Is it ever really possible to depict something ‘from life’? When artists work in direct confrontation with their model in the workshop, or while immersed in the very landscape that they are depicting, their creative process differs from the depiction of imagined or remembered models. It yields a different result, as well, ending usually with a more detailed image. The painting or drawing made from life may, in the end, convey more of that elusive sense of presence we get from actual people and sites. But even while painting or drawing with the model before their eyes, the artist is never quite depicting ‘from life’. Every time their gaze turns away from the model and towards the paper or canvas, they leave behind the model's living presence to enter the realm of memory and imagination. They may reduce the distance between observation and memory, but the gap will persist, and it is in that gap that representation takes place. In that gap, as well, is born the personal style of an artist, their distinctive ‘handwriting’.

Even if representation in any period or any medium is always mediated through an individual's thought and memory, the urge to create images in direct contact with the model, and to make images that seem unmediated, was a distinct feature of early modern arts. It may now be more easily discerned as part of Northern art, inherent in Dutch and Flemish practices. Yet it had a particular surge in popularity across Europe at the end of the sixteenth century.