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 2 Verso:
Inscription by Turner: Notes on Art, from Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo circa 1809
D07358
Turner Bequest CVIII 2a
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
The whole page is taken up with the following notes:
Prometheus the son of Japhet and Asia the nymph first invented | the Plastic. -Hence Gyges the Lydian, Pyrrhus the Grecian and | Polygnotus <...> the Athenian here Pliny 35 1234 Chap | is referd to as they painted only in Black & White the | P. Ardices the Corinthian and Telephanes the Sicyonian | Cleophantus the Corinthian brought the use of Colors | calld Monochroma. after this Appollodorus the Athenian | used the pencil, and Cumanus who characterized the forms | the beautyfull and Cimon Cleondus found out the fore- | shortening of figures casting the countenance so artifi | caly that it seemd to look every way, teaching more | hover how to represent the plaits and folds in garments | together with the veins and muscles of the Body Paneus | brother of Phidias sought the way to paint women with | white garments fringed and crowns of gold upon their heads | the Battle of the Athenians and Persians and invented the
The last sentence concludes with ‘art of drawing from the Life’ on folio 3 recto opposite (D07359).
As with Turner’s notes on the recto of this leaf (D07357), Jerrold Ziff has identified these anecdotes of ancient art as 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 they come from page 7 of the ‘Preface’.
Some nine lines of Lomazzo are passed over after Turner’s first sentence. The ‘Black & White’ passage is rather truncated, the original reading ‘onely with Blacke and White, the authors whereof were Ardices ...’; Turner’s ‘P’ probably stands for ‘painters’. He has also copied the marginal note ‘Plin. lib. 35. | ca. 1. 2. 3. 4. &’. Ziff has transcribed Turner’s notes on the history of ancient art made directly from the 1601 English edition of Pliny the Elder’s first century AD Naturalis Historia (‘Natural History’).2 Mordechai Omer has addressed Turner’s notes in relation to discussions of the Biblical Japhet and his father Noah as ‘the cradle of civilization and the origin of the Arts’, albeit without recognising Lomazzo as the direct source.3
Further passages of Turner’s extensive notes from Lomazzo appear later in the sketchbook (starting at folio 32; D07405).

Matthew Imms
June 2008

1
Ziff 1984, pp.45–6, with transcription of Turner’s notes (followed here with slight variations); see also Davies 1994, p.287; Lomazzo also rechecked directly.
2
‘Appendix II’ in Ziff 1984, pp.50–2.
3
Omer 1975, pp.698, 701.

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-r1136553, accessed 03 November 2025.