Art. The Albertina Drawings.

The article focuses on the utility of paper and printing technology. The invention of printing necessitated the production of quantities of reasonably priced paper. But the availability of paper in large quantities is also credited with the emergence of drawing as an autonomous mode of artistic expression in the early fifteenth century. Since drawing is the paradigm of artistic spontaneity, there is a felicitous irony in the fact that the mechanical has given rise to the spontaneous. Until an affordable supply of paper allowed drawings to be saved, it was common for them to be destroyed, in the course of transferring their images to the panels on which paintings were to be executed.