The Art of Scribbling Paul Barolsky (bio) We read in Wikipedia that “doodling and scribbling are most often associated with young children and toddlers.” My maternal grandfather remembered how, as a very young child, I would scribble on paper spread out for me on the kitchen floor. I also remember the physical pleasure somewhat later of scrawling on paper with crayons. I would scribble wherever and whenever I could. When I was in college and later in graduate school, I would entertain my friends by scribbling on paper napkins. Ever the art historian, I would later come to call such confections “Napkin Art.” None of my scribbling has found its way into the Museum of Modern Art. At least not yet! The word scribbling (scarabocchio in Italian) has many connotations. It can refer to doodles and doodling. It can be used interchangeably with such words as drawing or sketching. It can refer to what in Italian is called gofferia or goffezza—that which is clumsy or gauche, raw, awkward, or crude. Careless or sloppy in execution, it stands in opposition to the ideal to which the art historian Giorgio Vasari referred as bella maniera, the beautiful style that is the perfection of art. The notion of scribbling leads one back to one of the most amusing of all the stories in Boccaccio’s Decameron, the sixth story told on the sixth day, a tale which demonstrates that the Baronci were the oldest, most noble family not just in Florence but in the whole wide world. It is a novella that has everything to do with scribbling. According to Boccaccio’s tale, when God created the Baronci, he was still learning how to draw and paint, whereas he fashioned the [End Page 97] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Giovanni Francesco Caroto, Portrait of a Boy Holding a Drawing, c. 1515–20. Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona. rest of humanity only after he had mastered His craft. To see that this was so, all one needed to do was to compare the Baronci to everybody else. Whereas there were those who had nicely shaped and beautifully proportioned faces, the Baronci had faces that were long and narrow and, on occasion, extraordinarily wide. Some had long noses, some short noses. Still others had protruding, turned up chins with gigantic jaws resembling those of an ass. In addition, some had one eye lower than the other. Generally, their faces look like those that children or fanciulli make when they first learn how to draw. You might say that the Baronci were divine juvenilia that God had scribbled. If God was [End Page 98] still learning to draw and paint when He made the Baronci, it also follows that He made them before He fashioned Adam, who was, according to Vasari, the first sculpture, fashioned by God out of clay. That God created the first man on the sixth day, resonated nicely (and surely not by chance) with the fact that the story Boccaccio told was the sixth tale on the sixth day of the Decameron. One might well imagine that the Lord, when still learning to draw, was most emphatically a scribbler. According to two ambitious scholars, Francesca Alberti and Diane H. Bodart, scribbling has a history. They have recently addressed the subject in an important book, Scarabocchio da Leonardo da Vinci a Cy Twombly (Scribbling from Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly), which was published this year in conjunction with an exhibition at the Villa Médicis in Rome and the Beaux Arts in Paris. Their copiously illustrated book surveys the story of scribbling from the Renaissance to the present by including 300 images. ________ Although God’s youthful scribbling vanished long ago, we get some idea of what His figures might have looked like if we consider one of the most familiar of all Renaissance scribbles. I speak of the subject of an early sixteenth-century painting by Giovanni Francesco Caroto, The Portrait of a Boy Holding a Drawing, which is now in the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona—a work that is featured in Alberti’s and Bodart’s splendid tome (Fig.1). The boy...
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