Yves Alain Bois on the image:
“The essential gap between Mattisse’s conception of art and that of Renaissance masters had to do with his rejection of any form of projection (and enlargement is perhaps the barest form of projection). Why so? Because projection always implied a clear separation, not to say hierarchization, between conception and realization. Historically when projection was applied this meant that color became a servant of drawing, coming after the fact. For the Renaissance artist, the idea is what counts most, as Irwin Panofsky brilliantly demonstrated close to a century ago. For them the idea remains the same, no matter the size of the miniaturization. In fact, many Renaissance artists used a long stick, but unlike Matisse, they used it as a mechanical projective tool with no incidence on their designs. Vasari does briefly mention a long rod with charcoal as the best way to transfer with charcoal a cartoon to a wall, but no Renaissance artist is found posing with such a device, which would have been seen as the tool manual labor from which they sought to distance themselves.”