Albrecht Dürer’s Drawing Devices: an Experimental Study

Abstract

In the two editions of his Underweysung der Messung of 1525 and 1538, Albrecht Dürer published designs for four devices to help artists with drawing. The present author has reconstructed all four tools and made experiments, in each case drawing a lute. The paper reports on the problems encountered and the times taken. For comparison, a perspective view of the lute is constructed geometrically, and other drawings are made freehand. The two more complex machines proved to be inaccurate, time-consuming, and almost unworkable. The gridded frame is faster and more accurate. Best of all in terms of speed and precision is tracing on glass, which in the experiments took less than a tenth of the time needed to set up and draw a perspective of the lute’s difficult curved form. The paper follows the historical legacy of Dürer’s devices. The complex machines are republished repeatedly in Renaissance texts on perspective but were arguably little used in practice. By contrast, the gridded frame and tracing on glass were recommended in many teaching texts and used widely by artists right up to the twentieth century.