Demystifying Drawings #11
What’s the big deal with blue paper? part 2
Jacopo Tintoretto (1518/19–1594), Crucifixion, 1565. Sala dell’Albergo. Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice
Jacopo Tintoretto (1518/19–1594), Study for a Mourning Figure, 1565. Uffizi. Florence (inv. no. 1837f)
To the lover of drawings, the term ‘blue paper’ might evoke an array of images. To the Italianist, perhaps the drawings of Tintoretto and Veronese; to the ‘dix-huitièmiste’, the Fables of Oudry; to the devotees of Dutch drawing, the figure studies of Govert Flinck and Jacob Adriaensz Backer; and to the Anglophile, the self-portraits of Jonathan Richardson the Elder.
The past few years have seen a revived interest in the appreciation and understanding of blue paper in all its forms. In 2024 alone, readers of this newsletter will have observed last month’s call for papers for a conference, Drawn to Blue, co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the University of Amsterdam, and prior to that, the opening of an exhibition, Drawing on Blue, at the Getty Center in January. January also saw the publication of Venetian Disegno: New Frontiers, the product of a conference held in May of 2021, which, amongst other topics, addressed blue paper in its Venetian context. In September of 2021, the first conference dedicated to the use of blue paper, “Venice in Blue The Use of carta azzurra in the Artist’s Studio and in the Printer’s Workshop, ca. 1500–50,” was held and will result in a forthcoming edited volume. This coming autumn, the Courtauld Gallery will host their own exhibition on the topic, Drawn to Blue: Artists’ use of blue paper.
Dr Alexa McCarthy, one of the contributors to Venetian Disegno: New Frontiers and co-editor of Venice in Blue The Use of carta azzurra in the Artist’s Studio and in the Printer’s Workshop, ca. 1500–50, joins our editor to unpick this phenomenon in a two-part feature.
Could you provide a brief synopsis of the colorito, disegno debate?
A debate that has pervaded the study of sixteenth-century Italian art positioned Florentine artists as the masters of disegno, both drawing and design, and Venetian artists as painters without concept of draughtsmanship. As Catherine Whistler has discussed, the opposition between disegno and colorito developed in the second half of the sixteenth century, outside of Venice. It was through readings of Giorgio Vasari’s (1511–1574) Le vite (1550; 1568) that this paragone, or debate, began to dominate artistic dialogues. Vasari did not necessarily envision disegno as informing the colorito of a painting, but rather conceived of disegno and colore as separate concepts. For Vasari, drawing was the foundation of artistic practice and the purpose of drawn lines in a composition was primarily to give form and relief to a figure. He considered line and tonal modeling to be integral components in rendering figures in space, whereas colour was a superficial element of a composition. His text established an opposition between disegno and colore for his contemporary and future readers.
Venetian writers on art including Marco Boschini (1613–1681), Lodovico Dolce (1508–1568), and Paolo Pino (fl. 1534–1565) used the term colorito or colorire in their respective writings, rather than colore, to describe Venetian colour. Colorito does not refer to the colours themselves, but to the active manner in which they are applied. Pino was the first to discuss the disparities between disegno and colore as manifested in Tuscan and Venetian art in his Dialogo di pittura (1548), published two years before the first edition of Vasari’s Le vite. In his text, comprised of a dialogue between a Florentine and a Venetian, Pino identified Michelangelo (1475–1564) as the Florentine master of disegno and Titian as the supreme Venetian colourist, championing the colorito of Venice. Vasari’s publication did not include a biography of Titian until the publication of the second edition in 1568.
Throughout his biography of Titian in the 1568 edition, Vasari praised Titian’s mastery of colorito but he repeatedly referred to his inability to draw. Vasari recalled that when he and Michelangelo visited Titian in the Belvedere and saw Titian’s depiction of Danaë, Michelangelo commented that Titian’s colouring and his manner were pleasing, but that it was a shame that Venetian artists did not place a focus on drawing in their studies. Throughout his text and through these anecdotal comments, Vasari further established a rhetoric that placed the Venetian application of colore [colorito] in opposition to Florentine disegno.
Evidenced by annotations in copies of Le vite in New Haven and Bologna, sixteenth-century readers were aware of Vasari’s Tuscan bias. Two readers from the Veneto, most likely Paduans, recorded the achievements of Venetian artists, including the missing Titian, in a two-volume set of the 1550 edition at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. After visiting Venice, Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) also annotated a copy of Vasari’s 1568 edition of Le vite now in the collection of the Library of the Archiginnasio, Bologna. Annibale made direct judgements in reference to Vasari’s newly added account of Titian’s life. By employing blue paper with a combination of black and white chalk, as Titian and the Carracci did, artists could explore the complementary relationship between disegno and colorito.
What are the stereotypes and myths that have come to surround blue paper?
The circulation of texts discussing the Venetian propensity for painted colorito together with the comparatively low survival rate of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Venetian drawings contributed to the lasting impression that these artists did not draw. The perceived opposition between disegno and colore in art historical scholarship was challenged in 1944 with the publication of Hans Tietze and E. Tietze-Conrat’s The Drawings of the Venetian Painters in the 15th and 16th Centuries. The authors of this publication summarize the argument as follows, ‘conscious contrast of “Florentine design” and “Venetian coloring” – mainly developed in the circle of Florentine academicians who were so influential in all subsequent theories of art – produced the idea that Venetian artists did not draw at all.’ Since, scholars have demonstrated the extent to which Venetian artists were draughtsmen who infused their drawings with colore as they experimented with a multitude of materials. The art of historical narrative has evolved such that we now associate the material of blue paper with drawings produced in late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice.
