Architectural Tracings and the Fragility of Design Authorship

Scholarship on early modern architectural drawing is replete with discussions of artistic genius and inimitable creation. Even in the study of model books and copy drawings, scholars are eager to make attributions. With good reason: knowledge of the author, provenance and date of a drawing offers insight into its subject matter and function, and may help to explain its anomalous preservation. How then do we proceed in assessing traced drawings—renderings produced by direct, manual transfer resulting in a near-facsimile of a prototype?

This paper centres on a sixteenth-century architectural drawing book produced by tracing, conserved in the Drawing Matter Collection (UK). The approximately sixty surviving folios represent what was undoubtedly a larger compilation. These pages, originally treated with oil so as to make them transparent, contain methodical reproductions of canonical architectural details, ground plans, elevations, and machine designs.  The swift, confident hand that characterises three-fourths of the material may be soundly attributed to Giovanni Antonio Dosio. The remaining folios are by a second (and possibly third?) hand; like the book itself they are workshop productions, executed for reference value. One of the most striking characteristics of the Drawing Matter book is the salient presence of annotations, which detail the name, location and dimensions of the recorded subjects, and in multiple instances, explicitly link given drawings with the ‘hand’ of an authorial designer. Indeed, the anonymity of the traced folios is accentuated, almost in a self-conscious and contradictory way, by the overt acknowledgement of architects of the ranks of Alberti, Michelangelo and Bramante.  

The Drawing Matter book thus introduces a series of methodological issues regarding the authorship of traced drawings. Thanks to a relative abundance of paper and established techniques for semi-mechanical graphic reproduction, traced architectural drawings were relatively common by the second-half of the sixteenth century. An architect like Dosio—or any anonymous draughtsman— could easily appropriate different ‘hands’, and in doing so, came to substantially define coeval perceptions of the canonical architect-authors and their ‘originals.’  

Elizabeth Merrill specializes in early modern Italian architecture, with a research focus on architectural training, and the means by which architects communicated building designs. She is the studied at Columbia University and the University of Virginia and held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin) and the Warburg Institute (London). She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC project “Copying as Common Practice in Early Modern European Architecture” (2023-2028).

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