Artist and Model

David Eastwood

How and why do artists use models? I pose this question thinking of the scale model in particular and its application in painting. Although it is not widely recognised, its role as a studio aid has a history that dates back centuries. I want to reflect on this history and explore the model’s status as a hypothetical object. Of key interest is the model’s agency in provoking speculative thinking. Far from being passive props, artists’ models of all kinds, human or non-human, are active contributors in the studio, helping to shape creative outcomes. They not only have an independence from the artists who work with them but from lived reality itself. Distinct from direct experience, models filter our knowledge of the world by presenting us with alternate realities. Their inherent tensions between authenticity and artifice arouse both wonder and scepticism.

The model as a category in the visual arts occupies ambiguous territory. Colloquially, the mention of an artist’s model will more than likely call to mind the life model: a person (often nude) who poses for artists in the studio, or for students in the context of an art class. The non-living variety of the artist’s model is generally three-dimensional in construction, including computer-generated simulations, and may take the form of a set, diorama, maquette, mannequin, or figurine. Like a life model, it can be a source for the artist to refer to during the artmaking process. In some cases, it can also stand as a finished artwork in itself.

Both the life model and the inanimate model are related by their shared function as studio aids. Historically, these two types of models have been used in tandem by artists portraying the human figure. For practical reasons associated with the inevitable fatigue and expense of live sitters, during a painting’s progress, life models (used for observing complexion and capturing facial likenesses, for instance) were interchanged with draped mannequins, from which the artist could record details such as folds in garments when a person was not required. As a class of the artist’s model, mannequins were widely used from the fifteenth century onwards.[1] Distinct from the department store variety, mannequins designed for use by artists were jointed models of the human body, otherwise known as manikins or lay figures, either at life-size or in miniature, put to use by countless artists from Michelangelo to Paul Cézanne.[2] However, especially by the twentieth century, artists such as Giorgio de Chirico and Hans Bellmer co-opted a variety of dummies, dolls and puppets in their work. In the comprehensive survey of this practice addressed in the Fitzwilliam Museum’s exhibition and catalogue Silent Partners (2014), curator Jane Munro charts a trajectory in art since the Renaissance in which the use of the mannequin as an artist’s aid begins as a discreet device, eventually assuming a conspicuous position as an uncanny presence in modern and contemporary art.[3]

A ‘lay figure’ used by Australian artist Norman Lindsay, on display in the artist’s preserved studio, Norman Lindsay Gallery and Museum, Faulconbridge NSW. Photograph by David Eastwood, 2013.

Writing in the early 1460s, the architect, sculptor and theorist known as Il Filarete advised artists on drawing drapery based on the use of models: “Have a little wooden figure with jointed arms, legs and neck. Then make a dress of linen in whatever fashion you choose, as if it were alive. Put it on him in the action that you wish and fix it up.”[4] Similarly, writing in the sixteenth century, Giorgio Vasari observed: “Many masters also before making the composition on the cartoon, adopt the plan of fashioning a model in clay on a plane and of setting up all the figures in the round to see the projections, that is, the shadows caused by a light being thrown on to the figures.”[5] As suggested by these early writers, the scale model has fulfilled a fundamental but little known role in the studios of numerous Western artists. Munro notes that while the use of small, three-dimensional models as visual aids might be logically associated with a sculptor’s preliminary process, this is not necessarily so for painters, and yet she cites Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci as among many artists for whom such models are thought to have aided the creation of drawings or paintings.[6] Other Renaissance-era exponents of this tradition include the aforementioned Michelangelo as well as Titian and Tintoretto. Far from being an esoteric pursuit isolated to an insignificant few, many notable artists have employed methods that evidence the continuation of this practice among the makers of images since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a few of whom are cited below.

An inventory of the studio of El Greco made at the time of the artist’s death in 1614 lists some fifty models of plaster, clay, and wax. According to curator Xavier Bray, these models were integral to the artist’s “quintessentially otherworldly style.”[7] In a lecture given at the Frick Museum in 2015, Bray states, “The interplay between the real and the spiritual worlds was one of El Greco’s principal philosophical concerns. But like any artist of his time, he had to begin with a physical concept before creating a vision of the otherworldly.”[8] Bray speculates that El Greco, like other artists before and since, would drape his figurines and stage them according to his compositional requirements. The pliability of the models, and the ability to suspend them for observation at dramatic angles, afforded the opportunity to depict creative distortions in the bodies that populate his paintings, bestowing them with a weightlessness befitting of their metaphysical associations. As Bray states, “By purposely not representing the body realistically, El Greco was able to communicate a sense of the immaterial and of the need for individuals to relinquish their physical ties with the world in order to participate more closely in the spiritual world.”[9] Bray makes a compelling argument for the integral role that scale models may have played in establishing El Greco’s distinct aesthetic.

