The use of artists’ assistants is as old as art itself. The Greek sculptor Phidias was for millennia credited with the creation of the sculptures for the Parthenon, but close study of those that remain, principally the so-called “Elgin Marbles”, shows that many different hands carried out the carving. The conception was probably Phidias’s so in that sense – however unlikely it may seem – his workshop can be seen as a remote ancestor of Warhol’s Factory.

 

Cennino Cennini, in his fourteenth-century painters’ manual Il Libro d’Arte, advised young artists to “take pains and pleasure in constantly copying the best things you can find done by the hand of the great masters.” Leonardo da Vinci says the same thing in his notebooks. In fact, medieval and Renaissance apprentices were taught to copy their masters’ work not just for their own education, but to ensure workshop production was  uniform. The studio assistant’s job was to imitate someone else’s style. Since many contemporary artists do not have especially complex styles this task may have become easier. The assistants of Tracy Emin or Damien Hirst, sewing blankets or executing “spot paintings”, possibly have a less challenging time of it than apprentices in the workshops of, say, Rubens or Rembrandt.

 

Inevitably arguments have often broken out between patrons and painters about the proportion of work carried out by the master himself. The Carracci family, Bolognese painters who collaborated in the late sixteenth century, firmly deterred all such enquiries, as their biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia relates: “So it happened that when they were asked where was the work of Annibale, where of Agostino and where Lodovico’s hand was visible, nothing could be got out of them but ‘It’s by the Carracci: we all of us did it’.” This might be termed...

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