpretative modelli” for drawings like Paulus Pontius and Peter Paul Rubens’s Assumption of the Virgin to differentiate them from drawings that are created to protect the modelli in the process of transfer. Scholarly literature, like Michael Bury’s excellent catalogue The Print in Italy, uses the term “intermediary drawing” to describe these two types of objects. We settled on the term “interpretative modelli” to acknowledge that these drawings themselves are translations–they take a painted, a sculpted source and transform them into a drawn model that can facilitate the making of a print.
Jamie, you chart the evolution of prints which were made to mimic the appearance of drawings and serve as indexes for those specific objects. What significance do these kinds of prints hold for the history of drawings and drawings collections?
[JG] The topic of printed imitations of drawings is huge, but delving into it made me fully appreciate just how important this genre of prints was to early modern connoisseurs and collectors. Nowadays, in our seamlessly photographic age, prints after drawings are mostly thought of (it at all) as a technical curiosity, a niche subject in the history of printmaking. But this type of print developed in lockstep with the collecting of drawings: they were mutually sustaining phenomena. Prints after drawings made information about works in private collections available to a broad audience, and enhanced the prestige of collectors (the famous, deluxe Cabinet Crozat is just one example), introducing at the same time the notion of the value of provenance. They allowed collectors and amateurs to remotely discuss questions of style, contributing significantly to the growth of connoisseurship (for instance Gabburri correctly questioned the attribution of a drawing he knew only through its translation in print). In some cases they brought together multiple examples of drawings by the same artist in ways that were not possible in a single collection, thereby solidifying the notion of an artist’s oeuvre. It is not surprising, therefore, that the first illustrated histories of art in Europe contain printed translations of drawings. These prints not only played a significant role in the development of art history, but were also intimately involved in artistic training, in both a formal academic context and in private practice. Crayon manner prints produced in Paris, for example, were sent to drawing academies in smaller centres, while artists avidly collected prints after drawings as materials for their training – to learn from and engage with the works of past masters.
Lucas Cranach the Elder, Saint Jerome in Penitence, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Clarence Buckingham Collection
Jost Amman after Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Penitent Saint Jerome, Metropolitan Museum, New York, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 2008
Edina, you dedicate an entire chapter to ‘Drawings from Prints’, and a subsection to imitations as deception. How did the educational practice of imitating prints potentially feed into more nefarious practices by artists and later owners.
[EA] Imitating a print was a popular way of displaying one’s skills as a draughtsman. In the exhibition we have Jost Amman’s The Penitent St. Jerome after the woodcut by Lucas von Cranach the Elder. Amman, who was in his late teens when he executed this work, carefully traced Cranach’s composition then replicated the linework in pen and ink. While the drawing might have briefly deceived the viewer, the budding artist included small details that distinguished his drawing from the print (such as the coats of arms in the upper left) and called attention to his authorship (his monogram in the open tome). Forgeries were usually created using the same method but in contrast to virtuoso copies their ‘success’ depended upon the viewer never realising the deception. An exciting example we cite in the catalogue is a drawing from the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest that was made after facsimile of the so-called Buxheim Saint Christopher, a 15th-century woodcut, a printed imitation of which was published in a journal in 1776. But how do we know that this drawing is a “nefarious imitation” and not a substitute for a rare impression like the Rijksmuseum’s drawing after Lucas van Leyden? For one, it was sold to the collector Nicholas Esterházy as a print shortly after it was made. The counterfeiter also used a sheet that bears a common fifteenth-century watermark.
Jamie, you provide an overview of the elusive topic of ‘hybrid’ works, where monotypes, touched-up counterproofs and hand-coloured prints defy neat categorisation and blur the boundaries between the two media. How did these creative experiments foster invention and artistic expression?
[JG] The section on hybrids is both broad and diverse. I think one of the takeaways for me from the study of these works was that early modern artists didn’t necessarily think of their practice in terms of strict categories. Great artists are often curious and attracted to explore the expressive potential of the tools and materials they have at their disposal. We still don’t know why exactly Castiglione started making monotypes (a type of object for which there was little or no precedent, and for which there was no obvious market), but we can understand how this new type of work arose in the studio of a radically experimental draftsman with access to a printing press. Draftsmen who worked in the proximity of printmakers began to make counterproofs very early on, embracing a new technique that took on a life of its own, stimulating innovation and experimentation (the complex use made of it by Hubert Robert and Jean-Robert Ango is emblematic). On the other hand, some artists intentionally created hybrid works as statements on intermediality. In this context, I see Joseph Wright’s Self-Portrait in black and white chalk as a profound reflection on his personal relationship to print, and in particular to mezzotint – the medium responsible for shaping his public reputation as an artist.
As a closing note, what do you hope readers will take away from this catalogue, and how do you hope future scholars might take these ideas forward.
[EA] This is just a first attempt at thinking about the relationship between drawing and printmaking in a more comprehensive and equitable manner. We hope that the exhibition and the catalogue will serve as a broad introduction to the topic, sparking conversations within the field and encouraging curators, art historians, and collectors to consider the two media inseparable rather than treating them in silos.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at The Art Institute of Chicago from March 15 to June 1, 2025 and at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from July 1 to September 14, 2025.
