PEN DRAWING. The art of line drawing is perhaps the oldest of the graphic arts. The Greeks seem to have considered drawing and writing as essentially the same process, since they used the same word for both. This points to the early identity of the two arts when drawing was a kind of writing and when such writing as men had learned to practise was essentially what we should call drawing, though of a crude and simple kind.
The earliest pens were made of the bamboo reed, the hollow stalk of the calamus, or other wood with the end frayed or pulped. Greek and Roman scribes at a later time used reeds cut to a point and slit like the modern pen; copper pens of the same type, of Roman manufacture, are to be found in mu seums to-day. This pen possibly antedated the common use of the quill pen made from the wing feather of the goose. Ink, in its earliest form, was made from soot and charcoal mixed with gum ; there were also vegetable stains and berry juices. In China the invention of ink is credited to Tien-Tcheu who lived between 2697 B.C. and 2597 B.C. One of the oldest books known, the maxims of that ancient Egyptian ruler Ptah-hotep, dating from beyond the 25th century B.C., shows the use of red and black inks. The development of these mediums, however, was not toward a graphic art, but rather toward the written word, of history and literature, devoid of design or pictorial embellishment. (See INK ) For paper, the barks of trees (especially lime trees), papyrus, linen and the prepared skins of calf or sheep, as well as vellum and parchment, were used. Finally the use of parchment re placed that of papyrus because of its susceptibility to ready erasures, its two usable sides and its thinness. The old scroll and the triptych of wax gave way to the codex with its leaves of vel lum. With this convenient form under his hand the scribe for once became the artist and his pen found a facility which brought forth some of the most treasured contributions to the graphic arts; these are the hand-lettered, illuminated books which began to appear a little later than the 4th century and reached their great est beauty during the following two or three centuries.
The basis of the many beautiful designs in these books is the pen line, with flat tones of colour and applications of burnished gold. With the invention of printing, which began with Guten berg, with the first printed date of 1454, and the development of means of reproducing the line drawing, the art of the book con tinued. This was, in fact, the beginning of pen and ink art and, incidentally, of illustration, which is that art that accompanies the written word and adorns the printed page.
The art of pen and ink, as we know it, began with outline drawing as practised by Villard de Honnecourt and others in the Gothic period. The Florentine masters of the early Renaissance such as Pollaiuolo and Botticelli excelled in the ren dering of form ; shapes were well defined by means of a continu ous and rhythmic outline, and Leonardo da Vinci combined the well defined outline with delicate shading in parallel lines. Michelangelo modelled the muscles in detail by numerous little crosslines and his outline is not continuous ; Raphael excelled in sureness of line and in the suggestion of form by the simplest means; in north Italy Pisanello, by delicate pen strokes, rendered the texture of things such as the hairy furs of animals ; the Carac cis and the Bolognese school developed a pictorial style by the close study of nature and the practice of engraving; Guercino's and Barocci's brilliant studies were highly prized though not free from mannerism. This pictorial style reached its height in the drawings of two Flemings, Rubens and Vandyck, who were deeply impressed with Italian art. Their drawings are inspired by a very robust reality in which the visible surface of things is observed in detail; their style is curiously informal. The deliberate, ordered calligraphy of the earlier northern engravers, of Diirer, Schon gauer, Lucas and Leyden, is replaced by a fluent literal draughts manship where colour and tone are suggested by cross-hatching or washes.