A drawing tutor I once sat for at the Royal Academy, not long after arriving to life model for the first time, told me that there are as many different definitions of life drawing as there are people who draw from life. A decade later, challenged with the task of writing this story defining the practice, I have selected a number of works which together summarise my thoughts – some of which might be surprising.
Notwithstanding the subjective nature of any definition, a good place to start looking for inspiration is Raphael's Studies for a Scene of Fighting Youths, which, through masterful rendering of the figures, reveals the human body to be of critical importance. Almost certainly the result of direct observation from life, the drawing is emblematic of the Renaissance preoccupation with the nude. This interest was catalyzed by a revived enthusiasm for Greco-Roman sculpture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Adopting the ancient Greek notions of ideal beauty which held the athletic male form to be sacrosanct, the formalised practice of life drawing developed in the Italian workshops of masters and their apprentices. Following the advice of the painter Cennino Cennini in his influential manual Il Libro dell'arte (The Craftsman's Handbook, 1390), students strove to '… take pains and pleasure in constantly copying the best things which you can find done by the hand of great masters.'
Baccio Bandinelli in his studio holding a statuette of Venus, students sketching from a model
1531, engraving by Agostino Veneziano (c.1490–after 1536) after Baccio Bandinelli (1493–1560) 
Agostino Veneziano's 1531 engraving The Academy of Baccio Bandinelli represents one of the earliest recorded depictions of the academic study of drawing. Illuminated by candlelight, students draw from antique statuettes while Bandinelli holds Venus, the Roman Goddess, in his hands.
The muscles of the arm, and the veins of the arm and trunk (recto)
c.1510–1511, black chalk, pen & ink wash by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) 
Motivated by a desire to attain mastery over the human form, artists including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarotti focused their attention on anatomy, believing the musculoskeletal structure underlying the body provided essential information to the artist. Their commitment to this endeavour reflected a deeply held conviction that the sculptural work from classical antiquity being discovered in Rome owed its magnificence to an expert knowledge which eluded them. To this end, they engaged in the dissection of cadavers from which écorchés were produced, or sketches of flayed figures revealing the muscles and bones.
Vitruvian Man
c.1490, pen & ink with wash over metalpoint on paper by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) 
However, the pursuit of representational skill through drawing was informed by a further belief that the sculptural work that inspired it possessed mathematical harmony. In his iconic drawing Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci embraced ancient Greek principles of measurement to describe the perfect human proportions.
Michelangelo (1475–1564) 
Based on these ideas, artists were encouraged to draw idealised figures which betrayed reality. Da Vinci recommended that they 'select … the best limbs and bodies' from studies they had made to create composite images of perfection.
Group of four nude men in conversation
c.1515–1560, pen & brown ink on laid paper, laid down on an early secondary support in the style of Baccio Bandinelli (1493–1560) 
Studies after Michelangelo's 'Samson and the Philistines'
c.1545–c.1555
Jacopo Tintoretto (c.1518–1594) 
Thirty years after Bandinelli opened his workshop in Rome, the first formal art academy was established in 1563 by Georgio Vasari in Florence. The Accademia e Compagnia delle Arti del Designo not only placed life drawing at the core of its curriculum, but also located it within a structured mode of tuition which would set the mould advocated by future academies. Their burgeoning popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came to define the tradition.
The Antique School at Old Somerset House
1779
Edward Francis Burney (1760–1848) 
Students first learnt to draw by copying facsimiles, drawings or paintings by celebrated artists. Michelangelo famously reproduced a detail from Giotto's Ascension of Saint John the Evangelist when he was a 15-year-old apprentice. Closely scrutinising the work of masters was believed to be the best way to learn from them. Following this stage, an extended period was spent drawing from heroic casts or statues.
At both the Parisian Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture and the Royal Academy in London (founded in 1648 and 1768 respectively), students were required to spend no less than one year working from the antique. The opportunity to draw three-dimensional figures in the round fostered a better understanding of the way light moved across the form, preparing aspiring artists to draw real bodies.
Anatomical Drawing of the Bones of the Lower Arm
1805
Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846) 
The penultimate stage of training prior to students being admitted into the life room was the study of anatomy. Guided by physicians who employed the use of skeletons and ever-sophisticated écorchés carved out of wood with anatomical features set in, students learnt how to describe the articulation of limbs and movement of the body on paper. The impact of Leonardo da Vinci's earlier teaching and Vesalius's groundbreaking illuminated manuscript De humani corporis fabrica (Of the Structure of the Human Body, 1555), continued to resonate well into the eighteenth century.
In his classic painting William Hunter, Johan Zoffany depicted the Royal Academy's celebrated Professor of Anatomy delivering a lecture to a group of art students. He is aided by a life model whose arm is raised replicating the gesture of an écorché positioned next to him. A prominently displayed skeleton is suspended from a height offering a clear view to the assembled group. The combination of these three forms of model is a clear example of how students were taught at this time.
