The Notebook

Sentimentality may provide the answer. This tatty, scarred, yet practical notebook must have acquired value as it passed from hand to hand, accreting knowledge and nuance as it went. The constant companion of a succession of childless Franciscans, living and dying together in the community of their order, perhaps it came to embody the bonds that gr

LHD 244’s tips, aimed at players more than composers, show how to add appropriate notes to the bass as it moves up or down the scale, while avoiding accidentally landing on the tritone, an interval so abrasive that it was named diabolus in musica (‘the devil in music’).

To conjure the devil, play a C and an F# together, or listen to the intro to Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’.

And they copied not in the formal gothic or antique scripts that took years to master, but the rapid cursive scripts used by merchants and notaries; people who had to write accurately, but also quickly.

We should note, too, that the labour involved in copying out a chunk of literature changes the way the copyist relates to it. Transcribing a poem or letter forces the writer to read it multiple times, paying attention to the fine details of word selection and word order, and to consequently enjoy what one scholar calls ‘a more intimate and meaningf

The earliest sketchbooks to make it through to us intact are those of Pisanello, who was probably born in Pisa – which had close links with Florence – in 1395. Bound up into a single volume called the Codex Vallardi, his strikingly beautiful pages, now resident in the Louvre, show how essential a sketchbook had become.

Hockney’s telling point is that it is not enough merely to look at a work: if an artist wants to learn from it, they need to make their own record of it, and in doing so, come to fathom it better. This is how art lives and grows.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote, a century after Cennini: And take a note… with slight strokes in a little book that you should always carry with you… preserved with great care; for the forms, and positions of objects are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them, wherefore keep these sketches as your guides and masters.

A ‘folio’ book was made from sheets of paper that had been folded once, then gathered and bound into a codex. While the exact size varies, the pages are normally larger than our modern A4. A ‘quarto’ volume’s pages were folded in half one more time, making for a much more portable product.