One might advocate the ascetic life as a means of pleasing God and winning the eternal bliss of Heaven. Before the advent of the camera, illustration was the primary way that we recorded history, and today it provides visual interpretations of written texts, particularly in children’s books. Because it is so direct, tracing the path of the artist’s hand recorded directly on paper, artists also find drawing to be a ready-made means for self-expression. It is as if, in the act of drawing, the soul or spirit of the artist finds it way to paper. The young man in this picture seems to be doing the most ordinary thing in the World—drawing. We think of drawing as an everyday activity that everyone, artists and ordinary people, does all the time. You doodle on a pad; you throw away the marked-up sheet and start again with a fresh one. Artists often make dozens of sketches before deciding on the composition of a major work. However, people have not always been able or willing to causally toss out marked-up paper and begin again fresh. Before the late fifteenth century, paper was costly and expensive, and people wanted to preserve trees. The young man shown here is sketching on a wooden tablet that he would sand clean after each drawing. The artist who drew him at work, however, worked in pen and ink on rare, expensive paper. This work this represents a transition point in Western art—the point at which artists began to draw on paper before they committed their idea to canvas or plaster. This involves  frustration of unfulfilled desires, and self-inflicted pain. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

I showed them the bedroom with the sealed-up window that was painted to look like a window. I showed them the steel plating on the door and the lock. I told them about the human guards twenty-four hours. They were to pull the curtains around the bed, and sleep in each other’s arms. No ray of Sun, no immortal, not mortal intruder, no one would bother them here. Of course they had a long time before Sunrise. Talk, talk, yes. They could wander. However, no spying on the Harris’, no. No probing for secrets, no. No searching for a lost child yet, no. No going home to the mansion, no. I told them I would meet them tomorrow at dusk. Now I had to leave, had to. Had to get out of here. Had to get out of there. Had to get out of everywhere. The open country. Near the Winchester Mansion. Distant rumble of trucks on the River Road. Smell of the River. Smell of the Grass. Walking. Grass wet. Field of scattered redwood evergreens. White clapboard house tumbling to ruin, the way they do in Louisiana, swaying walls and steeply pitched roof embraced and held suspended by the vines. Walking. I spun around. He was there. Technicolour ghost, black tailcoat, waling as I had been, through the grass, tossing aside the champagne glass, coming on. Stopped. I lunged at him, grabbed him before he could vanish, had him by the throat, fingers dug into what sought to be invisible, holding him, hurting what would be immaterial. Yeah, got you! You impudent phantom, look at me! #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

You think you can haunt me! I growled. You think you can do that to me! And just what crazy half-illuminated Afterlife are you from! What are your half-baked mystical promises! What are your half-baked mystical promises! Yeah, come on, what Other Side are you hawking, yeah, spill it, let us hear about Leo Winterland, yeah, testify, how many ectoplasmic Angels are on your side, give me the splendiferous images of your famous fabulous friggin’ self-created, self-sustained astral plane! Where the Hell were you going to take him! You going to tell me some Lord of the Universe sends spooks like you to take little boys to Heaven! (I was clutching nothing.) I was all alone. It was sweetly warm and there was a numbing quiet in the vibration of the distant trucks, a winking beauty in the passing headlights. Who missed the deep silence of so many past centuries? Who missed the deep darkness of the long pre-electric nights? Not me. When I reached Winchester Mansion, Randolph was standing on the terrace. Loose gray hair mussed, cotton pajamas, sashed robe, bare feet. A mortal could not have discovered him, standing in the shadows, waiting. An empathetic face, patient celibate alertness. Self-discipline is a genuine virtue, but it denies desire only when this is necessary to achieve an inclusive and harmonious satisfaction. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

Until the late fifteenth century, drawing was generally considered a student medium Copying a master’s work was the means by which a student learned the higher art of painting. Thus, in 1493, the Italian religious zealot Savonarola outlined the ideal relation between student and master: “What does the pupil look for in the master? I will tell you. The master draws from his mind an image which his hands trace on paper and it carries the imprint of his idea. The pupil studies the drawing, and tries to imitate it. Little by little, in this way, he appropriates the style of his master. That is how all natural things, and all creatures, have derived from the divine intellect.” Savonarola thus describes drawing as both the banal, everyday business of beginners and also as equal in its creativity to God’s handiwork in nature. For Savonarola, the master’s idea is comparable to divine intellect. The master is to the student as God is to humanity. Drawing is, furthermore, autographic: it bears the master’s imprint, his style. By the end of the fifteenth century, then, drawing had come into its own. It was seen as embodying, perhaps more clearly than even the finished work, the artist’s personality and creative genius. As one watched an artist’s ideas develop through a series of preparatory sketches, it became possible to speak knowingly about the creative process itself. By the time Giorgio Vasari wrote his famous Lives of the Painters in 1550, the tendency was to see, in drawing, the foundation of Renaissance painting itself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

