Silverpoint Drawing

One of the most distinctive Renaissance drawing techniques is the use of a metallic stylus. Commonly referred to as silverpoint drawing, it takes its name from silver, the metal most frequently used to make these styluses.

Metalpoint drawing had its flourishing across both Northern and Southern Europe between the 14th and 16th centuries. With the rise of Mannerism and the Baroque, artists gradually turned to more versatile media such as chalk and graphite, which allowed greater freedom of gesture and expression. Yet, over the centuries, many artists returned to the silverpoint technique, drawn by its delicate tonal range and unmatched precision.

The history of drawing is closely intertwined with the history of writing materials. A pointed stylus was already an auxiliary writing tool in antiquity. Widely used by the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines, it served for practice, composition, and note-taking on reusable wax tablets. These styli were typically made of bronze or other materials suitable for shaping. A Roman bronze stylus, for instance, usually had a pointed end for writing and a broad, flat, spatula-like end on the opposite side for erasing. This practice survived up to late middle ages, when paper has started gradually becoming a readily available commodity.

A few depictions of bound wooden tablets with styli have come down to us, along with a considerable number of surviving bronze styli and tablets (typically made of boxwood), of which the British Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art preserve particularly noteworthy examples.

During the Middle Ages, the lead stylus gained importance in its role of auxiliary tool in manuscript production. Because its soft metal leaves a faint but visible trace on parchment, scribes used it to rule pages with guiding lines and to sketch out initials and decorative motifs before inking or painting them.

For artists, however, parchment was prohibitively expensive. The need for a cheaper and reusable surface for practice and invention encouraged the emergence of metalpoint drawing as an independent technique.

Cennino Cennini, writing in the late 14th century, explains how small boxwood tablets could be coated with a prepared ground and used for sketching with a metal stylus. These panels worked in spirit much like the wax tablets of antiquity, erasable and recyclable, but the crucial difference lay in the quality of the line. Unlike the blunt marks left in wax, the metalpoint stroke could be sharp, delicate, and capable of refined detail and subtle tonal effects.

A rare survival of this practice is a sketchbook of six boxwood panels, produced in Paris around 1400 and today preserved at the Morgan Library & Museum (MS M.346 and MS M.346a). Traditionally associated with the French illuminator Jacquemart de Hesdin, the panels provide a vivid illustration of the silverpoint technique as described by Cennini. Only a handful of such examples have come down to us, likely because they were working tools, used for practice and repeatedly re-prepared, and thus were not valued as finished artworks by their makers or contemporaries.

Cennino describes the metalpoint as “a style of silver, or brass, or anything else, provided the ends be of silver, fairly slender, smooth, and handsome“. Alcherius, likely a French contemporary of Cennini, also refers to different metal styluses in the context of testing a metalpoint ground: “which may be known by drawing on it with a stile of brass, or bronze, or copper, or still better of silver, and seeing whether it makes black marks or not“

Scientific examination of Old Master drawings confirms that although silver (more precisely, a silver–copper alloy with an average ratio of about 90/10%) was the most common material for metalpoints, artists sometimes employed other metals. For example, goldpoint has been identified in Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of a Cardinal (possibly Niccolò Albergati).

Another widely used type of stylus from the Middle Ages onward was the leadpoint, usually made of a lead–tin alloy in a 2:1 ratio and shaped by hand with a hammer, as described by Cennini. Unlike silverpoint, the lead stylus did not require a specially prepared bone-ash ground; being a softer metal, it could mark directly on raw parchment or paper and could also be erased more easily with a piece of bread pulp.

But what did these metallic styluses actually look like in the Renaissance? A valuable source is the composition St. Luke Drawing the Virgin, which was especially popular among Netherlandish artists of the early 16th century:

Silverpoint strokes can be very light and blended or can be more distinct and the dark tones will be achieved with intersecting hatched lines.

In case the drawing surface is prepared with a middle-tone ground, the highlights can be executed with help of white color and a brush.

When Cennini composed his treatise in the late 14th century, paper was still relatively costly, and parchment remained the standard for manuscripts. By the mid-15th century, however, the spread of papermaking and the growing demand fueled by the printing industry made paper increasingly affordable. As a result, the boxwood tablets described by Cennini gradually gave way to sketchbooks made of paper or parchment prepared with bone ash. With these, artists could carry their books and draw directly on site, in a manner not unlike how we use a graphite pencil in a sketchbook today.

Notice the handy way in which silverpoint styluses were attached to the sketchbooks:

One of the most famous silverpoint sketchbooks is by Albrecht Durer. He filled it with drawings during his trip to the Netherlands in 1520-1521. The book was dismantled and the pages can now be found in multiple collections around the world. Printed reproductions of the pages were assembled and published over the years. Check out Heidelberg University Library where you can get an idea of sketchbook’s original contents.

Finally, extremely light but indelible silverpoint lines were also commonly used as an underdrawing by many 15th century artists: for ink drawings (by Leonardo da Vinci for example) and even for paintings on panel (Jan van Eyck). Sometimes, it worked the other way around: charchoal drawing was made prior to using silverpoint which is much harder to erase (see the above dog drawing by Albrecht Dürer).