Renaissance Drawing: Inspiration Needs Preparation

The head of a youth, attributed to Pietro Faccini, c.1590 King's Gallery

I recently attended a fascinating exhibition of Renaissance drawing. (‘Drawing the Italian Renaissance’ is at The King’s Gallery, London until 9 March.)

Drawing became widespread in Italy in the 1400s, as the cost of paper fell and as new materials like chalk became available. It was the basis for artistic study, a fundamental of preparatory practice and a means of exploring ideas. 

The exhibition features 160 drawings - by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and many others. There are tender portraits of unknown sitters; fearsome sketches of imaginary grotesques; precise explorations of costume and drapery; of character, posture and attitude. There are designs for small devotional images, altarpieces and wall paintings; allegories and scenes from ancient myths. We can see Leonardo’s studies of horses, Parmigianino’s dogs and Titian’s ostrich. Here’s Michelangelo’s black chalk drawing of The Risen Christ, reaching in exultation to the sky; and Raphael’s sensitive sketch of one naked woman in three poses - preparation for a fresco of the Three Graces. He was one of the few Renaissance artists to work from female models.

We can also inspect large drawings known as cartoons (from the Italian ‘cartone’, meaning ‘large sheet of paper’), final designs to be transferred to an altarpiece or wall. This was done by pricking outlines and rubbing powdered charcoal or dust across the back of the sheet; or by working with a squared grid to enable further enlargement. Cartoons are particularly precious because they were made with poor quality paper and often discarded after use.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Studies of a horse, c 1490
ROYAL COLLECTION ENTERPRISES LIMITED 2024/ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST

I was very much taken with Leonardo’s restless, curious mind. He sketched to develop his ideas on anatomy, botany, water and avian flight. He drafted a bird’s eye view of western Tuscany; a bear’s foot; a dog captaining a sailing boat with an oak tree for a mast. He drew human and animal dissections; filled pages with sketches of vivacious domestic cats, caged lions and sinister dragons. He was constantly looking to understand the physical world, drawing for pleasure as well as for research.

We learn that early paper was made from shredded clothing rags (linen and hemp). Artists could work in metalpoint, employing a lead or silver stylus. They could draw with black, red or white chalk, cut into small pieces and wedged into the end of a split stick – sharpening the chalk to a point for fine lines. Or they could employ charcoal (carbonised wood), less precise but more durable, soaking sticks in linseed oil to produce a richer colour. There was also black ink, applied with goose feather quills or a fine brush of squirrel hair. 

Bernardino Campi, The Virgin and Child (c.1570-80), which is in the exhibition at The King’s Gallery
CREDIT: © ROYAL COLLECTION ENTERPRISES LIMITED 2024/ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST

Shortly before his death in 1564, at the age of 88, Michelangelo ordered that many of his drawings be destroyed in two bonfires. Writing a few years after, the biographer Giorgio Vasari explained that the artist didn't want people to see the labour that had gone into his art. 

We may recognise this instinct in contemporary creative professions – the desire to suggest that inspiration is effortless and instinctive; that ideas arrive magically, fully formed.

But experienced heads know that success derives from exploration and experimentation; from trial and error; from drafting, planning and plotting; from hours of deep thought and hard work.

Inspiration needs preparation.

'Intuition is given only to him who has undergone long preparation to receive it.’
Louis Pasteur

Head of a Cleric c. 1448
Metalpoint on prepared ochre surface, heightened with white, 189 x 173 mm. Royal Library, Windsor

Of course, once we’re properly primed and rigorously rehearsed, we can afford to be more cavalier in our execution. One drawing by Paolo Farinati is inscribed with instructions. The figures, when transferred to the walls of the patron’s villa, should be roughly 3 feet high, but ‘You may do as you fancy when you are on the scaffolding.’

'I been reading my old journals,
Checking to see where my head has been.
And I been apologizing to some people,
Some bridges I needed to mend.
And I been eating more greens,
Getting my body out the line.
I'm gonna be super fine.
And I been letting some old ideas go.
I'm making room for my life to grow.
I just wanna be prepared.
I just wanna be prepared.
Getting myself ready
For what's comin' for me.
I just wanna be prepared.’

Jill Scott, ‘Prepared’ (A Harris / D Farris / J Scott)

No. 505

Yevonde: ‘Be Original or Die’

Joan Maude by Yevonde (1932). © National Portrait Gallery, London

'Be original or die would be a good motto for photographers to adopt.’
Yevonde

I recently attended an exhibition of the work of photographer Yevonde. (‘Life and Colour’ is at The National Portrait Gallery, London until 15 October.)