Left: El Greco (attributed), The Risen Christ, 1595–98, polychrome wood, 45cm high. Hospital Tavera, Toledo. Right: El Greco, The Resurrection, 1597–1600, oil on canvas, 275 127 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. The small wooden sculpture is thought to be based on a lost preparatory model in wax, plaster or clay which may have also served as a reference source for El Greco’s painting of Christ in The Resurrection.

The particular type of scale model employed by the painter Nicolas Poussin was known as the grande machine, a diorama-like apparatus that housed adjustable wax figurines. According to art historian Oskar Bätschmann, it had two components. The first was the base, referred to as the planche Barlongue, which supported the wax figures and their landscape or architectural setting. Secondly, it had a box-like cover, with one open side that sat facedown over the base, and openings at strategic points for the artist to peer into and for light control.[10] Poussin’s elaborate model appears to have been regarded with some misgivings by certain commentators. Munro points out that “several later artists considered the practice to have been detrimental to Poussin’s art.”[11] She cites observations from Antoine Coypel regarding the drapery’s “unnatural” appearance, and Eugene Delacroix’s criticism regarding the “extreme aridity” of Poussin’s figure compositions.[12] Such sentiments relate to the caution issued by the French artist and critic Roger de Piles in The Principles of Painting (1708), in which he writes “little laymen… may be useful, but they are falsifying.”[13]

Nicolas Poussin, Extreme Unction, c.1638–1640, oil on canvas, 95.5 121 cm. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

A degree of falsification could likewise be attributed to the landscapes of Thomas Gainsborough, who was reputed to “make models—or rather thoughts—for landscape scenery on a little old-fashioned folding oak table… [on which] he would place cork or coal for his foregrounds; make middle grounds of sand and clay, bushes of mosses and lichens, and set up distant woods of broccoli.”[14] Affirming this anecdote, fellow artist Joshua Reynolds said of Gainsborough, “He even framed a kind of model of landskips, on his table; composed of broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking glass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees, and water.”[15] Reynolds notes Gainsborough’s skill in producing convincing paintings with his model landscape technique, but adds with a degree of circumspection, “I think on the whole, unless we constantly refer to real nature, that practice may be more likely to do harm than good.”[16] Reynolds’ reservations appear to be based on a presupposition that mimesis of reality is a primary artistic aim. His expressed preference for direct observation of “real nature” may seem quaint from today’s perspective, and does not take into account the important role that models can play in shaping worlds otherwise difficult, impractical or impossible to access.

Thomas Gainsborough, Romantic Landscape with Sheep at a Spring, c.1783, oil on canvas, 153.7 186.7 cm. Royal Academy of Arts, London.

As source material for imaging practices like painting and photography, scale models offer rich possibilities for the artist as an intermediary step between the imaginary and the real. On the one hand, the model’s miniaturised scale and makeshift materiality can heighten appearances as idiosyncratic, otherworldly, or even “false.” At the same time, as objects that occupy three-dimensional space, offering multiple vantage points with the ability to be placed under various lighting conditions, the model allows the artist to test and observe a constructed scenario under “real world” conditions, lending a sense of veracity and plausibility to an imaginative concept that might be otherwise absent in a painting produced entirely from imagination, for instance. The typically modest size of the scale model is indicative of its intermediary role as an implement for testing out ideas, often fabricated at a tabletop scale, and frequently intended for subsequent interpretation or mediation.

The model, a kind of prism through which to view the world, can establish a hypothetical mise en scène, postulating alternate realities that can appear both startling and half-familiar. According to theoretician Margaret Morrison, models operate as “autonomous agents.”[17] They are neither strictly theoretical nor entirely empirical—“neither just theory nor data”—and therefore function as partially independent tools of investigation that “mediate between theory and the world.”[18] Morrison and co-editor Mary S. Morgan’s study Models as Mediators (1999) is chiefly concerned with the application of models in modern science, but their insights can be usefully applied to an interpretation of models constructed within the context of artistic practice.

