Van Eyck’s Portrait of an Older Man is a benchmark in the history of northern European draftsmanship. It is the earliest surviving study that can be securely attributed to an individual artist active in northern Europe and the only sheet universally accepted as an autograph drawing by Van Eyck. A pivotal figure in Netherlandish art, Van Eyck is renowned for his virtuosic handling of oil paint and his skill in pictorial illusionism. Made in preparation for a painted portrait (shown below), this drawing illuminates the process of careful observation behind the creation of Van Eyck’s meticulously executed panel.

The artist focused his attention on the man’s face, which he modeled using densely packed parallel lines. He was particularly concerned with the play of light, which animates the sitter’s physiognomy and imbues the likeness with a sculptural quality. While the use of silverpoint and goldpoint—traditional fifteenth-century drawing media—resulted in a monochromatic image, extensive inscriptions to the left of the man’s head vividly describe the color of his eyes, lips (“very whitish purple”), skin tone, hair, and “stubbly beard.” Van Eyck would have referred to these notes when creating the painted portrait.

Although both the drawing and painting were long believed to depict Niccolò Albergati, a Carthusian monk from Bologna, the man’s secular dress and hair argue against such an identification. More likely, the sitter is a scholar whose name is no longer known to us.

Born in Germany and first active as an independent master in Switzerland, Holbein spent the final decade of his life in England, working in the ambit of the Tudor court. He was particularly admired for his skills as a portraitist. This imposing likeness of Charles de Solier—a French nobleman, soldier, and diplomat—exemplifies the multilayered drawing technique that Holbein developed for his portrait studies around this time. The artist used paper prepared with a light-pink ground, approximating his sitter’s skin tone. Subtle modeling in black and colored chalk helped animate the frontal likeness, drawing the viewer’s attention to Solier’s pensive gaze. Perhaps most striking, however, is Holbein’s meticulous rendering of the man’s beard, composed of gray and auburn streaks.

Grünewald conceived this boldly rendered and expressively foreshortened figure as a witness to one of the key New Testament miracles—the Transfiguration. In this biblical event, Christ is enveloped in a halo of light as his divine nature is revealed to a small group of apostles. Here, one of the apostles is depicted as having tumbled to the ground, his body contorted and his arms extended forward, as though to protect himself from the blinding apparition. Grünewald used this study to explore the direction and modulation of light, which illuminates the apostle’s back, creating a stark contrast with the rest of the heavily shaded drapery.

In addition to his activities as a draftsman, engraver, and goldsmith, Graf was a mercenary who participated in military campaigns in Italy and France. Many of his drawings build on these experiences, chronicling the life of soldiers and the vicissitudes of war. In this sheet, a soldier and a woman are seen parting ways. While she firmly grips the front of his cloak, a sword in his left hand connects with her bulging belly, imbuing the drawing with an erotic charge. The scabbard points into the dark landscape at right, indicating the departing soldier’s direction. Although Graf’s highly linear style evokes printmaking, the drawing was not a preparatory study for an engraving. Monogrammed and dated at lower right, it was created as an independent work of art.

In a procession organized in two tiers, a princess on horseback is accompanied by servants and led by a bearded rider who points the way to a younger companion. Courtly cavalcades were popular motifs in fifteenth-century Italy, but women seldom played a leading role in such scenes, and the subject of this intriguing composition remains elusive. The artist drew attention to the now-mysterious princess and the bearded rider through both their placement in the composition and their attentively rendered robes and horses, heightened in white to contrast with the paper’s midtone. The drawing is one of the oldest surviving works on manufactured blue paper.

This finely executed drawing depicts Jupiter, the mythical Roman god, identified by the lightning bolts in his right hand, the eagle appearing over his left shoulder, and the fallen Titan partially visible beneath the god’s ornate robes. Jupiter here symbolically represents his eponymous planet, as the inscription around the five-pointed star at lower center indicates. On the verso of this sheet, the unidentified Burgundian artist portrayed Venus. Further drawings in Dresden by the same hand feature Mercury, Mars, and Saturn, the gods corresponding with the other planets then known. The style of the drawings and the figure types employed suggest a dating of around 1420–30, a notably early date for a drawing of this type.

A much-celebrated example of Florentine draftsmanship of the fifteenth century, Verrocchio’s Madonna with the Brooch demonstrates a range of techniques and artistic interests. The artist first sketched the Virgin and Christ Child in silverpoint, establishing the composition with a light touch and making several small adjustments in the process. Focusing his attention on the Virgin, he used leadpoint to reinforce contours and adjust the figure’s eyes, neck, and brooch. Picking up the brush, Verrocchio then skillfully described the fall of light over the Virgin’s robes, adding brown wash for shadows and opaque white watercolor for highlights. These painterly passages add a convincing sense of plasticity and volume to the more immediate and spontaneous metalpoint sketch.

