Artist Insights: Jonathan Long

Jonathan Long is the founder of The Renaissance Workshop, which aims to revive the artisanal drawing techniques used by artists of the 15th and 16th centuries. In this Artist Insights film, Jonathan tells us how his desire for historical authenticity gives his life meaning, how a knowledge of materials helps us connect with the art of the Old Masters, and why he believes that the Renaissance approach to drawing is still so vital today.

0:00 Introduction

0:54 “I was yearning for an experience like that of an apprentice in a Renaissance workshop”

1:31 “Something radiated out from the paintings at the National Gallery”

2:06 “I had to study history to understand what art really means”

3:05 “You have to draw before you can paint”

3:37 “You can’t understand the process of Renaissance drawing without the materials”

5:18 “I need to have the confidence that what I’m doing is historically authentic”

5:54 “Cennino Cennini is an essential insight into how artists worked”

7:13 “Artists were primarily interested in the narrative capacities of the human form”

8:17 “Drawing is a means of conception, a process of incremental refinement”

10:14 “The materials I produce would be recognisable to an artist of the Renaissance”

10:38 “Silverpoint drawing is a physical transfer of one material to another”

11:47 “Everything made in the Renaissance was beautified. That’s what I want to bring back”

12:09 “The process begins with the raw materials”

14:36 “It’s a way to have a tactile and immediate interaction with history”

15:19 “There wasn’t a Jackson’s in the Renaissance”

15:54 “Renaissance drawing is an interpretive and representational art form”

17:09 “Leonardo said you begin a drawing with the movement”

17:56 “The second stage of the drawing is about refining the intrinsic design of the form”

18:11 “Tone is what enables us to see the substance of something”

18:58 “To find out when a drawing is finished, define what your intentions were”

19:41 “Drawing is the way to get into the mood for drawing”

20:28 “I love drawing people who I have affection for”

21:19 “Renaissance Workshop exists to make historical drawing a part of the living fabric of our world now”

22:04 “There was a Corinthian potter…”

22:48 Credits

Extract

I was born too late. I wish I had been born around the 1460s and made my way to Verrocchio’s workshop. Drawing is about representing something in a way that conforms to the artist’s fantasia or imagination and has a purpose to it above and beyond merely representational.

I was always interested in drawing and wanted to have an understanding of how artists worked historically. My experience in the kitchen coincided with that development. What I was yearning for was a kind of experience like an apprentice in a Renaissance workshop. The workshops have all gone. The bottegas of 15th-century Florence have gone. And so that’s why I think my soul ended up dragging me into the depths of the French kitchens of London to experience that.

Jonanthan Long while a student at Kings College, London

When I was 16, I went to the National Gallery and something radiated out from the paintings. The possibility that something that I could make could follow in that same tradition and be connected through history to the great traditions going back to antiquity would be what could give my life meaning.

When I was 18 I did a foundation in fine art. I didn’t really feel that I was connecting to what I wanted to connect to in that environment. I wanted to reconstruct and reconstitute the world of Renaissance drawing. Without understanding the history of something, you don’t understand the intrinsic value of the thing itself. That was my intuition. I had to study history in order to understand what art really was, what art really means. And why Renaissance art is so significant as the underpinning for so many of the beautiful paintings that I’d seen in the National Gallery from later periods up to the 17th century.

Compositional Sketches for the Virgin Adoring the Christ Child, with and without the Infant St. John the Baptist; Diagram of a Perspectival Projection, 1480–85
Leonardo da Vinci
Silverpoint partly reworked with pen and ink, 19.3 x 16.2 cm | 7.6 x 6.4 in
Metropolitan Museum of Art

You have to draw before you can paint, I think. You can paint alla prima as Velázquez did, you can paint alla prima as Frans Hals did, but drawing and design are fundamental. While I was at King’s College, I set up the Renaissance Workshop. I had three weekly life drawing sessions where I worked with life models. And that’s where it began. For me, when I’d go around and help people with their drawings, I would talk about what the Old Masters used to do.

Jonathan showing Leonardo’s drawing materials at Christies, London

The purpose of the Renaissance Workshop is to be a place where I reconstitute the world of Renaissance drawing. Through interdisciplinary research and visual archaeology, I explain and teach the process of drawing used by Renaissance artists. This is so that you can have the same form of apprenticeship in drawing as Leonardo da Vinci in the time of the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, with the same materials that were used.

The materials have a vital purpose and you can’t really understand the process of Renaissance drawing without them. Draftsmanship is of such great importance to me. The 15th and 16th century Florentine draftsmen pioneered and developed an approach to drawing which is the greatest form that drawing has ever taken.

That, for me, was something that I had to learn first before becoming a painter. That approach and methodology is the truest foundation for the future development of Western drawing and painting up until the Enlightenment. I absolutely need to have the feeling and confidence that what I’m doing is historically authentic. When I feel confident that I’m doing that, there is a euphoria I can’t really describe.

