Pair of Draped Figures 16th-17th century

Lazzaro Tavarone made this drawing, "Pair of Draped Figures" with pen, brown ink, and wash on paper sometime in the late 16th or early 17th century. This drawing relates to a key institutional change in the art world of the Italian Renaissance, the rise of the art academy. As opposed to the guild workshop, the academy focused on theoretical knowledge, promoted an elite idea of the artist, and emphasized drawing from life and the antique as essential to training. We can see this drawing as an example of that practice. The grid marks also tell us something about artistic production in this period. Often artists would use a grid to transfer and scale up a design to a larger format. To understand more, we might look at academic treatises, and other drawings from the period. In the end, we can only understand a work of art like this by seeing it in its full social and institutional context.