The drawing is the seed of all visual arts, yet its evolution is not often held to be important in the changes that have taken place in the course of the history of art. And although science and art produce the more immediate social transformations, only education, in a slow, generation-by-generation process, can build the infrastructure required for pioneering scientists and artists to crop up. Nevertheless, the bursting-onto-the-scene of the avant-garde at the dawn of the 20th century has been almost exclusively explained in terms of the genius of its protagonists, who are in truth connected to heterodox predecessors fished straight out of art history. But if we consider how old most of the artists of the early avant-garde were in 1900, we can conclude that their training was 19th-century, and it is important to look at their formative years as determinant in the development of their genial personalities...