The pope probably thought that since Michelangelo could draw so well there was no reason why he couldn�t paint well. But this is a non sequitur. To prove it to yourself, make a pretty charcoal drawing and try to copy it in paint. Draw it right there on the canvas if you will and put the oil paint on top. What happens? Your pretty drawing gets covered up by blobs of mucky paint and there is no way to recover the fine lines and delicate shades you have buried. A whole new world of problems appears when you see that color has nothing to do with line: they are two different ways of rendering, of making a picture.
The �world� is �really� color, of course�you don�t understand that until you begin to paint. There are no lines around things that you see, only more or less abrupt changes of color. There are no shadows, strictly speaking, either; only different colors�call them tones, call them what you want: they are a color, only another color. The painter�s task is to see, to gauge, to understand, that color, mix it up on his palette, and lay it on his canvas in just the right place.
�Yes,� Michelangelo would say if he were reading this, �that�s true. But it is only by means of drawing that you learn to see things, that you train your eye and train your hand. Through drawing you learn to simplify, to organize your images�organize your ideas. Without a solid basis in drawing, the painting lacks not just force but personality.�
That was the conventional wisdom of his time�or rather of his place. Oil painting was fairly young then but already in a city like Venice excellent painters were skipping the drawing. They made a few charcoal lines on their new canvas to center their subject and then started right off painting. Why spend time doing a precise and elaborate drawing that will be covered up with paint as soon as you begin? You�re just wasting your time, they thought. Isn�t your aim to get all those delicate shades in paint?
In fact, the old Florentine painters had found ways of preserving their drawings while they applied the paint. How? They made a painting in stages. To begin with, they didn�t make their preliminary drawing on a white canvas but on a colored one. They primed their linen canvas or wooden board with a coat or two of yellow, orange or cream-colored paint. That was better for working in the lights and darks. Next they went over, traced over, the charcoal (or chalk) lines of their drawing with paint�black or burnt umber�using a fine brush. That fixed the outlines of the drawing and the areas for shading. With a brush or even with their finger, they smeared on burnt umber for shadows and so made a careful light-and-dark study,. In this way, the charcoal drawing became an orange and brown painting. Finally, onto this orange and brown painting they added other colors, one by one, always respecting the outlines and the lights and darks of the original. If you compare the finished painting of those old Florentine masters to their preliminary drawing, you will see how closely they were able to do that.
And so they taught themselves to turn a drawing into a painting, to keep it from being obscured by the layers of paint, to let that drawing rule the painting. What they ended up doing, in effect, was coloring their drawings. �Do you know what always looks good?� art teachers sometimes tell their students. �Water-colors over an ink drawing. The better the drawing, the better the painting looks, no matter what colors you put on or how thinly you apply them.� The ink lines of the drawing tell you what to think and they make a nice, intelligible container for the colors. Cartoons!
In fresco painting the method was the same. You made a drawing of the size the wall-painting was going to be, and tranferred it to the wall. That finished drawing, called a cartoon, was made on many sheets of paper glued together, or cloth, and you held it up to the wall and traced it
Michelangelo meets Titian
Michelangelo was so convinced that this was the right way to paint that he turned up his nose at the great Titian�s work because it was not based on drawing. �One day Michelangelo and Vasari went along to visit Titian in the Belvedere,� says Vasari, �where they saw a picture he had finished......and naturally, as one would do with the artist present, they praised it warmly. After they had left they started to discuss Titian's method and Buonarroti commended it highly, saying that his coloring and his style pleased him very much but that it was a shame that in Venice they did not learn to draw well from the beginning and that those painters did not pursue their studies with more method. For the truth was, he went on, that if Titian had been assisted by art and design as much as he was by nature, and especially in reproducing living subjects, then no one could achieve more or work better, for he had a fine spirit and a lively and entrancing style.� Then Vasari put in his two cents: �To be sure, what Michelangelo said was nothing but the truth; for if an artist has not drawn a great deal and studied carefully selected ancient and modern works he cannot by himself work well from memory or enhance what he copies from life, and so give his work the grace and perfection of art which are beyond the reach of nature, some of whose aspects tend to be less than beautiful.� (Vasari p, 455)
Now Titian was surely able to appreciate Michelangelo�s genius�who was not?�but he must have thought his paintings looked, precisely, too �drawn�. Each great nude on the ceiling and front wall of the Sistine stands out like a giant drawing, with a clear, completed outline and careful chiaroscuro. They might each have served as studies for statues. �I paint what I see,� Titian would have said, �not what I have been trained to see. I don�t correct to fit some ancient canon. Michelangelo doesn�t need a model for what he does: he takes the figures out of his head. That is fine�and he can do whatever he wants. But no one should be surprised that his people don�t look like people.�
A Very Short History of Painting
The fact is, the two men�Titian and Michelangelo�represented not only two different ways of painting but of seeing the world. Michelangelo�s was conceptual. It might be seen as a stage in the history of painting, which started as mere decoration of sacred images and symbols. In order to paint a Virgin, old-time artists didn�t observe nature, they didn�t have a living model sit for them. They made a face in a conventional way and began to decorate the Virgin�s robe with pretty colors. Their Virgin wasn�t so much a girl, a real person like the ones they had around, as a concept. They drew into the picture all the things they knew about the mother of God, almost as though those things were words.
