At Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) first-year art students enroll in “Cast Drawing,” a discipline with a long history in Europe and America. Artists have practiced drawing plaster casts of ancient sculpture for over two centuries, yet today’s students soon learn to appreciate what might seem like a very conservative pursuit. Indeed, they realize, as one graduate put it: “Drawing a cast is challenging. You have to capture subtle variations in tone across curved surfaces, and observe changes in the light at the same time.” For Academy students the cast drawing studios represent more than just faded displays of naked gods and heroes from ancient history. They are true classrooms, where aspiring artists solidify their drawing skills in a manner that goes back more than two hundred years (Fig. 1).