I’ve done as much as I can to train myself according to how an artist was trained in the Renaissance, using the historical sources that were available to read and access in the time of Leonardo and Verrocchio. Cennino Cennini, of course, is an essential insight into how artists worked in the 15th century. Leonardo’s notebooks, some of which were intended to become a treatise on painting, give you direct insights from Leonardo himself about drawing. The little phrases he gives us, like going to work very slowly when we start or beginning with the movement in a figure, rather than the proportions. How Leonardo tells us to distinguish the lights in drawing, practicing diligence, practicing working methodically. Leonardo gives so many insights in his notebooks, so it’s probably the most exciting source for somebody in my endeavor.

Head of a Man in Profile Facing to the Left, 1490–94
Leonardo da Vinci
Pen and brown ink over black chalk, 11.7 x 5.2 cm | 4.6 x 2 in
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Understanding really basic things about the early modern period can help you get into the mindset of a Renaissance artist. The fact that 90% of the population are agricultural workers, for instance. If you were an artist born in the mid-15th century, you wouldn’t have been born an artist, you would have become one through apprenticeship. Artists in the workshops at this time are primarily interested in the narrative capacities of the human form, trying to convey a message of theological importance, theological significance, or narrative and historical significance. During the time of Leonardo and thereafter, increasingly, emotive significance. An artist in the Renaissance would either be executing artworks, assisting in the execution of artworks, preparing materials, or learning to draw.

What distinguishes Renaissance drawing from other approaches to drawing is that there isn’t a preciousness or pressure on the individual drawing itself. Drawing is used as a means of conception. An error or mistake in a drawing isn’t problematic. Artists didn’t prize and show their drawings in the Renaissance so much unless they were a modelo or presentation drawings. The approach and ethos of Renaissance drawing is one of incremental refinement. And in order to refine one’s drawing, you need errors. Renaissance artists drew very loosely, very intuitively, but with Silverpoint. You can erase it, but it’s not relevant to the Renaissance approach to drawing because artists didn’t really rub out. You look at Renaissance drawing and you see lots of what are called or what are known as pentiment or pentimenti. It’s not that they’re good or that they’re okay; mistakes don’t exist.

It’s that freedom and looseness, intuition and spontaneity that you need to practice to get this approach to drawing. Make lots of beautiful errors, draw over them, and incorporate them into the drawing. Allow them to be a part of the drawing. Drawings did not have the status of artworks in the Renaissance and that’s a very useful thing to displace the importance and primacy of the drawing itself. See it as a place where the action takes place, where the act of drawing is implemented and set in motion rather than a place to produce an image. That is what will really unlock a bit more of your artistic potential.

In my courses and classes, you can draw with whatever you want. But the materials that I produce, that I make are all handmade historical items which would be recognizable to an artist of the Renaissance. I want everything I do and everything I use to be something that I can rationally believe could be recognisable, and even ubiquitous, in the period that I love so much.

Jonathan with his stylus on display at the Royal Collection Show

Silverpoint drawing is when you take a piece of metal and scrape it across an abrasive surface and leave traces of that metal behind on the surface. The point of the stylus is dragged across the paper. Because the paper is coated with your ground, the pigment particles capture and draw away particles of silver from the point. They remain embedded on that surface, so it’s just a physical transfer of one material to another via friction.

I started making the styluses because I simply wanted to have a historically authentic stylus. And then the demand for them grew out of me using my styluses when I was teaching. We know that the silver that went into the styluses was alloyed because you can analyse them molecularly and they’re alloys of predominantly silver with tin, zinc, bismuth, and copper. So the styluses that we make are also alloyed with those materials. The styluses are 92.5% silver, made to the same design as a Renaissance stylus, with the same paper and the same materials. Everything made in the Renaissance was beautified and that’s what I want to bring back. I want to return Europe back into what it was in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance through art, through what I do.

Making a Renaissance Workshop Silverpoint Stylus

To draw with Silverpoint, you need something to draw on. It can really be anything. The paper is made from rag paper, and it’s prepared with glue which is made from goat skin. That is the historical glue that is described in Cennino Cennini’s Handbook. The pigments, the bone-white pigment I make, allow for a dynamic tonal range and a range of varying linear qualities, unlike other surfaces. The process begins with the raw materials. I’m eating the animals first, yeah, and then I’m cleaning the bones, drying them out, putting them into an incinerator and making bone ash with them. I then grind them down in a pestle and mortar so that you have a fine powder.

Once you have that fine powder, you need to make it considerably finer still on a slab made of either porphyry or glass, with a muller made of either porphyry or glass. Then you would grind the pigment with water to make a smooth, silken paste and you would combine that with hide glue before brushing that onto the paper. The hide glue is made out of the collagenous tissues of goat. You make that by boiling up the collagenous tissues, the skin, the sinews, the connective tissue of the goat until you’ve extracted all of that collagen and you’ve evaporated all of the water. Then that thick substance will be passed through a cheesecloth and a very fine sieve and cooled in a dish until it sets into a jelly. It is then cut into little pieces and dried out. It can be rehydrated when you want to make the glue and combined with the pigments.

