ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that before beginning to do history, inquirers must make an attempt to understand the character of the particular traces of the past on which they would rely, in this instance, paintings. What is a painting? This chapter argues that this question can be fruitfully approached, first, by considering the huge variety of practices subsumed by the term painting; and then by considering the properties of drawings, especially in relation to paintings. This chapter distinguishes between a notion of drawing in the Eurocentric sense, and the concept of drawing in a pancultural sense, by assembling a viable definition of things described as drawings in many eras, places, and media, by means of family resemblance. It discusses the boundaries of drawing in practices that include photography, lettering, skywriting, and scientific illustration, before proposing that painting is properly a species of drawing, which, as a concept, includes, but may not be confined to being marks that trace the course of human gestures within a discernable temporal span, so as to be apprehensible as a motionless entity, the whole being purposive. If art is an open kind, drawing—which includes painting—is not. This chapter refers to scholars David Bomford, Robert Boyle, Berys Gaut, Nelson Goodman, Immanuel Kant, Isaac Newton, Petrarch, Pliny the Elder; writers David Jones and Laurence Sterne; and artists Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri), Paul Cézanne, Richard Long, Maria Sibylla Merian, Joan Miró, Dennis Oppenheim, Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, William Fox Talbot, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, John Webber, and Christopher Wren.
