Knowledge on the Ground: John Talman and the Representation of Floors on Paper

Abstract Floors, while marginalized in current architectural history, held a profound importance in early modernity. This article contends that representations of floors were employed to capture and convey the epistemic and experiential richness of pavements. It focuses on the early eighteenth-century paper museum of John Talman (1677–1726), the British antiquarian, architect, and collector who assembled one of the period’s most important collections of sketches and colored renderings of floors. For the first time, these drawings are dissected to show how they capture the multifaceted social and architectural knowledge embedded on the ground—bringing the world of buildings into conversation with antiquarianism, materiality, media, observation, deception, and architectural representation. The article shows how Talman’s paper floors, working in conjunction with other images in the same collection, generate an augmented way of knowing and experiencing actual floors that involves both imaginative and rational engagement and goes beyond on-site empirical observation.