ArtistsNetwork.com 23Seated Male Youth
by Peter Paul Rubens
ca 1613; black chalk, heighted with
white chalk, 19¹¹⁄₁^6 x11¾
THE PIERPONT MORGAN LIBRARY, NEW YORK, N.Y.
difficult-to-hold gesture of Daniel’s
figure. Given the limited resources
of his era, it couldn’t have been easy
for Rubens to analyze each lion. He
must have spent vast hours drawing
the species in every position from life,
perhaps comparing the skeletal and
muscular structure to a human’s.
Notice the boxlike, or cubic
value shapes in Rubens’ lion
drawings (opposite). They convey
a convincing sculptural feeling of
form only possible when working
from life and, if necessary, are sup-
plemented by a combination of
sketches from multiple viewpoints.
Today, with the help of modern
technology, you can work from refer-
ence photos taken at a zoo or view
videos of lions in the wild, frame by
frame, to achieve a precise gesture.
Still, if you want to get a volumetric
cubic sense of the animals’ form, as
Rubens so capably did, you’ll need to
spend a good deal of time sketching
them from life. Alternatively, to
become more familiar with animal
anatomy, consider sketching your pet.FINDING FORM
Rubens was a consummate figure
painter and drawer, but in his sketch
of Daniel (left), he was pushing his
dimensional understanding of the
human form. You can see him analyz-
ing the underlying cylindrical form
of Daniel’s limbs: encircling the leg
with a cross-contour in the form of
a cast shadow; stressing the shad-
owed plane breaks along the length
of each limb; and emphasizing their
turning edges with the kind of strong
core shadow and interior reflected
lights often found in his paintings.
There are few defining shadows
in Study for the Figure of Christ (page
25), but notice how Rubens signifies
plane breaks of the torso with chalk
highlights or the way he uses rolling,
overlapping lines to indicate where
one form detail crosses in front of
another. Observe how he alternates
a heavy and faint line quality in both
drawings to describe solid bone and
malleable muscle forms, anticipating
his use of hard/soft and lost/found
edges in the paintings.