If an early painting be examined, even one so late as Botticelli's Venus, certain mannerisms are noticed which are of great interest to the student of form.
The painter has evidently not worked directly from the model. The treatment is "sympathetic" rather than the result of observation. He has perhaps drawn on his reminiscences of classic sculpture, or even from contemporary engravings of the nude.
Judged by modern standards, there is a lack of construction in the figure generally, and especially is this seen in the feet, which, like those in contemporary work, never seem to stand firmly on the ground, perhaps because extreme foreshortening forbids the clear representation of all the toes, which were invariably shown. All this in no way detracts from Botticelli's beauty of line and suavity of form. He might be said to claim kinship with the Chinese and Japanese masters, so easy and fluent are his contours.
Italian Art of the Trecento and Quattrocento periods exhibit generally lightly shaded forms. The expression is empirical rather than that of personal observation, a convention derived from wall painting.
Leonardo da Vinci changed all that and formulated the rules governing the expression of form by light and shade. In his work are seen the "lines of shade" and their soft or smoky (sfumato) appearance. He was the first notable academic, and on his work the teaching of light and shade, as now taught in schools of art, was founded.
Since Leonardo the study of drawing has depended, upon "appearance." The photograph, essentially light and shade as it is, and simulating the endless gradations of natural lighting, has tightened the chain of tradition. Consequently students are told to be truthful, honest, to draw what they see, to copy nature—impossible task and misleading advice. Moral issues are needlessly dragged in. The main thing is for students to be artists. But if the test of appearance be conceded, if the object with its environment is to be represented, what are the limits of the convention which is called drawing?
First it is clear that it is quite impossible to show on a plane surface all the gradations of light occurring on a curved surface. In attempting to do so the student merely deceives himself, loses his way, and consequently all profit from his study of drawing in line and tone.
The great realistic painters, such as the Dutch and the Spaniards, chose a few tones. They painted in the general tone, and into this they brushed the dark and the light tones. On the latter they placed the high light, and in the dark the reflected light. Their practice shows that these few tones are the essential ones.
Drawings made with the stump are specially open to the objection that by continuous working, students delude themselves with the idea that they are making a complete expression of the tones of the subject, whereas the fictitious relief, apparently destroying the plane surface of the paper, is a vulgar and meretricious quality, crushing the student's powers of artistic appreciation.
Students should understand that all drawing is a convention, and that it is impossible fully to realize any object, except by means of a trick, (the history of Art is full of instances, from the grapes of Appelles onwards), and should be urged not to copy the object, but to express those essentials of form which they can discern. In a sense the more they try to make their drawings like, the more they cloud and confuse their artistic intelligence. Every drawing done should be an artistic effort, and made with artistic intention, for drawing cannot be divorced from art.
This disposes at once of the old-fashioned practice of outline drawing. Outline or contour drawing, such as the outlines of ornament (with sections) drawn by an architect for a carver to follow, is a convention used professionally, but as study, pursued for long periods, it is destructive of interest in the appearance of things.
Nothing written above is intended to relieve the student from the responsibility of taking his drawing as far as possible. We have only to look at the great masters, at the early work, say, of Velasquez, Rembrandt, Franz Hals, and at the drawings of Holbein, to see what an amount of eyesight they putt into their work, what an incredible amount of pains they took with mere details of dress, etc. Velasquez spent himself in studying the effect of light on homely pots and pans, to a degree which hardly any modern student has felt necessary. A friend of the writer once reported a conversation with a great living sculptor and decorator who, speaking of the modern pseudo-decorative effect obtained by the slurring of detail, declared that he would exhibit the very pores of the skin on his figures if it could be done. He meant that the most realistic mode of expression is possible in the hands of a true artist, and not only not incompatible with but enhancing the 'decorative effect he may wish to secure.