Csornay Boldizsár - Dobos Zsuzsa - Varga Ágota - Zakariás János szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 100. (Budapest, 2004)

URBACH, ZSUZSA: Ein flämischer ikonographischer Bildtypus im italienischen Quattrocento. Bemerkungen zur Studie von Éva Eszláry

Special care was taken in the clean, closed outlines of the model drawings, providing the highest guarantee of transmutability of the prototypes of the motifs (exemplum).

33 Where the drawings were worn by the traces of time, the fading contours were reinforced again and again.

34 This practice led to the earlier silverpoint drawings often receiving subsequent outlines drawn with pen and ink. In this way, Jacopo Bellini's drawing-book of silverpoint drawings at the Louvre was already drawn over at the beginning of the sixteenth century by the Bellini workshop.

35 Rarer, perhaps, but it also happened that faded drawings were replaced completely with new ones, as in the case of Jacques Daliwe's model-book produced circa 1400.

36 In the Budapest Model-book, fine modelled, monochrome pen drawings are arranged. Simple carbon ink, the bistre was employed toward the drawings, and there is no trace of under- or overdrawing. It is not only in their styles that the drawings differ from one another, forming two characteristically different groups, but they also were prepared with bistre of different tone.

37 The principal characteristic of the earlier depictions drawn with darker, blackish-brown bistre is their thin closed outline, which the draughtsman then washed with densely running, fine parallel hatching lines of a lighter tone. The master of the other group of drawings modelled his lighter, yellow-brown bistre drawings with the well-defined, backand-forth hatching lines of a uniform shade. Nevertheless, the silhouette of these latter drawings of a more vigorous style is also closed and drawn with a sure hand. The true distinction between the two drawing styles is contained in their different modelling. In the earlier drawings, parallel lines are run with bistre dissolved in water in various shades, while in the other group of drawings, the touch of the pen lines, densely aligned, corresponding to spatial forms and of identical tone, creates the plasticity of the forms. The earlier drawings of the Budapest Model-book quote from the so-called/me manner engravings of the early Florentine engravers.

38 At the beginning, the engravings were directly inspired by contemporary drawings in pen and wash, preserving their thin precisely outlined, clean, lucid structure of finely drawn lines. According to style, between the two categories of early Italian engravings, in contrast with the 3 Cennini, chap. 10, 23, 30, 31, 122. 4 J. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work, New Haven and London 1992, 41; Serieller, op. cit. (n. 1), 39. 5 Elen, op. cit. (n. 8), 470. 6 Scheller, op. cit. (n. 1), cat. 21. 7 Gyula Gajdó differentiates between two types of bistre in the Budapest Model-book: the drawings of the first group of a blackish-brown solid bistre of a high pigment content, while those of the second group were produced with a light, yellowish-brown bistre without grains of pigment, see Gajdó, op. cit. (n. 7), 9. I have indicated the former with hi and the latter with b2 in chart 1. s Relative of the Budapest Model-book, likewise Florentine, the Rothschild Model-book has been similarly linked with the Florentine fine manner engravings, on the basis of the style of the drawings, see n. 2.