In 1834, the German painter Johann Erdmann Hummel devoted a drawing to the famous founding myth of fine art (fig. 1), passed down by Pliny and highly popular in the late eighteenth century. Pliny reports that the Corinthian potter Butades had invented portrait-like pictures in clay with the help of his daughter Debutadis, who “for the love of a departing young man, outlined on the wall the shadow of his profile by the light of a lamp.” While most other pictures of the subject from around 1800 concentrate on Debutadis and thus on disegno as the master art, Hummel shows us a twofold scene. We see the potter's workshop, where the old Butadis is seated at a potter's wheel. While his hands form useful vessels out of formless clay, his eyes follow his daughter's drawing. In Pliny's story, Butadis thereupon filled the outline on the wall with clay and fired the likeness along with other sundry items. Clay, the “primordial material” in Gottfried Semper's terminology, serves for both common objects and for fine art, with its high aim of producing lasting memory. Thanks to the transfer of the outlined picture on the wall into clay, the image became independent of its location and could be traded and transported, like pots. Following Pliny, Hummel combined high and low — drawing and the production of useful things.

As we know, the combination of the working processes of the fine and applied arts within a confined space was disrupted in the course of time, and has been theorized differently. On the one hand, the workshop as a site for handicraft persisted; on the other hand, the studio for the conception and realization of the fine arts emerged. In studio pictures, artists since the Renaissance have staged themselves mainly as intellectuals — as thinkers, not as craftsmen. Hummel, however, who had been a teacher of perspective and optics at the Berlin Academy, here programmatically links both realms. This relates to his conviction that drawing should form the basis for artists as well as for artisans. Ignoring the Academy rules, Hummel's drawing lessons remained open to craftsmen and architects, as well as to artists.