For centuries, artists and art circles were engaged by paragoni, debates over the comparative worth of different modes of artistic expression. One paragone pitted disegno (drawing) against colorito (the use of color), an opposition categorized by the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin as “linear” versus “painterly” painting. Sometimes the two approaches coexisted in relative proximity, as in the work of Renaissance Florentines obsessed with preparatory drawing and their Venetian contemporaries reveling in directly brushed, rich hues. Usually, one or the other was deemed more significant and desirable, with drawing gaining the upper hand in the official academies, where students spent hours rendering casts of classical sculptures before graduating to living models, posed to look like classical sculptures. One debate about the relative merits of disegno and colorito decided for disegno because a drawing without color could convey the essential information about a given subject, while color without drawing to organize and discipline the image would be meaningless. (This was, of course, long before what Wölfflin would have called “painterly” abstraction was even an idea.)

In the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, drawings were the prized stock of artists’ ateliers, sometimes passed down as a legacy—Pieter Breughel the Younger inherited his father’s drawings and