Traces: Renaissance Drawings for Flemish Prints at the Courtauld Gallery review

This small but rather beautiful show reveals just how important drawings have always been to the creation of art
Jan van der Straet, View of the River Arno in Florence, looking upstream, with fishermen and a river god, around 1575
Courtauld Gallery
Melanie McDonagh17 June 2022

Blockbuster shows are all very well, but there’s a lot to be said for small exhibitions: more focus, greater opportunity for close scrutiny. The calm space of the drawings room at the Courtauld Gallery is pretty well perfect for its purpose: the presentation of drawings, chiefly from the gallery’s extensive collection. Here are just 16 works, mostly from its 250 Flemish works – it used to be 300 until a Belgian curator, Maarten Bassens, weeded out imports from other countries – with a specific focus on their relation to print and etchings.

The printmaking industry was centred in Antwerp, which had some of the most expert practitioners in Europe. Thus the title, Traces. The technique whereby a drawing is transferred to copper is shown here in two interesting videos, and it does indeed leave outline traces on the wax coating on the metal plate, which is then incised for printing. And drawings that have been incised show traces of the blade and often traces of the grid used to scale the drawing up or down subsequently.

Traces might suggest modern material, but the sixteen pieces here are from the sixteenth century. Some are preparatory drawings for print; one is a drawing once attributed to Bruegel but is actually copied from one of his prints; one is a design for tapestry; one is a drawing by an artist best known as a print maker. We see here images of the print associated with a drawing, to compare and contrast. And what the comparison did for me was confirm how strongly I prefer drawing.

Ambrosius I Francken, The Power of Women, between 1573 - 1579
Courtauld Gallery

Prints were of course a perfect medium for disseminating an image, and played an incalculable role in popularising artists’ work during the Renaissance and beyond, but in their nature, the outlines of a print are clear and unmistakeable, made to be dug into copper with a burin, or etching needle, the opposite of the suggestiveness and delicacy of a drawing.

Drawings made for print often lack ambiguity; it’s all about the line. So here we find a charming drawing in pen and brown ink of the Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes (the one where Atalanta gets distracted by golden apples dropped by her suitor – cheat!) by Maerten de Vos, which is all lightness and mobility and the print made from it which looks heavy handed by comparison. Same goes for another beautiful drawing by De Vos of the apocalyptic destruction of the Temple, which is curiously delicate for its fearsome subject; the print version is heavy and dark.

Anyway, the very specific focus of this show makes for some interesting selections. At the outset we find an engraving by Cornelis Cort of The Practice of the Visual Arts which demonstrates how drawing underlines all the visual arts, from statuary to architecture and yes, print-making; it also gives a gruesome insight into the flaying of a corpse and the suspension of a skeleton for the benefit of artists studying anatomy.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fair at Hoboken, 1559
Courtauld Gallery

But the cream of the crop is The Fair at Hoboken by Bruegel the Elder, a pen and ink drawing of a saint’s day festival at a village outside Antwerp, which is packed full of incident. There are hogs and piglets running amok, a man defecating outside a church, an improvised theatre, a church procession, children chucking hard boiled eggs or something at a target, archers, dancers… all the vitality and variety of a village en fete and the peasant exuberance with which Bruegel had warm sympathy. What a jigsaw it would make. The print next to it does have the advantage of clarifying details you may have missed – the geese pecking, the archers’ tiny target.

This then, is an admirably focused exhibition which seeks to illumine connections between two media, drawing and prints, and succeeds in making us look more closely at both.

Courtauld Gallery, to September 22; courtauld.ac.uk

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