Pictured: Study for Queen Semiramis Receiving News of the Revolt of Babylon, 1624. Pen and brown ink on cream-laid paper, by Guercino. Photo Courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum.

When most people doodle during a meeting or sketch out a quick image during a game of Pictionary, they don’t ponder what will become of their finished works. Perhaps they’ll be tossed into the trash, or someone will save them, preserving the drawings for years to come. At The Ringling Museum, 500 Years of Italian Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum invites guests to consider the role of the collector in safeguarding these pivotal art history building blocks.

The Ringling’s Ulla R. Searing Curator of Collections Sarah Cartwright encourages visitors to view Italian Drawings alongside the Guercino’s Friar with A Gold Earring: Fra Bonaventura Bisi, Painter and Art Dealer exhibition, which focuses on Fra Bonaventura Bisi. Bisi facilitated the collection of art for important figures like the Dukes of Modena and Leopoldo de’ Medici. Stepping into Bisi’s world allows guests to understand why he prioritized collecting drawings, like those in the Italian Drawings exhibition.

“The collection covers 500 years of Italian drawings with a concentration on the 16th and 17th centuries,” says Cartwright. “Through the mid-fifteenth century, aspiring artists were instructed to make copies after drawings in a model-book, a compendium of motifs, human figures, flora and fauna, passed from one generation to another, ready to be inserted into paintings or illuminated manuscripts,” reads the exhibit’s walk text. Like children’s fashion design toys, in which the user rubs their selection of textured fashion plates to transfer a pre-made template onto paper, this process overlooked artists’ exploration of individual expression. This pattern began to change as artists took inspiration from other sources like prints, plaster casts and ancient sculptures, and drawing focused more on celebrating the hand of each artist who used the medium to achieve certain goals. “Some drawings were sketches of ideas and were taken further to become finished drawings. Some nailed down composition and shading and might have been presented to a patron. Others are working drawings, used to transfer to other mediums,” Cartwright adds. “They support composition and disegno.” Disegno is the intersection of drawing and design, where the mental process of conjuring up and developing an idea meets the practice of executing it in a physical medium.

Through disegno, artists like Guercino, Amadeo Modigliani and Michelangelo, all featured at Ringling, honed their craft. Many works in the exhibition focus on the human figure. Drawing allowed artists to explore how the human body expresses various emotions which the works reflect, urging the viewer to consider how the artist might have conceptualized their idea and determined the best way to showcase it on paper. “People still draw on paper. Most people doodle on notepads at work or draw at school. We know what it’s like to have a pen and paper, which is what the artists were doing. It’s a basic human thing to make marks on paper,” Cartwright says. “A lot of the works relate to figure drawing, and when you talk about drawing the human figure, you’re telling the story through the human body. People can relate to that because that’s the world we live in.”

500 Years of Italian Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum is on view at The Ringling through January 21, 2024. The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 5401 Bay Shore Rd., Sarasota, 941-359-5700, ringling.org.

Pictured: Study for Queen Semiramis Receiving News of the Revolt of Babylon, 1624. Pen and brown ink on cream-laid paper, by Guercino. Photo Courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum.

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