Secrets, part three: Perfection
3.) Perfection: This is where the artist takes the idea sketch and “nurtures and cares for this idea with skill until its final perfection is achieved…This is the…most difficult and estimable kind of drawing, because the could have been managed by either force of genius or by chance, but this can only be accomplished through much work, study.” It is only with the perfection of design that one is ready to transfer his drawing to canvas.
Velazquez’s teacher and father-in-law, Francisco Pacheco, wrote in 1638:
It is certain that the activity of making sketches, drawings, and cartoons directly belongs to painters who have achieved the third and final grade of their art; they are more obliged to invent new things… They prepare themselves to paint either by counsel from learned persons or by reading books, and thus forming their ideas, they fabricate a whole from parts. Then they draw the first rough ideas of the movements and actions required for the lively expression of the subject to be painted. From three or four studies, they choose one to be used (either by their own taste or by the judgement of learned men)
Yet still he relies on copying as the foundation of his creations:
I keep to nature for everything; if everything could be taken from nature, not only the heads, nudes, hands and feet, but [also] the draperies…it would be much better.
It was advised by Le Blond de la Tour of France that a child should begin to study drawing at the age of ten to twelve after having learned to read and write. He should begin as an apprentice to a master, and then progress to the Academy to study from the live model.
De Piles suggested that one should begin with learning to draw heads; for he considered that if you could draw a head you could draw a flower, but not vice versa. He advised drawing on a large scale and beginning from nature.
• Massing
To check your drawing or painting, the folloowing advice is given by Du Fresnoy in regards to the use of a mirror.
The Painter must have a principal Respect to the Masses, and the Effect of the whole together. The Looking Glass distances the Objects, and by consequence gives us onely to see the Masses, in which all the little parts are confounded.
Since the Mirror is the rule and Master of all Painters, as showing them their faults by distancing the Objects, we may conclude that the Picture which makes not a good effect at a distance cannot be well done; and a Painter must never finish his Picture, before he has examin’d it at home some reasonable distance, or with a Looking Glass, whether the Masses of the Lights and Shadows, and the Bodies of the Colors be well distributed. Giorgione and Correggio have made use of this method.
Leonardo’s view is reflected in the following two excerpts:
”Those who are in love with practice without knowledge are like the sailor who gets into a ship without rudder or compass and who never can be certain where he is going. Practice must always be founded on sound theory, and to this Perspective is the guide and the gate way…”
or
”The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies everything placed in front of it without knowing about them.”