Silverpoint, Swan Quills

Drawing is the probity of art.--Ingres

The most distinguished single volume in English on the subject of great drawings was on sale last week. It is Charles de Tolnay's History and Technique of Old Master Drawings (H. Bittner & Co.; $20) The 44-year-old Hungarian author, until recent years one of Europe's leading younger art historians, is now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Into his book he has put high sensibility, a lifetime of scholarship, and an exquisite selection of 261 collotype reproductions of important drawings.

The latter, alone, would stir a possessive itch. The plates are so handsome as to prove that, even in reproduction, fine drawings can give a tactile pleasure in addition to their esthetic worth. De Tolnay's definition of drawing includes some forms of watercolor work, and the whole range of tools --swan and goose quill, silverpoint, chalk, charcoal, pencil. His "Old Masters" range from an unknown Egyptian artist's outline drawing of Rameses IV to a 18th Century sleeping figure by Toulouse-Lautrec. Along the way are such choice items as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's gracious chalk masterpiece Head of a Youth (see cut), and Edouard Manet's brush sketch for his great painting Olympia (see cut).

De Tolnay's text is rich with quotations, such as that attributed to Delacroix: "If you are not accomplished enough to make a sketch of a man in midair, falling out of a window, in the time it takes him to travel from the fourth floor to the ground, you will never be able to do great work." But few matters in the text are more impressive than de Tolnay's own paragraphs, packed with sound information, flecked with illumination, and free from crotchets. Characteristic is his discussion of Pisanello's place in history:

"Pisanello ... was perhaps the first great draftsman of Europe. . . . [He] tries to grasp man as a product of nature. . . . His new conception of nature ... is . . . immediately expressed in his drawings of animals, plants, trees, and landscapes. He looks with new eyes on the broad realm of creation and discovers in the pulpy flower or plant something zooemorphic, and in the animal something plantlike. He sees trees as tender, trembling creatures hovering in the soft air; landscape is for him no longer a mere background to man but a space filled with light and air. . . ."

The Author. Slight, courtly Charles de Tolnay got his appointment to the Institute in 1939. He left France with his wife on the day of French mobilization. His library--a fine one--had preceded him. Behind him was a European career marked by outstanding monographs on Breugel the Elder, Hieronymus Bosch, the brothers van Eyck, and brilliant lectures at the Sorbonne.

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