Lessons From Michelangelo

The images in this section are from photos I took at the Teylers Museum during a Michelangelo exhibition. I learned the lessons below from the book ‘Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters’ by Robert Beverly Hale.

Michelangelo was a sculptor, and his studies were also form studies. He thought in 3D form. This short page shows five tricks he used for that, and frankly, all masters of his time used.

#1: Convex Lines

If you draw clouds, you draw them with “convex” lines: C-shaped lines that bulge outward. The opposite would be lines that the lines cave in. Such a line is called a concave line. You can also have straight lines or S-shaped lines.

Michelangelo, and frankly, all or most of the old masters, used Convex lines to delineate figures because those convex lines suggested flesh.

See, for example, this red chalk study for the Libyan Sibyl:

Look around the image. Notice how all the lines bulge outward.

Also, look at this image with a head and a foot.

These do have areas where the line caves in, but even there, he built it up from convex lines, again to suggest fleshiness.

#2: Secondary Lighting

Now look at this lower arm.

What you see is that there is a light source from above, and there is a softer light source below the lower arm. The primary light source is above, and the secondary light source is light from the primary bouncing off the environment and into the lower part of the lower arm, the part turned away from the primary.

As you can see, this is useful if you want to suggest form.

#3: Simplified Forms

If you look closely, you also see in the image with the arm that it consists of two simpler forms: an egg-shaped form and a box-like form. Michelangelo doesn't make them precisely like an egg or a box, but he shades these parts as if they were an egg and a box. On an egg, the shadow diminishes slowly, in a gradual fade, whereas on a box it terminates abruptly, and at a box rib, you might even have the brightest and darkest parts next to each other.

He primarily uses egg-like forms, but occasionally uses a box-like form. Next to the lower arm, he uses box-like forms for the bottom of the feet, like in this image, where you see that the lower leg is formed by eggs, but the flat of the foot has a box-like quality, with the heel having a cylinder-like quality.

#4: Contour-Like Hatch Lines

As you can see in the foot above, or in the other drawings, he used hatching lines to suggest tone, but the direction of the lines also matters; he used them to suggest the underlying form. These hatch lines were contour lines on the underlying form. Again, here he was thinking about form as he did his studies.

#5: Cast Shadows

Light tends to come from above, and as a nose extends from a face, there tends to be a cast shadow under the nose. The problem with dark shadows is that you just draw them dark, and that doesn't give you many options to suggest underlying form. When a tone is lighter, you can use hatch lined to suggest underlying form. When you go full dark, you can't do that.

So what they did (and what he did) was lighten the cast shadows so he could suggest form beneath them.

The nose below is from his statue, Dying Slave, and you can see a very dark shadow under his nose with the light coming from above.

The ones below, which were drawn by Michelangelo, barely have any cast shadow. The shadows below the upper and lower lips and under the eyebrows are softened considerably too, also in favor of being able to suggest form more effectively in those areas.

You can see the effect even more if you squint with your eyes. The statue has real shadows under the nose, lips, and eyebrows, but these are almost entirely absent in the drawings. What you do see is form suggestion of the area under the nose, the lips, and below the eyebrows. Michelangelo purposely left out these shadows to suggest form more clearly.

As you can see, he was very much thinking about form as he did his studies.

You can see more of Michelangelo's art here.

Bonus: there is another way you can suggest form: you can use contour lines that are not intended to also convey tone. Heinrich Kley did that often. Here is an example:

This is a cat-like creature, and you can see all sorts of swirling lines over its body, especially its lower body, depicting the underlying form.