Graphic Personality: Replica Drawings in Sixteenth-Century Italy

Jonathan Bober

Andrew W. Mellon Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings

National Gallery of Art

No sooner had a system and modality of drawing coalesced in late fifteenth-century Italy than individual examples were appreciated as autonomous works. Highly finished presentation drawings are the most conspicuous expression of this interest. Less developed studies were also exchanged between artists and pursued by discriminating patrons. It is possible to demonstrate the simultaneous emergence of a much larger category of autonomous drawing: autograph replicas of preparatory studies. Though seldom differentiated from copies, such replicas conveyed graphic personality in and of itself––the hand of the artist apart from context and other function––on an increasingly wide scale over the course of the sixteenth century. The type anticipated the flourishing of original etching in the seventeenth century. And it inaugurated the collecting of drawings according to the criterion that dominates to this day.