The Function of Drawings; Italian Renaissance Drawing: Design, Form and Function

We will demonstrate how behind every great Renaissance painting is an equally astounding drawing. Artists were judged firstly not by the quality of their paintings, but by their skill in drawing. We will bring together some of those paintings with their accompanying drawings to demonstrate the importance of drawing upon the Renaissance without which there could be no Renaissance. You will examine how these, at first purely functional objects, were made and how they would eventually be regarded as works of art in their own right.

Drawings were used in a variety of ways to create paintings and sculpture but how they achieved this varied. You will look at the clues that show us how the various techniques facilitated the transfer of ideas in drawings to finished works, including the patron’s influence and how this affected the drawing and works derived from it.