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

The whole page is taken up with the following notes:

Maurice Davies has identified these notes as taken 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 from ‘The Fifth Booke: Of the Perspectives’: chapter I, ‘The Proeme’, page 184 (as far as ‘Figures); Chapter IIII, ‘Of the Manner of our Sight in General’, page 191 (‘Hipparchus ... objects’); and chapter VIII, ‘Of Distance’, page 200.

These are the last of Turner’s extensive notes from Lomazzo, continuing from folio 62 recto opposite (D07460). The first phrase concludes Turner’s transcription of a statement following a discussion of proportion in statuary designed to be displayed above the viewer: ‘And this is the true arte which the ancient observed in all their workes’. Turner’s note ‘made bigger’ is from Lomazzo’s phrase ‘made bigger, and so they [i.e. the figures in relief ascending the column] seem all of one bignes [sic]’, which is qualified further: ‘For the iudicious workman made them so much the bigger, as they lost by reason of the distance from the eie’. The number ‘110’ seems to echo a discussion of adjusting proportion in terms of a one in ten ratio, as noted on folio 62 recto.

Trajan’s Column also features in Turner’s notes on folios 34 recto, 35 recto, 35 verso, 36 verso, 37 recto and 37 verso (D07409, D07411, D07412, D07414–D07416); see also the entry for folio 33 verso (D07408). The sculptures formerly attributed to Phidias and Praxiteles in Rome’s Piazza del Quirinale (in the area once known as Monte Cavallo) are also mentioned on folio 33 verso (D07408; see entry for a full discussion).

On the concluding point, Lomazzo declares: ‘Onely I will subscribe to the iudgment of Balthasar Petruccius, & Raph: Urbine, who when they would paint a wall with a narrow way, and galleries with wals, thought it no disgrace, not to represent th¿ in their picture according to the distance taken from the wall; but would have them done much greater, after an imaginary distance’.
‘Balthasar Petruccius’ appears to be Raphael’s contemporary Baldessare Peruzzi, the Italian painter and architect (1481–1536), who devised theatrical sets in perspective and painted a ‘Sala delle Prospettive’ in the Villa Farnesina, Rome.2

The nearest notes from Lomazzo working back through the sketchbook are on folio 60 verso (D07457).