Giorgio Vasari had one of the largest collections of fifteenth-century—or so-called quattrocento—drawings ever assembled, and he wrote as if these drawings were a dictionary of the styles of the artists who had come before him. In Lives he recalls how, in 1501, crowds rushed to see Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with St. Anne and Infant St. John, a cartoon (from the Italian cartone, meaning paper), a drawing done to scale for a painting or a fresco. “The work not only won the astonished admiration of all the artists, but when finished for two days it attracted to the room where it was exhibited a crowd of men and women, young and old, who flocked there, as if they were attending a great festival, to gaze in amazement at the marvels he had created,” reports Giorgio Vasari. Though this cartoon apparently does not survive, we can get some notion of it from the later cartoon illustrated here. Giorgio Vasari’s account, at any rate, is the earliest recorded example we have of the public actually admiring a drawing. The two works shown here illustrate why drawing merits serious consideration as an art form in its own right. In Leonardo’s Study for a Sleeve, witness the extraordinary fluidity and spontaneity of the master’s line. In contrast to the stillness of the resting arm (the hand, which is comparatively crude, was probably added later), the drapery is portrayed as if it where a whirlpool or vortex. The directness of the medium, the ability of the artist’s hand to move quickly over paper, allows Leonardo to being this turbulence out. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

Through the intensity of his line, Leonardo imparts a degree of emotional complexity to the sitter, who is revealed in the part as well as in the whole. However, the drawing also reveals the movements of the artist’s own mind. It is s if the still sitter were at odds with the turbulence of the artist’s imagination, an imagination that will not hold still whatever its object of contemplation. Movement, in fact, fascinated Leonardo. And nothing obsessed him more than the movement of water, in particular the swirling forms of the Deluge, the great flood that would come at the end of the World. It is as if, even in this sleeve, we are witnesses to the artist’s fantastic preoccupation with the destructive forces of nature. We can see it also in his famous notebooks, where he instructs the painter how to represent a storm. Rustlings, as if the house was full of ghosts. Glance of the real true hateful Randolph was out of the corner of my eye. It was Leonardo who turned. Then Randolph on the other side, and then there was Aaliyah, and the sound of taffeta as though from an old-fashioned floor-length dress. Leonardo turned again. His blue eyes fastened on me. He was worn down yet immeasurably strong, proud of the house and mildly happy with the way I looked at it. The night outside beat hard on the windows, the song of the winged things, throb of the frogs, with the full authority of the big garden. Narrow hallway, soaring walls. Evil stairs. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

Oh, what fearful noises were heard throughout the dark air as it was pounded by the discharged bolts of thunder and lightening that violently shot through it to strike whatever opposed their course. Oh, how many you might have seen covering their ears with their hands in abhorrence at the uproar….Oh, how much weeping and wailing! Oh, how many terrified beings hurled themselves from the rocks! Let there be shown huge branches of great oaks weighed down with men and borne through the air by impetuous winds…You might see herds of horses, oxen, goats and sheep, already encircled by waters left marooned on the high peaks of the mountains. Now they…huddled together with those in the middle clambering on top of the others, and all scuffling fiercely amongst themselves…The air was darkened by heavy rain that, driven aslant by the crosswinds and wafted up and down through the air, resembled nothing other than dust, differing only in that this inundation was streaked through by the lines drops of water makes as they fall. The alien fragrance again. However, more than that the smell of mortal death. How did I come by thus? Hand touching the newel post, sparked off it. Mortal tumbling down and down. Stairs made for the word headlong. These doors like temple doors rise up in protest to this domestic constriction. Added in 1868, everything just a little smaller in this room, but the best plasterwork in all the house. A wall of books, old leather. A magnificent ceiling. Tiny faces up there in the plaster medallion. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

Red carpet, went to the long window that opened on the small side porch and peered out as though measuring the World specifically by these particular lace curtains. Peacocks in the lace curtains. Because we can see in the earlier drawing of the sleeve a fascination with swirling line that erupts in the later drawings of the Deluge, we feel we know something important not only about Leonardo’s technique but about what drove his imagination. More than any other reason, this was why, in the sixteenth century, drawings began to be preserved by artist and, simultaneously, collected by connoisseurs, experts on and appreciators of fine art. One might regard the ascetic life as a means to liberation from this World suffering. It would be unrealistic to deny that we all suffer from time to time and that there are those for whom life is mostly suffering. It would be equally unrealistic, however, to deny that for mist of us the evils we experience are more than balanced by the genuine values we enjoy. Granted the existence of evil, the obvious expedient is to improve our World rather than to make it even worse by adding the sufferings involved in ascetic practices. If escape were desirable, there is no guarantee that the ascetic life would actually lead to freedom. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8