Mark Clarke. Mediaeval Painters’ Materials and Techniques. The Montpellier Liber diversarum arcium; Archetype, 2011

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro

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Mark Clarke

Mediaeval Painters' Materials and Techniques
The Montpellier Liber diversarum arcium

Archetype Publications, 2011

Isbn 978-1-904982-64-7

Of Mark Clarke see also: Pentimenti : D.V. Thompson’s reflections on his translation of Cennini       

[1] Text of the back cover: 

“The anonymous Montpellier Liber diversarum arcium (‘Book of Various Arts’) contains the most complete set of instructions in the craft of mediaeval painting to have survived to the present day. Its comprehensive summary of the state of the art of painting in the workshops of the fourteenth century will be of great interest to art historians, conservators and historians of artist’ technology.

This long-overlooked manuscript provides a complete practical painting course: drawing, water-based tempera, oil and fresco. It includes painting on manuscripts, panels, sculptures and walls, but also painting on glass and ceramics. Instructions are given for the preparation of materials such as pigments and media, and also for their application and modelling, as well as for gilding and other useful techniques. The range of knowledge displayed is remarkable with nearly six hundred recipes, two thirds of which are unique to this manuscript. Furthermore it demonstrates that when the van Eycks and their contemporaries transformed painting in the fifteenth century, they did so using materials and techniques of oil painting that already existed.

This volume contains the first ever published translation of the Liber diversarum arcium together with an extensive technical and historical commentary.”

[2] The critical history of the Liber diversarum arcium was certainly not full of satisfaction. The only printed edition that can be remembered is the one prepared by Guglielmo Libri in 1849, in Volume I of the Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques des départements (General catalogue of the manuscripts held by the departments’ public libraries). For the rest, the manuscript is mostly mentioned in relation to the much more famous De diversis artibus by the monk Theophilus, as a witness to a corrupted copy of the latter’s manuscript. For this reason, this (magnificent) edition is of particular importance and rightly proposes the Liber diversarum arcium as one of the fundamental texts of art making in Northern Europe during the fourteenth century.

[3] The Liber diversarum arcium (anonymous) is preserved with MS H 277 mark in the university library of Montpellier, ancient funds, medicine section. Its location in Montpellier has nothing to do with its origin. It is very likely that the original was drawn up in the countries of Northern Europe, in northern France, Flanders or Germany (see p. 51-54). Very likely, it was written during the fourteenth century. What is certain is that the original manuscript (or a copy of it) travelled to the South, and arrived in Italy. Here the manuscript got lost. But before disappearing, it had been copied in Ms. H 277. The codex examination of the manuscript shows a few things: the sample contains several manuscripts in the field of medicine; the Liber diversarum arcium is, seen through modern eyes, an exception. It was much less so with eyes of its contemporaries, in a world where the production of pigments and drugs was essentially in charge of the same professionals. All texts contained in the manuscript are bound together in a period of time between 1400 and about 1430, in a geographic area which belongs to Venice. To be precise, in one of the texts (cf. p. 314) appears a register of births, which shows the data of 13 children born between 24 July 1411 and 12 August 1431 (hence, this is the date post-quem for the time attribution). Those children were born at the home of the writer, in Conegliano, or in other areas of Venice. The transcript of the Liber was a disaster. While, as we shall see, the anonymous assembling it had extraordinary artistic techniques abilities, the copyist did not understand almost anything about substance, and often committed blunders. The Latin, in which he wrote, was very difficult to understand and very often wrongly written. All this would certainly not encourage, in the modern age, the study of the manuscript. Of course, we know very little about the following transfers, except that the manuscript was in the Albani Library in Rome when French troops occupied Italy and engaged in stripping artworks and manuscripts, as well knows (see Paul Wescher, I furti d’arte. Napoleone e la nascita del Louvre. Theft of art. Napoleon and the Birth of the Louvre). The manuscript Ms H 227 is looted in 1798 and, after a pure speculative passage, is purchased by the French Government in 1804 and placed in the library of medicine of Montpellier in the same year. This is the way, through which a text was composed in northern Europe, copied in Venice, moved to Rome, and finally ended up being kept in the South of France.

