DISEGNO -DRAWING. AMONG THE SOURCES OF MODERN ART Material from a Scientific Session, Toruń 26-27 October 2000, ed. by Tadeusz J. Żuchowski, Sebastian Dudzik, series ”Sztuka i Kultura”, II, Wyd. Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, Toruń 2001, 236 pp., black-and-white and colour ill.

In 2001 the Mikolaj Kopernik University in Torun started publishing the 'Sztuka i Kultura' (Art and Culture) series, edited by Prof. Tadeusz J. Zuchowski and Sebastian Dudzik, and containing material from scientific sessions about widely comprehended modern art and its role in European culture. Up to now, the series has included five volumes. The reviewed volume presents reflections on drawing and its significance in assorted periods, especially in Italian art of the sixteenth and seventeenth century when drawing, given the Italian name of 'disegno', gained a special rank and was perceived as a symptom of the artist's invention and an inauguration of the creative process. The authors discussed various problems connected with drawing, its etymology in various European languages, meaning in Byzantine art, the mediaeval project and architectural draughtsmanship. The majority of the deliberations concerns the role played by drawing in modern European art, in which it gained a prominent place in the treatises and writings of the theoreticians of the Italian Renaissance who conceived it as the foundation of all the arts and the focus of the intellectual work of the artist. The Italian term 'disegno', with its Latin provenance, became a synonym of 'invenzione'. The emergence of the anatomical drawing, as well as the preparatory and completed composition drawing became the reason why draughtsmanship no longer possessed merely a utilitarian character. It was now treated as an independent work of art, and became the object of developing patronage and the collection movement. The reviewed book considers the connections between drawing and graphic art in Italian art from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, seventeenth century art in Silesia, and the links between drawing and painting in Venetian art critique of the seventeenth century. In a conclusion summing up the session Zygmunt Wazbinski asserted that the articles do not exhaust all the problems associated with drawing, described by him as the 'motor force of European art' and 'the greatest adventure in West European art'. The articles, supplemented with an extensive bibliography and interesting footnotes, comprise valuable material for further reflections on drawing and its role in the history of European art