Silverpoint

A silverpoint drawing is made by dragging a silver rod or wire across a surface, often prepared with gesso or ground of Chinese white.

Metalpoint styli were used for writing on soft surfaces (wax or bark), ruling and underdrawing on parchment, and drawing on prepared paper and panel supports.

Albrecht Dürer's father was one such craftsman who later taught his young son to draw in metalpoint, to such good effect that his 1484 Self-Portrait at the Age of 13 is still considered a masterpiece.

Artists who worked in silverpoint include Jan van Eyck, Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer and Raphael.

Cennino Cennini's Il Libro dell'Arte provides a window on the practice of silver and leadpoint drawing, as well as preparing metalpoint grounds, in the late 14th century.

The discovery of graphite deposits at Seathwaite in Borrowdale, Cumbria, England, in the early 1500s, and its increasing availability to artists in a pure, soft (and erasable) form hastened silverpoint's eclipse.

However, artists who continued this tradition of fine line drawing, such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, turned to graphite, which gradually improved in quality and availability throughout Europe since the 17th century.

[7] There has however been a contemporary art revival among European and American artists and academies because the medium imposes considerable discipline in draughtsmanship since drawings cannot be erased or altered.

Art historian Meder created interest in the traditional technique in Austria and Germany, while artist and teacher Legros did likewise in England.

[10] The last known exhibition of Martinez's silverpoints was in 1921 at the Print Room of San Francisco where critics praised his "unusual" and "strongly futuristic" action figures on an unconventional dark mottled ground as "archaic in execution ... terse, alert ... with a bit too much flesh.

A traditional ground may be prepared with a rabbit skin glue solution pigmented with bone ash, chalk and/or lead white.

[17] In his The Last of the Old Woodstock Inn, 1968 (The Art Institute of Chicago), Ivan Le Lorraine Albright used silver with platinum, gold, copper and brasspoint on commercially prepared video media paper.

Contemporary American silverpoint artist Carol Prusa combines graphite and binder on acrylic hemispheres with metal leaf, video projection and fiber optics.

Experimental metalpoint techniques including goldpoint on silicon carbide paper are demonstrated in Draw Like da Vinci by Susan Dorothea White,[4] as in Gilding the Lily (2005).