Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns Details
Review "The superb exhibition catalog, edited and partly written by Ms. Sell and Mr. Chapman, represents the latest scholarship in this remarkable field, including the technical research of National Gallery paper conservator Kimberly Schenck."---Barrymore Laurence Scherer, Wall Street Journal Read more Review "Excellent. This should become a standard book about an area of drawing that has been difficult for the layman properly to understand and appreciate."―David Scrase, author of Italian Drawings at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Read more See all Editorial Reviews
Reviews
This is the volume accompanying the exhibit of the same name organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., with the collaboration of The British Museum in London, which owns about half of the exhibited items, the remainder having been lent by thirty or so other institutions or private owners. The exhibition is mounted in Washington from May until July, 2015 and then in London from September to December. The catalogue has been edited by Stacey Sell, Curator of Old Master Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery, and Hugo Chapman, a keeper of prints and drawings at The British Museum, each of whom has contributed a significant study to the book. The remaining essays are by their colleagues, senior curators and conservators at the two institutions and by Bruce Weber, a curator at the Museum of the City of New York, whose groundbreaking 1985 exhibition, “Fine Line: Drawing with Silver in America,” is one of the few previous exhibitions of works in the medium that one can point to. The current Washington show is a much more expansive affair, what the Directors’ Foreword in fact calls “the first exhibition to examine the history and development of metalpoint” (xi). Probably no other drawing medium is so closely linked with the Renaissance, and the metalpoint draftsmanship of the Renaissance artists of Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands figures prominently in the volume. But after its ascendance to great popularity in the first hundred years of its life, the practice waned, and its subsequent history was one of sporadic and limited appearances for brief periods in specific locations. Most of the essays are survey reports or overviews of metal point activity (almost all of which traditionally is silverpoint) in those times and areas: the Netherlandish Renaissance (Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden et. al.), the German and Swiss Renaissance (chiefly Hans Holbein the Elder and Albrecht Dürer), Renaissance Italy (Leonardo, Raphael, Filippino Lippi and others), the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (mostly Hendrick Goltzius, Jacques de Gheyn III and Rembrandt), nineteenth-century Britain (Frederic Leighton, Edward Burne-Jones, William Holman Hunt, Alphonse Legros, and others) and modern and contemporary drawing (Joseph Stella, Otto Dix, Pavel Tchelitchew and Jasper Johns, to name just the most prominent figures)—i.e., the subtitle “Leonardo to Jasper Johns” is fully justified by the scope of the content. The volume begins with an essay on “The Materials and Techniques of Metalpoint” and concludes with one on “The Technical Examination of Metalpoint Drawings,” which discusses three works in detail and explains the processes of technological imaging and chemical analysis that both underlie the fundamentals of conservation and contribute to connoisseurship studies. All these essays are very informative and clearly written and make this book a truly comprehensive introduction to the materials, techniques and history of the medium. This is the only book on metal point that I have ever read, so I can’t compare it to any others (there are several noted in the good selected bibliography), but for me, approaching the subject not in total ignorance, but certainly as a novice, it was a whole education in a fascinating area.The book itself is beautifully produced, with an uncluttered layout and handsome, easily legible print, and superb illustrations. The 105 exhibition plates are all reproduced one to a page, in excellent definition. They are gathered together and follow immediately on the essays in which they are discussed, which is a very convenient arrangement. There are, in addition, frequent companion illustrations within the texts (the jacket says there are 212 illustrations in all), and about twenty pages of display illustrations as chapter frontispieces. There is such a variety of color in the grounds on which the drawings are done, as well as quite idiosyncratic highlighting and occasional mixture with other mediums, that there is no sense of overwhelming “grayness” about these drawings, even though virtually all metals used oxidize to some shade of gray: this is really a great array of stunning and beautiful images. The apparatus consists of the bibliography, as mentioned, as well as a checklist with relevant curatorial data and references to literature (although no provenance), and an index of names and works. A wonderful achievement, and very highly recommended.