As an artist, my interest in models began with a project based on the studio of the Italian modernist painter Giorgio Morandi, now preserved as a posthumous museum. Having constructed a 1:15 scale model of the site, I produced a suite of paintings based on the model’s multiple vantage points. The model, Casa Morandi (2012–13), was equipped with movable contents and detachable walls, offering fertile possibilities for ulterior views of Morandi’s objects and the studio’s peripheral spaces. The tactile experience of crafting every detail and carefully arranging and rearranging its component parts generated insights into the studio’s spatial configuration that informed the subsequently painted interpretations. As Morrison and Morgan observe, we learn the most from models by building and manipulating them, more so than simply looking at them.[19]

David Eastwood, Casa Morandi, 2012–13, paper, cardboard, foam core, wood, plastic, wire, glue, ink & paint, 25 × 32.2 × 36.8 cm. Photograph courtesy the artist, 2013.

The scale model, whether an enlargement of the minuscule or a diminution of the very large, is typically confined to human-friendly proportions, enabling access to a wide range of encounters whose actual properties (such as the original scale) may make them otherwise unapproachable. Literary critic Susan Stewart observes that the miniaturisation intrinsic to many scale models can be particularly evocative. She writes, “The miniature, linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination.”[20] The small-scale model possesses a pervading sense of self-containment and insularity. Curator Ralph Rugoff describes dioramas as “Inhabiting an isolated and inviolate space that is profoundly remote from that of the viewer, they call to mind Platonic archetypes rather than actual physical specimens. In effect, they function as images of themselves, dematerialized signs which we consume with a distanced fascination.”[21] Rugoff points to the apparent virtuality of the diorama, commensurate with images and separated from the space of the viewer. Despite the sense of impenetrability inherent in the space of the miniature model, it remains accessible to the eye. As French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote, “the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world.”[22] Thus, the space of the model can transcend its miniaturization, intimately coaxing the viewer toward a visually immersive or voyeuristic experience, like peering through a keyhole.

At any scale, models occupy a certain distance from the world of lived experience; they are virtual. Contemporary art historian Amelia Barikin describes the model as “both a proposal for and an abstraction of the world. It is a translation or remaking… The art-work-as-model is then a carrier for a broader scenario: it is a seed for a potential future.”[23] Barikin cites Nelson Goodman’s comment that, “Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking.”[24] The model making process can inventively and imaginatively depart from the known world, producing objects that speculate beyond our immediate reality, providing a stimulus for images and ideas about how the world could be, asking “what if” questions, rather than describing the world exactly as we know it. They can also help us to question the assumptions upon which our knowledge of the world is constructed.

Model making remains a significant practice in contemporary art, as reflected in A Working Model of the World. Other exhibitions in recent years also indicate the currency of modelling practices, such as Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities, curated by David Revere McFadden for New York’s Museum of Arts and Design in 2011, with a focus on artists’ dioramas. In Australia, related approaches to art making have been contextualised in exhibitions such as Model Pictures, which featured paintings by Melbourne artists James Lynch, Moya McKenna, Amanda Marburg and Rob McHaffie, all of whom work from handmade models (curated by Bala Starr for the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne, 2011). Similarly, my own curatorial undertaking, Speculative Spaces (Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney, 2013), examined practices in which miniature models constructed by artists informed or complemented their imaging practices.

Describing the work of the artists in the Model Pictures exhibition, art historian and curator Chris McAuliffe writes: “in these paintings, reality is fleeting, flickering and unanchored. In painting, representation is always a form of surrogacy, always a set of marks standing in for something else. Here surrogacy is announced repeatedly in plasticine models, tabletop props, casts and moulded objects.”[25] A model is indeed a surrogate reality. It is often understood as a prototype, proposing yet-to-be-realized ideas, as in the maquette, conventionally produced by architects and sculptors as a precursor to a larger, more durable structure. For many artists, however, models need not be constrained by regard for the feasibility of construction on a larger scale. The model may stand alone as a proposition, reaching its full expression at prototype stage, or through the virtual space of the image.

David Eastwood, 2017.