For centuries, the art of draftsmanship has meant the ability to render the human figure, particularly its movement and action. They have the bodies of gods, these near-naked assailants, and the artist makes us feel the force and strength of their assault. This is a much rougher sketch, but among the confused and seemingly careless strokes of charcoal we can see a similar movement, as Death raises his hand over the cowering peasant. The beauty of a drawing is often its abstract nature, the way it forces us to fill in details with our mind. With a few strokes of the pen, he summons up a snow-covered landscape, leaving the foreground entirely blank and rendering, with rapid, graceful strokes of the pen, a house nestling into a clump of trees.
Some artists draw with tone rather than line.
A similar use of brown wash in gradations of dark to light can be found in the work of the 19th century German romanticist Caspar David Friedrich. Lines can take on a life of their own as they spin off the hands of some artists. We can see this in Tiburzio Passarotti's ink sketch of men loading camels. The beauty here is in the fluid, improvisatory execution, the movement of the pen, the way it glides across the surface of the paper in graceful swirls that seem to casually coalesce into contour lines. In other drawings, we are more aware of the artist working out a problem, trying alternate solutions, as in Bartolomeo Passarotti's studies of a woman climbing stairs.