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| Albrecht Dürer ‘Three Studies of a Tree Bullfinch‘ 1543 watercolor, located at the Real Monasterio de El Escorial, El Escorial, Spain |
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| 'The Great Turf', 1503, watercolor, pen, and ink, Albertina, Vienna |
And then there is Pisanello (ca 1395-1455), another superb draftsman, in the same league as Dürer and DaVinci but much less well-known.
These elegant drawings are found at the Louvre Museum.
A fine essay by Andrew Graham-Dixon on Pisanello is here.
Nothing can alter the fact that almost all of the teeming painted worlds that Pisanello once created, from this multitude of observations, have long since vanished. The frescoes have disappeared, or the buildings that once housed them have burned down, fallen down, or been demolished. But to be drawn into his world even through its fragments – to witness the ruins, so to speak, of the Pisanello monument – is still to see and feel the reality of Renaissance court life with an immediacy and fullness that can be had in no other way. Although we will never be able to see him whole, we can at least recover some sense of the epic amplitude of his art – and begin to understand what Lodovico Gonzaga meant when he called Pisanello “the Homer of painting”.
