The “value of drawing” and the “method of vision”. How formalism and connoisseurship shaped the aesthetic of the sketch

Abstract

This essay explores how connoisseurship and formalism from the late nineteenth until the middle of the twentieth centuries contributed to the study of drawing that characterised and shaped sketches as a particular subgenre. By focusing on reoccurring and recontextualised expressions, phrases, and notions used by Heinrich Wölfflin, Bernard Berenson, Max Friedländer, and Bernhard Degenhart, I will argue how drawings were either used to describe painting as a stepping stone for an epochal style or as a quasi-semiotic and graphological approach toward the genre that, in turn, favoured a specific aesthetic ascribed to the artist’s assumed personality. Moreover, the two genres were tied to a set of vocabulary that highlighted both their individual function and aesthetic, yet unfolded a methodologically problematic narrative.