CAST DRAWING

Drawing from plaster casts is an important step between copying 2D artworks and working from life. AL GURY explores the history of the practice and offers tips to try

- AL GURY

My first experience of walking into the Cast Halls of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia as a student was accompanied by the feeling that I had walked into the Renaissance. Though I had yet to understand the uses of that fine collection of early plaster casts, I felt as if I was in a space that encouraged reason, reflection and hope as a young artist.

As the first academy of art in the United States, conceived of as early as the 1790s and chartered in 1805, the drawing curriculum at PAFA incorporates the concepts and tools of cast drawing as part of a solid grounding for the artist to this day. The founders’ first act was to purchase fine casts from Paris and Florence for the teaching of drawing. That historic collection is an integral part of the teaching of drawing and form at PAFA today. Cast drawing remains a source and support of critical thinking and practical visual tools.

One of the earliest references to cast drawing as a tool for training artists was made in Leonardo da Vinci’s A Treatise on Painting. Though scholarly debate and speculation suggests that Leonardo may have founded the first Academy of Art in Milan during his lifetime (he died in 1519), the first formal Academy of Art – the Accademia del Disegno – was created in Florence by Georgio Vasari in 1561. Followed rapidly by the founding of numerous academies, royal academies and state-sponsored schools of art in Europe and the United States, cast drawing was always an integral part of the art school curricula until well into the 19th century.