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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > Sandycombe Lodge c.1808-12 > Windmill and Lock Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Diagram of a Cube in Perspective, after Vignola 1809

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Diagram of a Cube in Perspective, after Vignola’ 1809
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 13 Verso:
Diagram of a Cube in Perspective, after Vignola 1809
D07979
Turner Bequest CXIV 13a
Pencil on white wove paper, 87 x 117 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘Vignola’ towards bottom left below diagram
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Most of the page is taken up with a rough diagram of cubes in perspective. Maurice Davies has identified the source as notes on the history of perspective in Joshua Kirby’s Dr Brook Taylor’s Method of Perspective Made Easy Both in Theory and Practice: see the 1754 Ipswich edition, Book II, pp.81–4,1 and the 1768 London edition, Book II, pp.88–92.2 There are other notes from the same source on folios 11 verso, 12 recto, 14 recto and 14 verso (D07975, D07976, D07980, D07981).
This diagram shows a perspective method by Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola (1507–1573), taken from Kirby. In the 1768 edition it is shown in Book II, Pl.XIX, fig.1.3 There is a note on Vignola on folio 12 recto (D07976). As Andrea Fredericksen notes in her catalogue entry, diagram 33 (Tate D17047; Turner Bequest CXCV 77) for Turner’s third Royal Academy perspective lecture is a version of the same plate, derived from Vignola’s Le due regole della prospettiva pratica (1583).
For the dating of these and other notes made prior to Turner’s 1811 Royal Academy perspective lectures see the Introduction to the sketchbook.

Matthew Imms
January 2012

1
Davies 1994, p.306 note 3.
2
Ibid., p.290.
3
Ibid., pp.93, 309 note 67.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Diagram of a Cube in Perspective, after Vignola 1809 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, January 2012, 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-diagram-of-a-cube-in-perspective-after-vignola-r1134755, accessed 22 November 2024.