Having progressed through all those stages, students would finally arrive in the Life School to work from the living nude model.
Tutors set the poses of their models, and they favoured those inspired by classical sculpture. In his 1854 memoir, the artist Stephen Francis Rigaud recollects an evening at the Royal Academy during which a particularly dynamic spectacle unfolded: 'Mr Bacon … set two men, one in the act of slaying the other. A representation of the history of Cain and Abel, it continued for double the time allowed for a single figure which gave general satisfaction to the students.'
Echoing the earlier sentiments expressed by Leonardo da Vinci, Rigaud goes on to describe his father's method of working. Also an artist, Royal Academician John Francis Rigaud 'faithfully delineated all the fine parts of the model, but instead of copying its defects improved those parts and brought them up to the standard of those which were most perfect.'
Life Drawing of a Male Nude with a Cane
c.1910 –1912
Adolphe Valette (1876–1942) 
Models were usually required to hold poses over continuing periods of time from days to weeks to allow more considered studies to be undertaken. They also sometimes inhabited shorter, gestural forms lasting up to half an hour from which rapid, energetic sketches could be made, such as Frederic Leighton's chalk drawing below.
Study for 'The Arts of Industry as Applied to War': Male Figure
c.1879
Frederic Leighton (1830–1896) 
Both the European and British academies would occasionally stage theatrical events within their classes, as demonstrated by Arturo Bianchini's Conté crayon drawing below.
A Life Class in Rome with a Model Posed as a Crucified Man with an écorché Figure to the Left
1902
Arturo Bianchini (active 1898–1905) 
Notably absent from the life room, however, were female students. In her autobiographical painting, Design, Angelica Kauffman presents a female artist also drawing the Belvedere Torso. A bittersweet depiction and unwitting cultural statement of entrenched patriarchal attitudes, the work has come to highlight the restrictions imposed upon women in the art world both in the eighteenth century and beyond. Despite being a founding member of the Academy, Kaufmann and her contemporaries were prohibited from drawing from life according to strict codes of morality.
As if anticipating the Guerilla Girls 1989 question 'do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?', female life models were permitted entry into the life room at the Royal Academy (although this innovation did not represent a revolutionary shift in attitudes toward the female body which continued to be viewed as inferior to the idealised male form). It was not until the following century that attitudes were relaxed, with women artists permitted to draw alongside their male counterparts.
Angelica Kauffman is Barred from the Life Room at the RA
2016–2017
Chris Orr (b.1943) 
The academic tradition of life drawing dominated the European artistic landscape for four centuries, existing both as a genre and serving as the foundation of all other art forms from painting to sculpture. The advent of new artistic movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly the avant-garde schools of impressionism and later performance art and conceptualism, however, eroded its authority. By the latter part of the twentieth century, its relevance had diminished. Art schools including the Royal Academy no longer included the practice within their curriculums. Having now experienced a significant revival, is it time to reconsider its meaning?
When I arrived at the Royal Academy, some 250 years after its foundation, I held a very particular view of my own role as a life model. While conscious that not every context within which I worked lent itself to artistry (the anatomy class, for instance), I believed myself to be an artist in my own right through my practice. Using my body as my medium to draw in space, I created ephemeral works of art in symbiosis with the other artists who assembled to draw, paint and sculpt me. Substituting choreographed contrapposto poses for improvised abstracted forms, I subverted the artist–model relationship (which established the model as something other than an artist).
Life Study – Standing Male Nude
1980
Elaine Wilson (1959–2021) 
The temptation when attempting to describe what life drawing is has often been to offer a formal definition (the rendering of a nude figure through direct observation), located within an art historical context (a line traced from the Greeks and Romans to the early Florentine academies, emblematic of the Renaissance). This kind of framing is critical to understanding the tradition, but also obscures the artistic potential on both sides of the easel: life models rendered as mercenary drawing instruments and artists who draw them engaged in anatomical data entry.
While academic approaches still exist, life drawing has been reinvented in the twentieth century, adopting a more collaborative dimension. Perhaps there are as many different definitions of life drawing as there are people who draw from life!
Dominic Blake, life model, artist and writer
This content was funded by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation
Further reading
Cennino D'Andrea Cennini, translated by Daniel V. Thompson Jr, The Craftsman's Handbook ('Il Libro dell'arte'), Dover Publications Inc., 2000
James Hall, The Artist's Studio: A Cultural History, Thames and Hudson, 2022
Stephen Francis Dutilh Rigaud, Facts and Recollections of the XVIII Century in a Memoir of John Francis Rigaud Esq. R.A., 1854, The Walpole Society, 1984, Volume L
Leonardo da Vinci, translated by Jean Paul Richter, The Literary Works of Leonardo Da Vinci: Compiled and edited from the original manuscripts: Volume I, Phaidon, 1977
Caroline Vout, Exposed: The Greek and Roman Body, Wellcome Collection, 2022
Annette Wickham, Artists Working From Life, Royal Academy Publications, 2017
