He should form an ideal in his mind of the personage he means to represent, and take care to select either from professional models or from his friends those who approach nearest to this ideal. He will probably have to make use of casts. The small heads of the warriors on the Trajan Column are admirable in character and very suggestive. Casts from the mediæval heads of Pisano, Donatello, and Luca della Robbia are also very useful.
All these and other means toward his end will suggest themselves to him, but his course is not so clear when he comes to tackle his draperies.
Every student must be aware that draperies adjusted on the lay figure and carefully copied, have always an unnatural and trivial look about them. The form underneath, if expressed at all, is the form of the lay figure, and not that of nature. It will not do therefore in a picture to adjust the drapery on a lay figure and copy the result.
This may be done with advantage for those folds which hang altogether independent of the figure, but for all those which are in the slightest degree connected with the form underneath, some other method must be adopted.
No doubt the best method of all (were it possible) would be to dress up the living model and paint direct on to the picture, but this is seldom practicable.
Long before the artist has had time to study the folds, the model moves, and all has to be done over again.
If an artist has great experience with drapery, and the attitude is a very easy one, he may make a charcoal study which will serve him for the picture without having subsequently to readjust his drapery on the lay figure, but no young hand would be able to do this in a satisfactory way. He must go more systematically to work. He must first get a characteristic study of the nude figure. I mean such a study as the old masters used to make, giving the exact attitude and the form of the salient parts. He must then make a replica in charcoal of this study and adjust the drapery on his living model. On this replica he will now, as far as he can, reproduce the arrangement of the folds he has before him. There are plenty of studies by Raffaelle and the old masters which explain better than words can, the process I am trying to describe.
He has now two working drawings to guide him, viz., his original nude study, and the study from the draped model. Having thus as it were laid his foundations, he may drape his lay figure and paint direct from it on to his picture, taking care (as he proceeds) to correct the form from his preliminary studies. He will thus be doing sound, honest work, and, even if dissatisfied with his finished drapery, he has always his studies to fall back upon.
Some artists, especially French and Italians, make a great use of photography, and, if kept within bounds, I see no objection whatever to the practice. It would hardly be legitimate art to dress up and pose a number of models and have them photographed with the intention of transferring the group to canvas, but it is perfectly allowable to call in the aid of photography for draperies or costumes, where, from the action of the figures, it would be impracticable to draw the folds from nature.
All portrait-painters know that it is not easy to get ladies and gentlemen to sit for their clothes, and it is far better to get help from a good photograph than from a model or a lay figure whom the clothes do not fit. I have no doubt that if photography had been known in the time of Raffaelle he would have largely availed himself of it. He often copied whole figures from his predecessors, and this is certainly more reprehensible.