Later, when the Renaissance started�that is, when artists began to observe the objects of the world for realism, call it�they still passed through their minds all the new facts they learned. Or rather, they �saw� according to the ideas already inside their heads. They corrected nature, as Vasari says, to fit an ideal of perfection. They believed the classical world had found this perfection and they tried to copy it from them. This they did by a close study of the old models, by drawing. Drawing was the record of their observations, but it was also the reinforcing of their preconceived notions on the object they observed.
But not all of the observers rectified what they saw. Many of them put aside that classical ideal of beauty�of true proportion, of serenity, of harmony, and so on�because it was just too oppressive and conflicted with another kind of truth, a scientific truth. A man like Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest cold observers who ever lived, was so divided on this search for truth�the two of them�that he left his observations on anatomy out of his paintings, which were based on drawing and the ideal. His painted horses, for instance, though he had studied real horses carefully and left detailed drawings of them, look like beautiful dolls or merry-go-round horses.
It was for Michelangelo to bring observation and ideal together without a seam. He was able to incorporate all his own discoveries into the old ideal of grace and beauty. He alone could organize all his findings in one grand design. You might almost say he brought together truth and beauty, which, whatever Keats says, are not the same. Have a look at Albrecht Durer�s drawings and see the one without the other.
Painting took the Venetian, not the Florentine road�the empirical one, not the conceptual one. More and more painters put aside the classical ideal and tried for likeness as they saw it, experimentally. A man like Velazquez probably didn�t make drawings for his paintings: they had no place in his search for a new kind of likeness. He refused to project his preconceived notions on the model he had before him. He was damned if he would paint what he didn�t see.
Beginners in drawing are all conceptualists, starting out as children, when they draw a house with a smiling face of windows and a door, a chimney and a cloud. They wouldn�t even imagine that their picture could gain anything if they began copying the features of a real house, even their own. Later, when they grow up and try to learn to draw by copying a plaster copy of a Greek statue, say, most of them keep drawing not what they see but what they �know� beforehand�a priori. They draw a Valentine-heart for lips, though part of the statue�s lips isn�t even visible to them in the half-light. They draw two nice almond eyes though, truthfully, neither of the eyes is an almond and one is mostly hidden by a lid. Nor is that meaningful black line which shows the almond or the parabola anywhere to be seen on the model. The art teacher�s job is to make a scientist, an empiricist, out of these beginners, to get them to draw what they see, even though it doesn�t make sense to them. Once the drawing is finished, they will discover that it does look like the model, though in a way they hadn�t suspected.
Velazquez actually disliked the works by those old Florentine masters (Michelangelo, Rafael, Leonardo). He thought they didn�t look real enough. They were just glorified cartoons. And he found a way of painting which satisfied the eye and got around the mind�s law enforcement. His method was to copy his model strictly as the eye sees it, without definitions and completions imposed upon it by reason.
The painting method of the old school was like its drawing: every step pre-established, every stage conceptual�no matter the subject. Color was applied in broad, even, blankets, just as children do that to the figures of a coloring book. Let�s make his shirt yellow. The kids choose a yellow (the yellow is a tone right in the middle between lemon and orange�that�s what the word �yellow� means, isn�t it?) and they set about coloring the whole shirt evenly. The Renaissance painters did the same, though their drawing had taught them to mind the lights and shadows, which they marked out and painted in even layers too. The colors for those lights and darks were fixed too, at least for a hundred years or so. A light was the basic color mixed with white; a dark was the basic color pure, without any white. In between was a neutral tone established and already mixed up before the artisan started to paint.
Titian�s way
Titian got slowly bored with the look of paintings made in this traditional way. The color patches were all so even, so static, so predictable. Nature wasn�t like that. There were no broad, flat areas of color on things. Color changed on every inch of a surface, not only from the light to dark shadows but everywhere in each of those. It seemed to shower an object, to sparkle here and there or to glow, even on the dark side. A painting gave a better rendering of the �real thing� if it was made like a mosaic of precise colors. And these could well correspond to the thousands of brush applications�brushstrokes�a painting was built with.
�It is certainly true that the method used by Titian for painting these last pictures is very different from the way he worked in his youth,� says Vasari, who wanted to both complain about it and praise it. �For the early works are executed with incredible delicacy and diligence, and they may be viewed either at a distance or close at hand; on the other hand, these last works are executed with with bold, sweeping strokes, and in patches of color, with the result that they cannot be viewed from near by, but appear perfect at a distance. This method of painting is the reason for the clumsy pictures painted by the many artists who have tried to imitate Titian and show themselves practised masters; for although Titian�s works seem to many to have been created without much effort, this is far from the truth....� (Vasari, p. 458)