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by Francis Ames-Lewis.
New Haven & London: Yale University Press, U.S.A. 2000.
196 pp., illus. 101 b/w + 8 color, $27.50,
revised edition in paperback
ISBN 0-300-07981-8,
Reviewed by Wilfred Niels Arnold, Professor of Biochemistry, University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City, KS 66160-7421 U.S.A. E-mail: warnold@kumc.edu


The acceptance of drawing as a finished and free-standing art form took hold in Europe during the early fifteenth century and, by the turn into the next, crowds flocked into the studios of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) to admire their respective cartoons of "Virgin and Child with St. Anne" and "Battle of Cascina." Artists, architects and engineers from earlier times had obviously engaged in sketching and outlining as a means to an end in paintings, proposals or plans, but their preliminary efforts were either covered by pigments or enjoyed a limited life. The small number of pre-quattrocento drawings that survive has been attributed by Ames-Lewis to a relative lack of appreciation by connoisseurs. The scarcity and expense of good quality substrates (panels and paper) and the necessity for recycling were also at play.

The present volume abounds with fine quality reproductions of drawings by Filippo Lippi (1406?-1469), Giovanni Bellini (1430?-1516), Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), and Pietro Perugino (1446-1523?) to name a few. Drawing surfaces (parchment, vellum, paper), techniques (silverpoint, pen and ink, chalk, brush), and devices (cross-hatching, tonal-modulation) are explained in some detail in the text and a three-page glossary is complementary. Chapters on the place of the sketch-book, the evolutions of figure and compositional drawings, and an epilogue on the legacy of The Quattrocentro round out the book. A four-page bibliography is broken into sub-divisions including "Works on Drawing," "Museum and Exhibition Catalogues," and "Individual Draftsmen."

The index is useful although a notable absence is "perspective." Readers with an affinity for Leonardo Digital Reviews might be disappointed given the great advances in theory and application of three-dimensional rendering on a two-dimensional surface that were made during the fifteenth century. I was unable to find mention in appropriate chapters of the present book, not even under any of the three references to Albrecht DÄrer (1471-1528), who learnt from the Italian Masters but gave clarity and publicity to "perspective machines." A decade ago I described the influence of similar apparatus on Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). Last year, David Hockney rediscovered the camera lucida and, according to commentator Lawrence Weschler (New Yorker, January 31, 2000), continues to ponder the importance of mechanical devices for the old masters.

This book is a useful starting point for scholars and will be attractive in connection with focused graduate courses. Francis Ames-Lewis is professor of the history of renaissance art at Birbeck College, University of London.