You can make tinted ground, so you can use Bone White mixed with Vermilion or earth colours and combine that with the hide glue. Then brush that onto the paper to make a beautiful smooth, velvety prepared paper. You can burnish the paper smooth so that you get that gliding feel, and it also makes your lines more precise. The less grainy and the less abrasive the paper, the finer and more consistent and homogenised your lines are. The other products I make are the brass holder which is a chalk holder made of a little brass cylinder with two rings over it which tighten over the chalk. I make carbon-based ink made with lamp soot. I make the drawing tablet, the boxwood drawing tablet that was used and which is described in Cennino Cennini’s handbook as the first drawing surface an apprentice would ever draw on. It’s a way to actually in your hands the same drawing tools that were used in the Renaissance. That is a tactile and immediate interaction with history.

Studies for the Libyan Sibyl, 1510-11
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Red chalk, with small accents of white chalk, 28.9 × 21.4 cm | 11.3 x 8.4 in
Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the Renaissance, someone like Leonardo or Verrocchio would go to the Cartier to buy their paper. Predominantly pigments were bought from the apothecary. Glues were made in the workshops. There were no art shops, there were no specialised places to purchase one’s supplies for art. There were no Jackson’s in the Renaissance, and so the materials and the preparation of the materials were a part of the artistic life.

The historical debate, which goes back to antiquity about the role of the artist, is whether or not the artist should represent something or mimic something. Renaissance drawing is not a mimetic art form. It’s an interpretive and representational art form. When drawing from life, I would modulate the intrinsic design which I’ve memorised and have that fit the subject before me to render the individual likeness of the person’s face or body and their pose.

This type of drawing isn’t entirely observational. It’s scaffolded. Not just to idealise or to beautify something but there is a lexicon to Renaissance drawing and there is a system to it. This whole mimetic approach to drawing which developed in the later 17th century into the 18th and 19th centuries and is now still alive in the academies – that is post-Renaissance and it’s a new modern affair.

Renaissance artists start every drawing with an emphasis on the dynamic, the movement. Leonardo distinguishes between movement and proportion and he says that you begin a drawing with the movement. What does he mean by that? You look at the very initial lines of a Leonardo drawing or you find a drawing which is very unfinished where he’s just done the first stage of the drawing. He’ll break the figure down into a series of distinctive shapes. They’re never generic, Renaissance artists never draw generic shapes. There are no eggs or ovoids or spheres or cylinders. There’s none of that. There’s no visual trace of that whatsoever. The first stage of a drawing is all about the dynamic. The second stage of the drawing is about refining and delineating the intrinsic design of the form. Renaissance drawing at its most basic is the combination of line and hatching.

The tone is done with hatching in layers. Look at Leonardo and his hatching, it’s one-directional diagonal hatching. You would distinguish between the lights and the half lights first and then subsequently deepen the shadows within the area of the half lights that you’ve done with your hatching. And then pick out a few accents within those shadows for your darker tones. Hair will be drawn in these very soft flowing strokes. Leonardo’s particularly good for that, emulating the effect and the texture of hair with such simple delicate lines. Tone is what enables us to actually see the substance of something, that’s what he writes in his notebooks.

The Head of the Virgin in Three-Quarter View Facing Right, 1510–13
Leonardo da Vinci
Black chalk, charcoal, and red chalk, with some traces of white chalk,
20.3 x 15.6 cm | 8 x 6.1 in
Metropolitan Museum of Art

To find out or to determine when a drawing is finished, you would have to define first what your intentions for the drawing were. Renaissance drawings are virtually always an open-ended inquiry. Very, very few drawings by Leonardo appear to be finished. There will be some aspects of a drawing that are finished and others that are not. For a Renaissance artist like Verrocchio, drawings might be deliberately left unfinished for apprentices to learn from those unfinished drawings, whereas other drawings might be very highly finished as exemplar drawing.

I have a routine where I wake up and I do some exercise, rehydrate, and get some sunlight into my eyes. I have a beautiful draftsman’s table and I’ll have the light coming in from my left side. And I’ll start drawing slowly. I’ll draw things that I’m familiar with, like warming up, just to get into the process and to switch modes. Drawing is the way to get into the mood for drawing. I draw a lot from reference material. I go to the prints and drawings study room at the British Museum where I handle all the master drawings as part of my research and I draw in there. When I’m trying to train and practice, I’ll copy Renaissance drawings and I’ll do that quite repetitively which is, you know, it’s just an endless thing. I love drawing from life, I love drawing people close to me, and I love drawing people who I have affection for.

I build relationships with the models that I draw. There are some models I’ve drawn for a long time and who have been inspiring to me over the years. And when I’m teaching, my camera is set up over my hand and people just see my hand as I draw and as I explain the process during my courses.

The purpose is that the historical culture of drawing is no longer just history. The Renaissance Workshop really exists to make Renaissance drawing and historical European drawing a part of the living fabric of our world now. I want my yearning and love for Renaissance drawing to be the cause for a revival of this approach and to be what makes Renaissance drawing accessible globally.

About Jonathan Long

Jonathan Long is an artist specialising in 15th-century Italian drawing techniques and processes. He is the founder of The Renaissance Workshop where he teaches Renaissance drawing methods using historical approaches and media.

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