"The Art of Drawing ... may justly be called a bearing Mother of all Arts and Sciences ... and besides all this, the Art of Drawing is the Beginning and End, or Finisher of all things imaginable, wherefore she may be called a Sense of Poesie, a Second Nature, a Living Book of all things Past.' Willem Goeree --Drawing has always been an inseparable part of Western art-making, but its role has been subjected to increasing scrutiny during the past decades. Admiration for found objects and readymades, the endless possibilities of new technologies, and the embodiment of the artist as performer and animator of social practices as well as maker of artefacts mean that drawing practice has shifted away from the traditional life-class study, portrait likeness or town- and landscape sketch. This book is the first of its kind to address emergent ways of drawing within a richly illustrated trans-historical context and to propose ways of looking and constructions of meanings around a huge range of practices, both old and new. It celebrates Leonardo, Michelangelo, Anguissola, Durer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Goya, Fuseli, Kauffman, Ingres, Menzel, Seurat, Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, Bourgeois, Trockel, but it also illustrates, analyses and proposes ways to approach the drawings of many less-familiar artists and the ideas and theories that inform their work. --Beginning with a consideration of traditional connoisseurship and ancient myths about the origins of drawing, Deanna Petherbridge examines the polarities of open-ended sketches and highly finished presentation drawings that constitute a drawing continuum: graphic parameters within which artists continue to experiment. She examines the 'economy' of drawing, that is, its materials and techniques and qualities of line and mark, and she analyses strategies of making, composing, inventing and development through revealing juxtapositions of historical and contemporary images. The teaching of drawing across the centuries in academies has led to the production of drawing and anatomical manuals and complex theories about copying, hierarchies of genres, the centrality of the expressive body and responses to nature. Such issues even become the subject matter of graphic images or are incorporated into drawings of the act of drawing. The manner in which satire, sexuality or play are encoded in line and mark and generate compositional strategies reveals the thinking of Petherbridge as a teacher, concerned for many years to understand the hows and whys of making and visual thinking. The book is both a much-needed history of practice and a rich resource for anyone interested in drawing. --Book Jacket.