presentation drawing

presentation drawing. A highly finished drawing intended as an independent work of art rather than as a stage in the preparation of some other work; the term is applied particularly to such drawings made in the Italian Renaissance. The earliest known drawings of the type, probably dating from the 1420s, are by Lorenzo Monaco (Visitation and Journey of the Magi, both Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin), and the first artist known to have produced a drawing specifically for presentation to a patron is Leonardo da Vinci; Vasari records that he made such a drawing, of Neptune (c.1503), for ‘his good friend Antonio Segni’, a collector with antiquarian tastes, but it does not survive. Michelangelo is the artist who above all others is associated with presentation drawings and the term was coined (by Johannes Wilde) with reference to his work. In the 1530s he made a series of such drawings, some of which he gave to Tommaso Cavalieri, a young nobleman of great physical beauty whom he met in 1532 and to whom he had a passionate emotional attachment. The drawings, in delicately stippled chalk, were of mythological subjects or fanciful heads ( Vasari calls them ‘divine heads’), the earliest surviving one being the Punishment of Tityus (1532, Royal Lib., Windsor). Later Michelangelo made presentation drawings on religious subjects for Vittoria Colonna, a pious widow who became a close friend from about 1538 (Crucifixion, c.1539, BM, London).