artist, that resulted from the loosening of traditional bonds and conventions: from the constraints of the guilds and from the anonymity of the collective workshop in the early time of Dürer; and from the strict regimen of the acadamies

In German art history, drawing assumed a leading role in two periods: around 1500, the age of Dürer, and around 1800, the age of Goethe or the Romantic era. The correspondences between ideas, themes, and practices in the drawings of these periods are the subject of this article. I will first discuss the interesting phenomenon of the parallels between the ages of Dürer and Goethe in the development of autonomous draughtsmanship. This introduction is essential for understanding the various ways that the art of Dürer, in particular, as well as that of his contemporaries, was received by early 19th-century German artists. The visual arts of both periods show strong graphic tendencies, and their most eminent artists produced important works as draughtsmen. Many artists – and this applies particularly to the period of Goethe largely because a number of them died young – are documented primarily as draughtsmen. Parallel historical developments in Germany led to the autonomous position of drawing. Both periods were times of radical intellectual, religious, social, economic, and political change. The age of Dürer witnessed the transition from the late medieval age, the late Gothic, to the early Renaissance with the spread of humanism and the Reformation. In the age of Goethe, rococo, neoclassicism, various permutations of romanticism, and realism succeeded one another under the banner of Enlightenment. In both epochs, there were equivalent changes in the situation of the artist, that resulted from the loosening of traditional bonds and conventions: from the constraints of the guilds and from the anonymity of the collective workshop in the early time of Dürer; and from the strict regimen of the acadamies around 1800. This process of liberation had consequences for artistic creation that are still important today. The model sheet or model book of the anonymous medieval craftsman was only gradually replaced, during Dürer’s day, by the nature study and the personal sketchbook. Similarly, during the age of Goethe the direct study of nature gradually replaced the practice of copying from models at the academy. In both periods, the individualization of artists and their increasing self-awareness developed in tandem with the rise of an educated and affluent middle class. These conditions favoured the development of the autonomous drawing, that is, a drawing created for its own sake as an independent work of art. Rather than merely serving on auxiliary function in the creative process, drawings were appreciated in their own right and became collectable. Two examples demonstrate this shift from the anonymous model sheet to the individual sketchbook in Dürer’s time. The playing card, Six of Birds, an engraving by the Master E.S. of 1463, was used in the late medieval workshop as a model for book-illumination, panel, or wall painting (Pl.1). It may be compared with a marginal illumination in an Austrian missal of 1492, in which the artist, while copying the motif of the falcon attacking the heron from the earlier model, used colour in the bird’s plumage, which indicates at least a slight interest in the observation of nature (Pl.2). Prints by Martin Schongauer were already disseminated widely during his lifetime. His engraving of a woman spilling oil from her lamp (Pl. 3), part of a series illustrating the biblical parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, served as the model for a drawing by an unidentified artist of the late 15th century (Pl.4). The copy, although close to the engraving and its stereotypical character, exhibits a more individualized expression of sorrow in the woman’s face, apparently observed from life. Taken together, these two images reflect a phase of transition in which the model sheet and the study of nature overlap. Other late Gothic model sheets illustrate in a similar way the development of the portrait. Two such drawings depict types of heads in different attitudes, copied from various sources. From a sheet drawn by Sigmund Holbein members of the Holbein workshop could select the desired head for an altarpiece. In the second example, done in Michael Wolgemut’s workshop around 1470 to 80, numerous women’s hairstyles and headdresses are scattered across the sheet. The young Dürer might have made use of this drawing during his apprenticeship. Schongauer’s pen study of the Head of a Bearded Old Man, in Basel, comes somewhat closer to an individual likeness, but still remains the type of an Old Testament high priest. However, the silverpoint drawing in Hans Holbein the Elder’s sketch-book in Berlin, depicting Leonhart Wagner, the famous Augsburg calligrapher and scribe, is a true individual and autonomous portrait done from life. The technique of silverpoint, so popular in Dürer’s time, was re-introduced by Anton Graff of Dresden for his miniature portraits in the late 18th century, and it experienced a revival in the early 19th century. By the late Middle Ages, the artist had emerged from the anonymous collective workshop. With increasing selfawareness, he became conscious of his own artistic skills and initiated an internal dialogue in his art. Dürer, for example, in his youthful Self-Portrait of about 1492, for the first time and with expressive power, addressed the theme ‘Know thyself’ (Pl.5). A parallel, in terms of evolution and motif, can be found in Henry Fuseli’s self-portrait of about 1780 to 90, which also shows the artist in a melancholy pose, that suggests self-questioning and self-analysis (Pl. 6). During the age of Dürer, the artistic category of the individual portrait developed only slowly, for example, through the individualization of figures of saints – traditionally stylized in a formulaic way or through the donor portrait. By the age of Hinrich Sieveking