Copy

The honest limit, stated first. Copying demonstrably trains the eye and the hand, and it is sold as inheriting the master. Those are different claims and only the first has anything under it. No controlled study exists anywhere, in drawing or in music, testing whether copying a master's page produces independent work better than any other use of the same hours. That absence is the finding rather than a gap in the reading. The plate course the modern studios call the lost correct method was issued without instructions; the teaching method attached to it was written by two Americans in 2003, and the revival that treats it as the recovered tradition is itself recent. What the pair gives you is a record of an afternoon of looking closely, which is worth the afternoon.