At Villa Lante, about an hour north of Rome, there are beautiful box hedges and parterre. Box, like birch bark, has been used as a surface for drawing. Some of the box hedges at Villa Lante are very tall, and if you look into the center of the hedges, you’ll see trunks thicker than you would imagine–wide enough for small rectangular drawing supports.
Villa Lante | Box and Watercourse for Fountains | Bagnaia, Italy
Early draftsmen used boxwood to make model-books where they could record successful compositions, poses, and subjects for future use. Boxwood, because of its great density and because it could be smoothed to a high degree, was the wood of choice. Parchment, fig wood, and paper were also used. Cennino Cennini, writing in circa 1400, tells of how to prepare a boxwood drawing surface in Chapter V of his Libro dell’arte (English here) and and in Chapter VI he talks of fig wood, specifying that the fig wood should be old. To make a little panel, he calls for pieces of wood as high and wide as “un sommesso.” According to the 1612 Crusca dictionary, a sommesso is the width of a fist with the thumb extended, as in the hitchhiking gesture. For me, that is about 6 inches (I’ve seen some translations of Cennini say 9 inches, which seems too much. There’s a limit to box trunk width.) Whether box or fig, he says to clean it well, smooth with a cuttlebone, dry, and then coat with well ground bone dust and spittle.
There are too few examples of model books, and especially boxwood ones. I don’t think there are any early drawings on fig wood tablets. The drawing on box just below is given to a Jaques Daliwe. The attribution to Daliwe is based solely on an inscription on one of the 12 pages that make up the Berlin model book. The inscription might also refer to an owner of the model-book. There are a total of 22 drawings, mostly in metalpoint with white heightening. A couple of the drawings are based on illuminations of the Limbourg Brothers, though this one is not. If boxwood grew to be bigger, would they have wanted larger drawings, or were they happy to have a book that was so easily transportable to bring along to their various jobs?
Jaques Daliwe | Head Studies | Metalpoint, brush and white heightening on grounded boxwood panel | 89 x 130 mm | Liber picturatus A 74 Staatsbibliothek Berlin
Red earth has been used in painting for millennia. Sinopia was the Italian word for this pigment and it was used for the underdrawing in fresco painting. The drawings themselves are now known as sinopia, much like the word oil can stand for painting. Sinopia color was also used in the fresco itself and in panel paintings, particularly for painting flesh. The example from Todi just below, shows a fresco, and at the left, where the intonaco or final layer has fallen, a section with the sinopia on the coarser layer of plaster called the arriccio. This fresco is from about 1380, when paper was still not very available.
Anon. Umbrian Painter | Fresco and Sinopia Fragment | St. John and Feast of Herod Chapel | c. 1380 | San Fortunato | Todi
As paper became more common, fresco design could be done on paper and then transferred by pricking and pouncing to the plaster. However, the much later Ligozzi example below shows that artists even in 1600 liked to use sinopia for fresco preparation.
Jacopo Ligozzi | Detail from St. Francis Distributing Bread Sinopia | 1599-1600 | Santa Croce Museum | Florence
Sinopia takes its name from Sinop, a cape and port town on Turkey’s Black Sea coast. A bustling trade in the pigment took place in Sinop, though the color was mined to the south in Cappodocia. Cennino Cennini writes about sinopia in his Libro dell’Arte (available in Italian as a pdf and in English posted online). Cennini talks of going with his father, also a painter, and finding sinopia and other colors in the Colle di Val d’Elsa area of Tuscany.
E pervegnendo in uno vallicello, in una grotta molta salvatica, e raschiando la grotta con una zappa, io vidi vene di più ragioni colori: cioè ocria, sinopia scura e chiara, azzurro e bianco, e ‘l tenni il maggior miracolo del mondo, che bianco possa essere di vena terrigna, ricordandoti che io ne feci la prova di questo bianco, e trava’lo grasso, che non è da incarnazione.
And coming into a little valley, in a very wild grotto, and after scraping the grotto with a hoe, I saw many veins of color, that is, ochre, dark and light sinopia, blue, and white, and I thought that finding white in the earth was the greatest miracle in the world. I’ll remind you that I tried using the white and found it too fat and it couldn’t be used for flesh tones.
Cennino Cennini | Il Libro Dell’Arte | Chapter 45
What Cennini writes made me think that Italy’s artistic output, enough to stock museums all over the world and still have so much left within the country, must, at least in part, have something to do with the Italy’s rich geology––so many minerals for making pigments and so much stone for sculpture.
