The Roxburghe Club

INIGO JONES’S ROMAN SKETCHBOOK.

Sale Notes

Price £200.00

Sale Vendor

Maggs

Notes

A facsimile, with an introduction and commentary by Edward Chaney. The Roxburghe Club, 2006.

The modest, vellum-bound notebook now known as the Roman Sketchbook and catalogued at Chatsworth House as ‘Album 6’ was probably acquired early in the New Year of 1614, within days Inigo Jones's of arrival in Rome with the Earl of Arundel. Begun as a self-improving notebook in Rome on 21 January 1614, Jones soon seems to have put the Sketchbook aside while he explored Rome with his patron. A month later Jones began paraphrasing Palladio's Antichità di Roma but then seems to have abandoned his notebook and was not to return to it for at least two decades. Then, in his sixties, he decided to fill in many of the pages he had left blank with more pen and ink notes and drawings. Both were derived from books or prints with varying degrees of literalness; the Italian prose being translated and paraphrased or abridged; the visual material being inevitably filtered through his own artistic experience but usually repeated in more or less directly derivative form.

Both notes and drawings were inserted in the manner of one compiling a visual commonplace-book in which the drawings are related to many similar but scattered drawings done in the same period. Now, more than his own education, he seems to have had that of his own pupil, John Webb in mind and through and beyond him, his own immortality. Published previously only in a very rare lithographic facsimile in 1831 this is the first scholarly publication of the Roman Sketchbook.

The text has been fully reproduced in photographic facsimile and accurately transcribed by Professor Chaney for the first time. The sources of Jones's designs, mostly Italian prints of the sixteenth century have been identified, with supporting illustrations, and in a lengthy introduction Professor Chaney explores the place the Sketchbook fills in both Jones's life and his legacy. Issued in two volumes: 1: Introduction, transcription and textual commentary; 2: Facsimile.