Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin with Child, St. Anne and St. John, ca. 1500.

Leonardo was known for working for a long time with his sketches, instead of just doing experimental sketches and then going straight to a design beneath a painting. People came to see this drawing in Leonardo's studio, the drawing itself was a mark of Leo's "ingenum" or artistic talent/creativity, in motion. Black charcoal or chalk?

Lorenzo Monaco, Six Saints, ca.1414-20.

Pen and ink can be used on unprepared paper, cheap (i think?), so allows artists to sketch and experiment easily. Pen and ink also allows various intensity/thickness of line, unlike metal point.

Jacopo Bellini, The rape of a young satyr by Amor, c. 1450, Paris, Louvre.

Metal point requires preparation of paper, precision because it cannot be erased, creates more or less uniformly thin lines. This drawing was considered to have high artistic value even though it was not intended as a gift. Drawings give sense of intimacy, seeing into the artist's "ingenum at work."

Leonardo da Vinci, Study of a Warrior, ca. 1480

Metal point: requires preparation of paper, can't be erased, uniformly thin lines, can't be smudged, so requires great skill not to mess up and to create shading. Leonardo achieved different intensities of line by using different metal points. Shading achieved through very fine hatching.

Circle of Stefano da Verona, Male Nude, ca. 1440.

Pen and ink: cheap, no preparation required, hatching required to create shading. This shows loose hatch marks as opposed to Michelangelo's very dense ones that create more massive muscles as opposed to this drawing's very sketchy feeling, in which it is sometimes unclear whether the hatch marks are supposed to be creating 3-dimensionality or are part of the surface quality of the man. Also, not really anatomically correct but rather a study of motion/gesture.

Michelangelo, Male nude, c. 1505, Vienna, Albertina

Pen and ink. Hatching is dense, small, crossed: clear that it is supposed to create shadow, mass, as opposed to da Verano's loose hatching in his sketch of a male nude. Michelangelo has clearly mastered male anatomy.

Luca Signorelli, Hercules and Anteus, c. 1505, Windsor, Royal Library

Black charcoal: good for portraying dynamics, can be smudged (although this still shows diagonal hatching to create shading). In class, we said that you can tell who's winning based on the heads (Hercules' eyes/lower face are darker). I don't agree though, to me this is mainly a study of the interacting bodies and both heads are rather unfinished.

Leonardo, Study for the head of Judas, c. 1495, Windsor, Royal Library

Andrea del Verrocchio, Studies of a Child, ca. 1470.

Pen and ink: cheap (esp. since paper got a lot cheaper throughout the 1400s), so allows for experimentation like this. He clearly rotated the paper to make use of the available space: shows how drawings were now being used as experiments/ways to think instead of finished mini-paintings with composition (in Venice, however, drawings were still expected to look finished).

Leonardo da Vinci, Studies for a Madonna and Child and a Cat, ca. 1478-80.

Pen and ink: cheap, can experiment, need hatching to show shadow. Lines at bottom show Leonardo trying to get the direction/motion right, unafraid to experiment, not preoccupied with creating a finished-looking drawing, this is more of a thought process. Shows a kind of abstraction of the figures' pose. 

Luca Cambiaso, Study of Fighting Men, c. 1560.

Pen and ink (?), with some sort of wash, it looks like? Drawing as study and way to work out thoughts. Abstraction to think out the movements, interactions, composition without worrying about details. 

Jacopo Tintoretto, Man climbing into a boat, c. 1560

Black chalk?. Very abstracted, the gridlines show he is thinking about proportion/foreshortening, short independent strokes look like they were done very quickly to create the man, emphasis is clearly on his motion rather than any fleshed out sense of mass.

Andrea Mantegna, Entombment of Christ, engraving, ca. 1470.

Prints were reproducible, unlike paintings (Leonardo said that irreproducibility is one of the major superior qualities of painting). Mantegna used to give some of his prints to people as precious gifts. Lamentation on the left looks a lot like Donatello's bronze relief we saw in Padua. Question of whether "genius" lay in the conception of the image or its execution.

Enea Vico (after Parmigianino), Vulcan at his Forge with Mars and Venus), engraving (first state), ca. 1543.

Ugo da Carpi, Diogenes, chiaroscuro woodcut, ca. 1527-30.

Chiaroscuro woodcut requires multiple blocks carrying different colors, layers of dark and light build on each other to create final image that can have tons of contrast. In that way it's a little closer to painting, perhaps, because it has more colors?

Parmigianino, Saint Thais, etching, c. 1530.

Drypoint etching (drawing into wax, then letting acid etch what you've drawn into the underlying metal) allows much more free hand drawing, blurring, mixing of different thicknesses and intensities of line in one image. Compare cross hatches in her skirt to the looser, not uniform lines on the wall.