| In the drawings of the 1470s and 1480s Leonardo da Vinci began working in a mode characterized by the multitude of images on a single sheet, the quickness of their making, and the choice and economy of technique, all of which combined to create a "sketch," born of the efforts of observation, memory, and imagination. Today the sketch is viewed as a prized record of the artist's creative process, its birth traced to those early scrawls of Leonardo, but a greater understanding of its origin, and by extension, the complex relationship between the artist's eye, mind, and hand, is gained by shifting our gaze to the generation preceding his, to Antonio del Pollaiuolo and Andrea del Verrocchio, in whose drawings the first impulses of the sketch as a site of invention, experimentation, and artistic self-consciousness are manifested. These slightly older artists play a crucial role as models and as teachers for an entire generation of Florentine artists, and the immediate effect of their graphic innovations is revealed in the work of Leonardo and other contemporaries such as Domenico Ghirlandaio and Sandro Botticelli.;This dissertation takes the objects of drawing as the primary source of evidence, the carefully selected works interpreted as autonomous sites of invention, rather than purely practical tools in service to other media. The study of the sketch as an object is combined with an original evaluation of the theoretical language inherited and devised by Renaissance artists and writers to discuss drawing, invention, and imagination. Building on this analysis of image and text, a novel approach evolves that illuminates fifteenth-century drawing in a new way and provides a clearer lineage of the driving forces of western art production of the last 500 years. This more synthetic method reveals the full scope and function of late-Quattrocento Florentine sketches, a crucial step in the creation of a revisionist history of drawing that acknowledges a continuous evolution in the conception and reception of drawing, rather than the single moment of revolution attributed to Leonardo and Michelangelo around the year 1500. |
