metal point

or silverpoint

Method of drawing with a small sharpened metal rod

of lead, copper, gold, or most commonly silver

on specially prepared paper or parchment.

Silverpoint produces a fine gray line that oxidizes to a light brown; the technique is best suited for small-scale work. It first appeared in medieval Italy and achieved great popularity in the 15th century. Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci were its greatest exponents. It went out of fashion in the 17th century with the rise of the graphite pencil but was revived in the 18th century by the miniaturists and in the 20th century by Joseph Stella.

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▪ art

      descendant of the stylus of classical times and ancestor of the modern pencil, a small, sharpened metal rod used for drawing precise compositions on paper or parchment. The metal could be lead, silver, copper, or gold, but silverpoint was the most common choice because it is the most suited to permanent drawing, its stroke adhering unerasably. The silverpoint was of great value in producing the hard, clearly defined line required, for instance, by miniaturists; modelling, emphases, and light phenomena, however, had to be rendered either by means of repetitions, dense hatching, or blanks or else supplemented by other mediums.

      Silverpoint achieved great popularity with such 15th-century Flemish artists as Hubert and Jan van Eyck (Eyck, Jan van), Rogier van der Weyden (Weyden, Rogier van der), and Hans Memling (Memling, Hans), to whose styles it was perfectly attuned. The German artist Albrecht Dürer (Dürer, Albrecht) too used it with great effect, notably in the Self-Portrait (1484). The silverpoint lost favour in the 17th century but was revived by 18th-century miniaturists and was still occasionally used by modern artists, most notably by Pablo Picasso (Picasso, Pablo) and Ivan Albright (Albright, Ivan), though in a manner that defied the convention for precision established early on.

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