between that which makes for form and that which would make for colour, and the result would generally be a confusion. Again, let one attempt to give red hair to a monochrome drawing of a man, and if the red be plain and unmistakable to all who are not the artist’s accomplices, then the artist has succeeded; otherwise it is bootless to treat of colour and colour values (which of course must depend upon the existence of colour) in monochrome. Apart from theory, if we examine the drawings, etchings and monochromes of great artists, where do we find them attempting to give colour or colour values? The hundreds of costume studies by Rembrandt might have been done from white plaster models, and there are only a few exceptions where a man has, for instance, a black hat or cloak. But in these few instances the “colour” tone is applied with such discretion that the true representation of the form is scarcely, perhaps only theoretically, impaired: they certainly have gained nothing in colour value because no specific colour is manifest in them. In Rembrandt’s, Claude’s or Turner’s drawings of landscapes the formation of the country, the architecture, &c., is expressed by line, light and shade, and enhanced by shadows cast from clouds and trees. If, in the drawings of masters, we should find objects darker or lighter than their position in the light would warrant, they have value (perhaps not quite a legitimate one) for balancing the composition as a flat pattern. They were never intended to suggest colour, nor do they. Yet, in spite of the failure to succeed, and contrary to logical argument and the practice of great draughtsmen, the student of most of the schools of Europe and America still persists in doing the hair dark, and, by attempting to give colour values to the clothes, breaks up the consistency of the whole. For the same reason that the sculptor uses uniformly coloured material in order that the natural light and shade may have full opportunity of making his forms manifest to the spectator, the draughtsman confines himself to giving light and shade only. If a monochrome has “colour tones,” the effect is similar to that produced by a draped statue made out of variously coloured marbles—an inartistic jumble.
As the immediate purpose and content of drawing there remains the representation of form only. Drawing is, therefore, essentially the same activity as sculpture, and has no additional scope. “Pupils,” says Donatello, “I give you the whole art of sculpture when I tell you to draw” (cited by Holroyd, Michel Angelo, p. 2 95), and the only practical teaching of drawing might be summed up by the inversion of the above.
Now if everything in nature—men, mountains or clouds—were as flat targets, i.e. two-dimensional, drawing could be legitimately reduced to a mechanical process,—to trace their contours upon a glass screen or even photograph them would be all that would be required. Indeed, provided the size of the drawing, the local colour and the texture be the same as those of the original, a complete illusion would be the result, in fact the proper end of one’s labours. But the presence of the third dimension in all objects causes light and shade, which in their turn bring about radical changes of the local colour, even in uniformly coloured objects. Now since drawing cannot suggest colour, local or atmospherical, any attempt to effect an illusion by a monochrome is at once defeated. If the end of drawing were to approach imitation or illusion as nearly as possible, how is it that a mere “sketch” by a master draughtsman can be for itself as valuable as his highly finished drawing? And surely a masterly outline drawing of a figure or landscape does not pretend to be an illusion. If then the draughtsman does not, and cannot hope to imitate nature, he is compelled to state only his ideas of it, ideas of three-dimensional form. For this reason only drawing must be treated as an art, and not as a mechanical act of getting an illusion.
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| (From a Greek vase in the British Museum (E. 46). |
(From Bulletino arch. Napol. (1843, tom. 1, tav. 7). |
(From a drawing by Michelangelo (1854, 5, 13, i.), Print Room, British Museum). |
| Fig. 1. | Fig. 2. | Fig. 3. |
It is interesting to trace in the history of an indigenous art the development of drawing that shall ultimately express ideas of three-dimensional form. Prof. Emanuel Loewy, in his Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art, demonstrates how the early Greek sculpture (and that of all primitive peoples, children and ungifted artists) shows an aversion from depth. Their reliefs are of the flattest description, almost raised contours, and their figures in the round have at first only one aspect, or flat façade, so to speak, then three and four aspects, and finally at the date of Lysippus the figures are fully rounded out, and the members project at liberty in all directions. Then for the first time Greek sculpture showed a complete conception of the body’s corporeity (Körperlichkeit). The primitive artist, however well he may be intellectually aware of the three dimensions of an object, does not fully apprehend its true aspect as offered to the eye from one point of view. Following this conclusion, it is easy to see also in the drawing of the early Greeks, children and so on, the same lack of idea of the third dimension. The figures on the vases of the “finest period” (about 475 B.C.), despite occasional foreshortenings, have, when considered as representations of solid forms, a papery appearance. They have not half the draughtsmanship shown by the latter period of the vase industry, where the figures, though careless, stereotyped and ill-composed, come forwards (to use Prof. Loewy’s description of later sculpture), go backwards, twist and turn in space in a manner which cannot be excelled. The reproductions in figs. 1, 2, 3 will illustrate the development. The primitive draughtsman is at first bound by the silhouette. Later, he desires to fill out the interior, but this cannot be done without in great part modifying his contour lines, because they are generally merely indications of the disappearing and reappearing inner modelling, i.e. of the figure’s third dimension. Finally, the draughtsman in full possession of a feeling for the corporeity of the object will determine his contour entirely from within, a procedure which is the exact opposite to that of his first beginnings. He conceives the length, breadth and depth of an object and all its parts as solid wholes. To him a body in violent foreshortening is as easy as a simple
