Our idea of drawing today may be no more than an artist putting ideas onto paperas a quick sketch, a preparatory drawing for a painting, or a finely finished stand-alone drawing. But during the Renaissance, drawing or “disegno” in Italian, wasn’t just the act of drawing itself; it was more profound.
“Disegno” is translated as “design” or “drawing” in English, but the concept of disegno isn’t to be taken literally. For Renaissance artists, disegno represented their technical brilliance and inventive genius bearing fruit on paper. This wasn’t rote copying. Artists created these drawings by using the wisdom, intellect, knowledge, and imagination that they’d gained from their apprenticeships and ongoing art practice.
Renaissance art apprentices trained long, hard, and methodically to understand and re-create a variety of forms and the human figure. First, they’d copy ancient and contemporary sculptures and architectural reliefs in monotone before they could copy from life (the male figure). Then, only when they were competent in drawing in monotone could they introduce color. These artists knew the human figure so well that by the end of their apprenticeship, they could confidently and effectively move figures around in complex compositions.
Traditionally, the art of disegno was held in high esteem. According to the Visual Arts Cork encyclopedia website, in 15th-century Renaissance aesthetics, “disegno was seen as true art, while colorito [coloring, favored by Venetian artists such as Titian] was considered more of a craft.”
