# The 13 Greatest Drawings in Art History

> Chalk, silverpoint and ink on paper, which is the medium artists reach for when nobody is watching. Several of them did their best work there.

*By YPB Team · Published August 16, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-13-greatest-drawings-in-art-history*

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## Current results (0 votes)

1. **Vitruvian Man**
   Leonardo's pen study of a man inscribed in a circle and a square, held in Venice and rarely shown.
2. **The Burlington House Cartoon**
   Leonardo's full-scale charcoal cartoon of the Virgin, Child, St Anne and the infant Baptist.
3. **Studies of the Foetus in the Womb**
   Leonardo's red-chalk anatomical sheet, drawn from dissection around 1511.
4. **Praying Hands**
   Dürer's brush-and-ink study on blue paper, a preparatory sheet that outlived its altarpiece.
5. **Young Hare**
   Dürer's 1502 watercolour and bodycolour hare, painted hair by hair.
6. **Studies for the Libyan Sibyl**
   Michelangelo's red-chalk sheet worked up for the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
7. **Head of a Bear**
   Leonardo's tiny silverpoint bear's head, sold in 2021 for a record drawing price.
8. **The Elephant**
   Rembrandt's black-chalk study of Hansken, a performing elephant he saw in Amsterdam.
9. **Guernica sketches**
   Picasso's rapid preparatory sheets that show the mural assembling itself in days.
10. **The Great Wave preparatory print**
   Hokusai's design for the wave off Kanagawa, the most reproduced image from Japan.
11. **The Anatomy Studies**
   Vesalius's Fabrica plates of 1543, drawn in Titian's circle and still legible as anatomy.
12. **Ideal City perspective study**
   The Renaissance perspective panel that taught European art how to build depth.
13. **Self-Portrait in charcoal**
   Käthe Kollwitz's late charcoal self-portraits, drawing reduced to its bare force.

Tags: art, renaissance, drawings