J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Perspective lectures c.1809-28 > Perspective Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Inscription by Turner: Notes on Art, from Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo c.1809

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Inscription by Turner: Notes on Art, from Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’ c.1809
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 39 Verso:
Inscription by Turner: Notes on Art, from Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo circa 1809
D07420
Turner Bequest CVIII 39a
Pen and ink on white wove paper, 88 x 115 mm
Inscribed by Turner in ink (see main catalogue entry)
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Most of the page is taken up with the following notes:
either Aristides or Phamphilus had painted a bird sitting | upon an ear of corn without making the corn bend a jot [Lomazzo: ‘iot’] | which an ignorant ploughman detected not to be nature | and Mic Angelo perhaps from ridicule drew at the back of | a piece of Carving a blind beggar led by a dog but the | cord being so stiff without any bowing that a boy say the | dog would strangled or go no further which amused the painters | present | Gaudentius dog in his picture of Christ carrying | his cross at Canobium defaced by a dog Cæsar Sestius | the Landscape painter tree inticed the birds upon them
Jerrold Ziff has identified these notes, continuing from the recto of the present leaf (D07419), as free transcriptions from the 1598 English edition of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge Carvinge & Buildinge (see the sketchbook Introduction),1 in this case chapter XXIII, ‘Of the Motions of Trees, and All Other Thinges That Are Mooved’, of ‘The Seconde Booke: Of the Actions, Gestures, Situation, Decorum, Motion, Spirit, and Grace of Pictures’, page 91 (as far as ‘present’), and chapter I, ‘Of the Vertue of Colour’, of ‘The Third Booke: Treating of Colour’, pages 93 (concerning Gaudentius) and 94 (from ‘Cæsar Sestius’ onwards).
Lomazzo gives many other semi-legendary examples of paintings so naturalistic as to fool observers. For ‘Gaudentius’ (Gaudenzio Ferrari, 1475/80–1546),2 see also folios 34 recto, 38 verso and 39 recto (D07409, D07418, D07419). Further passages of Turner’s extensive notes from Lomazzo appear later in the sketchbook, continuing on folio 40 verso (D07422).

Matthew Imms
June 2008

1
Ziff 1984, pp.46, 49 note 6, and ‘Appendix I’, p.50, with transcription of Turner’s notes (followed here with slight variations); see also Davies 1994, p.288; Lomazzo also checked directly.
2
Riccardo Passoni, ‘Ferrari, Gaudenzio’, Grove Art Online, accessed 30 April 2008, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Inscription by Turner: Notes on Art, from Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo c.1809 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, June 2008, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-inscription-by-turner-notes-on-art-from-giovanni-paolo-r1136616, accessed 23 April 2024.