Remarkable in its fluidity and freedom, this drawing served as a preparatory study for an altarpiece (shown below) commissioned by the brotherhood of Saint Peter Martyr in the northern Italian town of Modena. Correggio began by laying out the basic composition in chalk or charcoal, which he then extensively reworked using brown wash and white heightening. Such bold, painterly use of the drawing media allowed the artist to effectively describe the plasticity and movement of his figures, and to explore the effects of light. The study was acquired by the Kupferstich-Kabinett in 1860 as a complement to the finished painting, which entered the Dresden collection in 1746.

This refined drawing was most likely a preparatory study for Bronzino’s fresco decorations in the private chapel of Duchess Eleonora di Toledo at the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. The artist modeled the child’s face with delicate hatching, which he then rubbed to create finely blended shadows, endowing the study with the smooth surface of polished sculpture. The inclusion of lightly sketched wings indicates that the figure is an angel or a putto, of a similar type to those painted in Eleonora’s chapel. The seemingly abstract vertical lines on the child’s face and chest are remnants of a linear sketch of crossed legs, which relates to another figural motif developed for the chapel commission.

In this early example of the still-life genre, Cranach captured the texture and nuanced color of the partridges’ plumage, ranging from the delicate gray tufts covering the chest to the firmer, darker wing feathers. While the dead birds are rendered against a plain background, the carefully modulated shadows create an illusionistic impression of space. Despite the partridges’ uncanny physicality and the work’s high degree of finish, the drawing was not conceived as an autonomous work of art. Like Young Stag, on view nearby, it belongs to a portfolio of drawings of animals and birds used as models for paintings in the Cranach workshop.

The stag in this drawing is a pricket—a male deer in its second year with short, unbranched antlers. In contrast to Two Dead Partridges, on view nearby, the animal was likely drawn from a live model, which allowed the artist to capture its taut, welldefined muscles and other anatomic features in great detail. The stag’s alert, slightly retreating posture and circumspect facial expression have also been convincingly described. Cranach the Elder and members of his workshop would have referred to such studies when painting their hunt scenes, which were celebrated for their high degree of naturalism. In a tribute written in 1509, humanist Christopher Scheurl claimed that the artist’s painted stags were so realistic that birds fell to the ground when trying to land on the antlers.

The relationship between the European powers and the Ottoman Empire in the Renaissance was marked by military conflict as well as sustained cultural and commercial exchange. Featuring Ottoman ceremonies and monuments, this album attests to the early “Turkish fashion” in Dresden. The volume was created by the court painter Zacharias Wehme on the basis of a now-lost album that David Ungnad, the imperial ambassador in Constantinople, had sent to Dresden just a few years prior. This drawing focuses on the Hagia Sophia—built as a Christian place of worship and converted to a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The left side of the composition includes a flap that, when opened, reveals the tomb of the recently deceased Sultan Selim II.

Native to New Guinea and surrounding islands, birds of paradise—or rather, their dried and dissected skins—first reached mainland Europe in 1522. Collectors admired the birds’ iridescent feathers and were puzzled by what they perceived to be an unusual anatomy. When birds of paradise were dissected and their skins prepared for export to Europe, their feet were usually removed, which led to the false belief that the species was in constant flight. This drawing marvels at the bird’s brilliant plumage, executed in varied shades of brown, black, and white watercolor. It likely depicts the first bird of paradise recorded to have reached the Dresden court at the end of the sixteenth century.

On the eve of his crucifixion, after the Last Supper, Christ visited the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives with the apostles Peter, John, and James. Withdrawing in prayer, Christ asked his companions to watch over him, but while he prayed, the apostles were overcome by sleep. The Master of Frankfurt’s fully realized drawing depicts Christ among the sleeping disciples, with the later saints Jerome and Francis of Assisi, both animated in their devotion, added as flanking figures. The highly finished and elaborately worked sheet carefully combines gradations of wash and white heightening against a gray preparation, lending the scene a subtle nocturnal atmosphere and its figures a volumetric presence.

The solemn Virgin Mary, crowned as the Queen of Heaven, holds both the Christ Child and a columbine, a flower with dove-shaped petals that alludes to the Holy Spirit in the Christian tradition. The drawing’s unusually large scale and the columnar folds covering the Virgin’s elongated legs emphasize the contained verticality of this quiet scene. As a result, the standing Virgin, depicted frontally, gives the impression of a sculptural work enclosed in a niche. The composition relates to paintings by the Early Netherlandish master Hugo van der Goes and his followers. Moreover, the technique—the work is drawn with the tip of a paintbrush, mixing regularized parallel hatching with short comma-like strokes—is one used by the master and his circle.

Landscape first emerged as an independent pictorial subject in prints, drawings, and paintings of the Danube School—a group of artists active in Germany and Austria in the first half of the sixteenth century. Trained in the workshop of his older brother, Albrecht, a central figure among the Danube artists, Erhard Altdorfer was a very early adopter of the genre. This drawing depicts an imaginary landscape with an enormous, highly stylized tree, craggy mountains, and a river, which winds toward a small town in the distance. Altdorfer structured the composition using tightly spaced parallel- and cross-hatching, as well as looser, spiraling lines, which describe the clouds and shrubbery.