The Anatomy of Sketching

Abstract

The only true voyage of discovery is not to go to new places, but to have other eyes. -Marcel Proust Both sketching and design emerged in the late medieval period, and this was no accident. From this period on, the trend was toward a separation of design from the process of making (Heskett 1980). With that came the need to find the means whereby the designer could explore and communicate ideas. Sketching, as a dis-tinct form of drawing, provided such a vehicle. The first examples of sketching, as we think of it today, come from Siena, from Mariano di Jacobi detto Taccola (McGee 2004). In the first half of the fifteenth century, he embarked on a four-volume set of books on civil and military tech-nology, called De Ingenisis. In a manner not unlike George Lucas and Star Wars, he completed volumes 3 and 4 first, and delivered them to the emperor in 1433. Volumes 1 and 2 were never completed. Rather, he went on to work on another project, De Machinis, which he completed in 1449. This might seem like a little too much arcane detail, but you kind of need to know it in order to understand the following excerpt from a recent book about Taccola's work: What is significant for our purposes is that Taccola worked out many of the ideas he presented in De Machin is by filling the unfinished pages of Books 1 and 2 of De Jngenisis with hundreds of rough sketches, turning them into a sort of notebook. Examining these sketches and comparing them to the drawings in De Machinis we are able to follow a person actually working out technical ideas for the first time in history. (McGee 2004; p. 73.)