NORTHERN NUDES PAGE — The Practice of Drawing

NORTHERN NUDES

Whether or not 15th-century northern European artists and apprentices did life-drawing exercises like their Italian contemporaries is not documented. Nevertheless, naked or semi-naked figures appear in early drawings by French and Flemish illuminators and artists such as the Master of the Cité des Dames (active from around 1405 to 1415) and Hugo van der Goes (ca. 1430-1482). The Study of a Naked Woman by Albecht Dürer (1471-1528), produced before he visited Italy, is perhaps the earliest surviving female nude drawn from life. He would return to the genre often: his expressive Nude Self Portrait is from after his second trip to Italy, as are his Four Books on Human Proportion based on the works of Vitruvius and Alberti. His most talented pupil, Hans Baldung Grien (ca. 1484-1545), also drew the nude from life.

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Attributed to Hugo van der Goes, The Crucifixion, late 1470s, brush and brown pigment, heightened with white, on grey-brown-violet grounded paper, Windsor, Royal Collection.

Albrecht Dürer, Study of a Naked Woman, 1493, pen and ink, Bayonne, Musée Bonnat-Helleu.

Jean Bourdichon, Bathsheba Bathing, 1498/99, tempera colours and gold paint on vellum, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, MS 79.

Albrecht Dürer, Nude Self-Portrait, ca. 1509, pen and brush,black ink with white lead on green prepared paper, Weimar, Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

Dürer’s apparently-naturalistic study of his own body here is remarkable in the context of his other nude drawings from the same period which depict ideal bodies influenced by classical sculpture.

Hans Baldung Grien, Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, ca. 1510-15, pen and brown ink, heightened with white lead pigment, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen.

Albrecht Dürer, Male Nude, ca. 1513, pen and brown ink, traces of preliminary drawing in black chalk, Vienna, Albertina.

In about 1512, Dürer decided to write a scientific treatise on human proportion which interested him for many years. This drawing, which served as the model for an illustration, is based on ideal proportions as defined by Vitruvius.