ABSTRACT
In discussing or analyzing the notion of design, many writers think that by recognizing its etymological derivation in the Italian word “disegno”, they have made the necessary explanatory correlation. Undeniably, during the Renaissance, with the discovery of the powerful role of the visual arts, the word “design” entered the English language. In Renaissance Italy, disegno assumed its contemporary sense of artistic or geometric composition and the social sense of purposeful planning. 1 In French, these senses are expressed by two words: “dessein”, meaning “purpose” or “plan”, and “dessin”, meaning “design in art”. In English, however, as in Italian, both senses are combined in the single word. Design involves making patterns out of matter and thoughts and the spontaneous recognition that something has been designed, i.e. was intentionally made. Ending with these considerations in their etymological quest, these authors do not ask why Italian speakers in the vernacular deformation of Latin did not pick up a Latin word obviously related to the pictographic arts, since the Italian disegnare stems from the Latin designare, meaning to denote by some indication, contrive, devise, point and appoint. In Italian vernacular, the use of the word disegno did not originate in painting and sculpture, but in ground measuring and in construction sites as the following excerpt from a thirteenth-century Florentine narration indicates:
“Sent the surveyors to measure the land of Cartage, drilled in the ground the boundary poles that were drawing/designating (disegnavano) it.” 2
