Anyone who has ever wondered why and how representations of the human nude became so central to Renaissance and post-Renaissance Western art will derive great pleasure from this catalogue, which documents an exhibition of fifty-six drawings from the impressive collection of the Crocker Art Museum. The works splendidly demonstrate the skillful use of pen-and-ink and wash techniques as well as combinations of black, red, and white chalks, most by renowned artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Jacques-Louis David, and Albrecht Dürer, along with masterly works by less familiar artists. Its numerous high-quality reproductions, informative essays, and catalogue entries for each of the drawings exhibited offer the reader comprehensive descriptions of the themes that were significant to artists and their audiences during those centuries, and of the training and practices that enabled artists to create images of the human body expressing humanist values. Black-and-white illustrations enhance the text by showing images of artists at work, older art that served as examples to developing artists, and the finished works that resulted from studies and sketches. The catalogue entries, grouped to accompany each of the essays, are organized along the lines of “theme and variation” in order to demonstrate the development of an ideal figural style from its origins in Italy through its adaptations in the various European centers in the Low Countries, France, and Germany. Each catalogue entry is also accompanied by detailed documentation providing a description of the object, its provenance, and referential literature; biographical information about the artist; and an account of the narrative, symbolic, or allegorical content of the image.

William Breazeale’s introduction offers an overview of the development in the use of images of the nude body as a “visual language of form, pose, and gesture” (9) that perfected the figure to suit artistic needs. This process began in early fifteenth-century Italy, as interest arose among artists and their patrons in the noble and idealized representations of the human form found in the art of the classical past. These dignified and monumental figures seemed appropriate for narrative renderings of Biblical, mythological, and allegorical subjects. The practice of working directly from live models as well as dissected bodies was first introduced to ensure that artists could draw the human figure with anatomical accuracy and correct proportions. This practice was accompanied by copying exemplary works by past masters. As the last step in the process, artists were trained to use these figures in compositions that would convey drama and expression in their final works. Although these compositions often required female as well as male figures, studio practices were limited to drawing from nude male models, with limited access to female models for the sake of propriety. Privately, artists could use their spouse or a hired model, but more often they worked from ancient sculpture or casts. Not until the nineteenth century was the female model incorporated into the academic curriculum. This three-part practice of drawing from the nude model, copying masterful prototypes, and learning how to compose narrative compositions became not only standard workshop practice in Italy but was adopted by the academies emerging throughout Europe. Formal organizations in Italy such as the Accademia del Designo in Florence (1563), the Accademia di San Luca in Rome (1577), and the informal academy run by the Carracci family in Bologna became models for the informal academy of Hendrick Goltzius in Haarlem, the Académie royale in Paris (1648), and the later academies in Stuttgart (1771), Dresden (1774), and Kassel (1777). A series of essays elaborate this history.

The initial essay, “Ideals and Masters: The Nude in Italy, 1530–1800,” also by Breazeale, more fully describes the beginning of the development of the language of the nude in Italy. He cites the important voice of Leon Battista Alberti, who urged students to learn the correct structure and action of the body by drawing from life in order to better reveal the feelings and sentiments expressed through movement and gesture. As the century progressed, artists added the practice of copying earlier masters and works of ancient sculptures that were available to them in the Vatican Collection especially, such as the Laocoön, the Apollo Belvedere, and the River Nile. By the mid-sixteenth century, Giorgio Vasari instructed artists to attain a refined figural style by copying selectively from the best examples. This would furnish artists with an ideal of perfection toward which to strive. In their formation of an idealized style, artists would synthesize their knowledge of anatomy with a vision held before them of a figure possessing grace, dignity, and grandeur that through its proportions and gestures could reveal the highest human values and virtues. How better to embody the gods and virtuous characters as examples to imitate than to represent them as figures that transcend the characteristics of any one individual?

The successive essays, “International Currents: The Nude in the Low Countries, 1550–1750” by Susan Anderson, “Academie, academie, étude: Figural Drawings in France, 1650–1885” by Christine Giviskos, and “The Nude in German Art, ca. 1490–1830” by Christiane Andersson, review the rise of workshops and academies across Europe, tracing the similarities as well as departures from the Italian model. Naturalizing and secularizing tendencies in the Low Countries lead to the development of a figural style characterized by erotic sensualism, exemplified in work by Karel Van Mander and Hendrick Goltzius, or of figures pulsating with rhythmical vitality as in the copy after Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgment by Peter Paul Rubens (1601–2). In France, the three-part practice of the Italian system was most closely adhered to by the Académie royale in Paris. Students worked from casts of ancient works as well as from intensive life studies, and heard lectures on the lessons to be learned from the historical sources they were expected to use when creating heroic or morally uplifting compositions. German artists, on the other hand, resisted a wholesale assimilation of these practices. Theirs was a tradition that had originally stressed the importance of representing observed particulars, and it was not until after Dürer returned from his journey to Venice that interest arose in synthesizing observed fact with a classical ideal.

The studio practices used to create an expressive language of the nude in life studies, copies, and compositional sketches are clearly revealed through the works reproduced in this catalogue. A standing male nude, drawn by an unidentified eighteenth-century French artist (cat. no. 27), for example, illustrates the artist’s ability to render an individualized figure showing carefully observed anatomical accuracy and credible movement. This impressive black-chalk drawing combines a crisp and flexibly vibrant line with subtle shading to produce convincing plastic form, contrasting with delicate transparent luminosity. Another work, Christ at the Column (ca. mid-1590s), a copy by Cavaliere d’Arpino of a painting by Sebastiano del Piombo, demonstrates the artist’s assimilation of monumental contrapposto derived through del Piombo from the classical tradition. As a result of using densely applied red and black chalks to create strong modeling, the artist has created a powerful idealized figure that seems to leap from the page as if in sculptural relief. Additionally, d’Arpino has succeeded in giving living warmth to the representation by overlapping each of the chalks to create an optical intermingling that seems incandescent. Francois Boucher’s sketch, The Birth of Venus (ca. 1732–34), is accompanied by supporting images (figs. 53 and 54) that illustrate the progression from life studies to a rhythmically focused preparatory compositional sketch to the final painting. This loosely worked sketch permits the viewer to participate in the creative process along with Boucher. The use of a warm-toned beige paper ground gives compositional unity to the work, suggestive of the sensuousness of the subject. The pyramidal massing of the figure group, though asymmetrical, reinforces that unity with a certain vitality. Within this large configuration, Boucher deftly described individual figures, rapidly suggesting their gestures and intertwining spatial movements with numerous broken lines of red chalk. The suggestion of modeling and luminous atmosphere is produced with flickering touches of white chalk. What emerges is a delightful drawing that reflects Boucher’s confident mastery of observation and invention.

The variety shown in this collection of drawings from the Crocker confirms that the establishment of both informal and systematic drawing practices did not stifle individual or regional expression. Rather, the methods of instruction were used with flexibility to train the eye and mind toward the distant but attainable goal of expressing significant human experience.

As a practicing artist and studio instructor who also teaches art history, I was pleased with the selection of work and with the insightful essays that call attention to this particular practice of artistic training. These drawings reflect what is universal to all art instruction; experience is filtered through interpretation that may begin with the imitation of appearances but is organized into a comprehensible and expressive form by the selective process of the mind.