The synonymous association of blue paper and Venice is, itself, a bit of a misconception. As mentioned in last month’s Part 1, this association is largely due to the proliferation of the use of the material in the Veneto during the sixteenth century. A preference for blue paper as exhibited by late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venetian artists like Vittore Carpaccio and circumstances such as Albrecht Dürer’s (1471–1578) employment of the material coinciding with his documented trip to the city in 1505–1507 have led to a distinctly Venetian characterisation of blue paper. It is important to consider that blue paper was not only used in Venice, but in the Veneto more broadly, and was also employed throughout Italy by artists including Leonardo da Vinci, the Carracci, and the Zuccari. Luca Baroni has published on its use in the Marche, and we cannot forget that its earliest extant use for drawing is attributed to Bolognese artist, Giovanni da Modena (ca. 1379-1454/55).
What role does blue paper play in counteracting the Vasarian stereotype of a Venice without disegno?
Inherently blue paper served as an expeditious ‘in between’ colour onto which lighter and darker chalks could be applied. With black and white chalk on blue paper, artists could capture the complexities of their chosen subject through a range of tones, bringing drawings one step closer to a painting, and, in turn, closer to life. Therefore, drawings on blue paper subvert the idea that disegno is separate from colore or colorito.
Jacopo Tintoretto’s (1518/19–1594) Study for a Mourning Figure (1565) in the Uffizi (inv. no. 1837f) demonstrates the significance of blue paper in informing the colorito of polychromatic painted compositions. Tintoretto used black chalk and charcoal with white heightening to explore tonality in preparation for his monumental Crucifixion for the Sala dell’Albergo, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. In this drawing, the artist paid close attention to the shading along the figure’s left side, which is one of the darkest parts of the painting, at the centre of the canvas. The portions of the figure that are not visible in the painting are schematic and barely part of the blue paper drawing, suggesting that Tintoretto produced these studies after he had largely mapped out the composition.
The Study for a Mourning Figure is evocative of the non-linear trajectory of artistic practice and the iterative dialogue between drawing and painting. Drawing occurs throughout the artistic process, and not solely as a prelude to painting. In Tintoretto’s Study for a Mourning Figure, the preparatory drawing was not for the purpose of informing line, but rather, colour, and is indicative of blue paper’s critical role in this process. The majority of extant drawings by Tintoretto are figure and head studies and he used blue paper often. As the name Tintoretto (‘Little Dyer’) indicates, it is appropriate that the son of fabric dyer, Battista Robusti, would be interested in the material of blue paper.
Does disegno inform colorito?
A recurring theme in early modern texts on art is the importance of a mastery of conveying light and shade. How colour varies according to light is implicit in the meaning of the term colorito in art discourse. Drawings that display a gradation of tones inform the unione of a painted composition. For Paolo Pino, disegno was a model for the envisaged whole, as he understood that preliminary drawings are affected by the artist’s aim of a unified composition. This idea relates to Vasari’s statement in Le vite (1568) that preliminary drawings or sketches should look like ‘a stain,’ or imprint of what is to come. Vasari, who employed blue paper for his own drawings, also referred to drawing on paper with a ‘sweet tint’ (una tinta dolce), noting that tinted papers create a mezzo or middle tone.
In his late-fourteenth-century publication, Il libro dell’arte, Cennino Cennini wrote of the benefits of drawing on prepared paper, referring specifically to that which is coloured blue after production. Cennini provided a recipe for this blue wash, among other colours. It is important to recall that Cennini wrote Il libro prior to the widespread use of blue paper for artistic purposes. Cennini also used the terms chiaro and scuro in explaining how to provide a sense of three-dimensionality in painted compositions. He spoke of the ‘tre parti d’incarnazione,’ or three gradations of lightness. These three gradations of light and dark tones facilitate the tonal modeling of the figures, through which rilievo, or the ability to model three-dimensional forms in space on a flat surface, can be achieved. For Cennini, as well as the writers on art who would follow, drawing held a fundamental place in artistic practice. Cennini referred to drawing as the ‘basis and the gateway of painting.’
Humanist and pioneering art theoretician Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) discussed how the tonality of drawings can inform painted compositions in his De Pictura (1434). Alberti wrote of the importance of drawing and the ability to accurately render the effects of light and shade on all surfaces. Alberti asserted,
I would like that a [painted] composition be well drawn and excellently coloured. Therefore, in order that painters avoid blame and deserve praise, light and shadows, first of all, must be noted with great diligence […] you will certainly learn in an excellent way from Nature and from the objects themselves.
While advice on how best to achieve this mastery and through which media varies, there is an agreement in the utilization of three tones: light, dark, and ‘in between’ (mezzo). Blue paper provides this ‘in between’ surface for tonal modelling. A continuous drawing practice, together with an understanding of colour and the effects of light and shade, contribute to a naturalistic painted composition. The combination of blue paper with light and dark chalks would have been appealing to artists because it allowed for the expedient exploration of all three elements in one drawn composition. Further, the friable material of black chalk in concert with the inherent tonality of coloured paper mimics the pictorial capabilities of oil on textured canvas.