Yevonde captured the Bright Young Things of British Society between the wars. She was the first British photographer to exhibit colour portraits. She shot with style and a light touch, and her images were laced with classical and surreal flourishes. She celebrated beauty, personality, modernity  - and, above all, vibrant, thrilling, luminous colour. 

‘In no phase of modern life has women’s influence proved so stimulating as in photography.’

Yevonde Cumbers was born into a wealthy family in Streatham in 1893. She was educated at progressive schools in England, France and Belgium. Having joined the Suffragette movement, she was prompted by an ad in the newspaper Votes for Women to apply for a job at a portrait photographer’s. After a three-year apprenticeship, and with a gift of £250 from her father, at the age of 21 she set up her own London studio - styling herself Yevonde, or sometimes Madame Yevonde.

‘I took up photography with the definite purpose of making myself independent.’

Yevonde photographed society figures and stage stars, debutantes and dowagers. While her pictures were carefully staged and lit, her approach was informal and witty. This was the golden age of the illustrated press and her work often appeared in magazines like The Tatler and The Sketch. As she gained recognition, she increasingly took advertising commissions too. 

Orchids by Yevonde © National Portrait Gallery, London

‘In almost any other job I must have failed, but by great good luck I had adopted an art-trade-profession-science that, like myself, was not properly ‘grown up.’ I was carried along by a demand which exceeded the supply of the commodity.’

In the early 1930s Yevonde began experimenting with colour photography, using the new Vivex process. This technology employed three negative plates (cyan, magenta and yellow) exposed through a ‘one-shot’ camera and processed separately. Colour photography was frowned upon by the establishment at the time, but she embraced it with gusto. 

‘[Colour photography] has no history, no tradition, no old masters, but only a future!’ 

Red-haired actor Joan Maude is shot in a crimson shawl against a scarlet screen; painter Cathleen Mann, hand on hip, wears a salmon-pink jacket and cloche hat; film star Vivien Leigh, in a cornflower coat, stares into the distance with piercing ice-blue eyes. A model in a bright marmalade and marigold dress, with matching bonnet, clasps a bouquet of yellow orchids. These portraits are vivid, radiant, intense.

Dorothy Emily Evelyn (née Whittall), Lady Campbell as Niobe, Vivex colour print, June 1935 © Yevonde Portrait Archive

Yevonde’s women are surrounded by eye-catching props - flowers, frames and masks. They wear bold shades of lipstick and nail varnish; striking styles of jewellery. 

For her series ‘Goddesses’ Yevonde photographed society women in classical costumes and fantastical settings. Dido is bathed in eerie blue light. Niobe is shot close-up, her azure eyes shedding tears of misery. Minerva, in primrose silk gown, wears a helmet and carries a revolver.

‘There must be arrangement, elimination, imagination.’

Yevonde’s images reveal the changing fashions of the time - shorter hair, dropped waistlines, looser fits - as well as growing female independence. While we sometimes see women engaged in domestic tasks, they are also cycling, smoking, relaxing on the beach. Racing driver Jill Scott sports vermilion overalls, shoes and cap. Artist Natalie Sieveking regards us with casual confidence. A bespectacled debutante in a caramel dress reclines on a sofa engrossed in a scholarly tome.

A Day in the Life of a Debutante: An hour's serious reading (Betty Cowell) by Yevonde © National Portrait Gallery, London

‘The duties of a wife with a separate career have yet to be defined, and although complete unselfishness has always been considered a sure foundation for domestic happiness, I am not convinced.’

In 1939 the Vivex process went out of service and, with the constraints of World War 2, Yevonde returned to working in black and white. She continued to produce portraits and to experiment - in still life fantasies, montage and Solarisation. In 1968 she staged an exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of women’s right to vote. She worked up until her death at the age of 82 in 1975.

Yevonde teaches us to pursue our careers with passion and to embrace new technology with vigour. She also reminds us that colour can be exhilarating, startling, dazzling.

'If we are going to have colour photographs, for heaven’s sake let’s have a riot of colour, none of your wishy washy hand tinted effects.'

Yevonde with Vivex One-Shot Camera, by Yevonde, 1937, © National Portrait Gallery, London

'Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead end street,
Faster than the wind, passionate as sin, ending so suddenly.
Loving him is like trying to change your mind,
Once you're already flying through the free fall.
Like the colors in autumn, so bright, just before they lose it all.
Losing him was blue, like I'd never known.
Missing him was dark grey, all alone.
Forgetting him was like trying to know
Somebody you never met.
But loving him was red,
Loving him was red.’
Taylor Swift, ‘Red'

No. 428