The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

by Roland Allen

Paper, by comparison, could be used without preparation, and held the line of a stylus, a pen, chalk or charcoal, equally well. You could create shade or the illusion of depth with hatched parallel strokes, and Cennini supplied instructions for dying paper green, pink, grey, blue or purple. A ledger’s portability made any scene a viable subject; ‘nature,’ wrote Cennini, ‘is the best of all possible examples’. And, at a tenth of the price of parchment, cheap paper allowed artists to ‘always and without fail draw something every day’. All of these material advantages would have naturally led to the sketchbook’s next great benefit: a step change in the quality of preparation that an artist could put into a work. With the space afforded by a ledger with hundreds of leaves, an artist could not only privately draw from life, but also plan and revise a painting before committing to a final subject, design, composition or execution. Detailed preparation – repeated studies, leading to a final plan or cartoon – would have given Giotto a significant edge over his precursors, one visible in his complex, sophisticated compositions, and in his facility in the unforgiving medium of fresco. The sketchbook also allowed an artist to develop their own style and repertoire, an additional memory bank that collected a body of material to refer to at a later date.