Giovanni antonio dosio biography of williams college

Instinctively, however, we know that flavour resides in fat. Thoughts of feasting, and midwinter delicacies, wallow in images of warmth, security and protective layers of lard. These associations are also embroiled in the surfaces we use to make drawings. Presentation drawings — clean, opaque and unsullied — project a distilled and immaculate imaginary, a clarified arrangement on a smooth and impenetrable substrate.

But what, then, of the drawings under the surface?

Giovanni antonio dosio biography of williams college: In Giovanni Antonio Dosio's mid-sixteenth-century

Those where thinking happens, with their fingerprints, smears and smudged dog-eared leaves, dead ends and miraculous mistakes? Something is revealed in the furtive ooze of these translucent marks. With them, we begin to see through. The sheet under discussion is one of a number of drawings made on oiled paper contained in the sixteenth-century album attributed to Giovanni Antonio Dosio.

A compilation of copies after the antique, the volume is a repository of reference drawings made both in, and through, the glutinous gluttony of the medium. Of the three possible methods used to increase light transmission in paper, oiling is the oldest.