[4] What makes this manuscript (of which there exists only one copy) so extraordinary? First, an objective fact, the abundance of recipes: they are almost 600. But above all the organization of the text, which is clearly structured by a deep knowledge of artistic techniques. It is no exaggeration - the author writes – to think of the manuscript as a real course of artistic techniques, structured in four books (cf. p. 2-3). The first book deals with the fundamental skills (in essence, the design), the second and third ones illustrate advanced specialized techniques (oil painting, painting on wall). Less "organic" than the rest of the work appears to be the fourth book, in which other more "sectorial" techniques (painting on ceramics and glass, metal, dyeing, fabrication of artificial gemstones). “Book 4 is more complicated…. It is noticeable that in Book 4 both the sections for metallurgy and vitreous materials are discontinuous. The likely reason for this is that the second section on each subject is a later addiction. The arrangement of Book 4 is suggestive of such later interpolations and additions that probably postdate the composition of the core LDA [Note of the editor: LDA = Liber diversarum arcium]. These may have been added as infill and marginalia to the exemplar-LDA from which MS H 277 was copied or in some earlier copy… Book 4 also contains more Italian words, Italianate Latin, and references to Italian materials and techniques than do Books 1-3, and it is quite likely that the bulk of it was compiled from Italian sources or composed in Italy. Certain of the dye recipes are ones often associated with Italy or even specifically Venice” (p. 40). The author also points out that only in this last book (which is assumed to be added just before or at the time of copying) are included recipes appearing unnecessary, because imperfect, or completely unrealistic, because clearly related to medieval legends.

[5] The attention, therefore, should be focused on the first three books, strong operational and hosting recipes indebted to the artistic practices of Northern Europe. On one thing it is necessary to be clear: whoever he was, the author of the recipe-book did not innovate; if anything, he tackled traditional techniques of which we know some valuable witness, certainly chronologically preceding. The most famous of all is the De diversis artibus of Theophilus, published by Lessing in 1774. As I said at the beginning, every time it is mentioned, the Liber diversarum arcium is considered as a late and corrupt copy of Theophilus’s text, dating back roughly to 1100. Yet some things are said very clearly by Clarke. Let's list them:

• medieval recipe books are created through knowledge sedimentation. Very often they are copies of earlier texts, to which more recipes are added. Thus, who prepares them (and this is also the case of the anonymous of the Liber) on one hand collates recipes and on the other one lists new recipes resulting from personal experience. In the Liber appears some of Theophilus’material (elder by two centuries), but we are talking about sixty recipes out of six hundred;
• more generally, about two-thirds of the recipes in the Liber are not reflected in any previous source. Which is not to say that they are all original: it is probable that most of the sources went lost. But in the meantime we must acknowledge the role of the Liber as precious testimony of the art technology in medieval Northern Europe. Very often, however, more recipes are reported for the same technique with variations of the proceedings; anyway, the section Textual parallels between the Liber diversarum arcium and other 'recipe books' analyzes in detail the relationships with other manuscripts;
• of particular relevance is the kinship with another manuscript, the Compendium artis picturae (CAP) of Brussels (MS 10152), in particular in relation to Theophilus’ Treaty;
• De diversis artibus is witnessed (in whole or in part) by a score of manuscripts, which more or less resemble each other. Exceptions are just the Liber and the Compendium of Brussels. “The wording of the Theophilus extracts in these two manuscripts differs substantially from the commonly accepted text, but the wording in each of these two manuscripts conforms very closely to each other” (p. 30). Studied individually, it was said that the two manuscripts reported a corrupted and rough version of Theophilus. Much more likely, they derive their version of the De diversis Artibus from an identical manuscript, which was lost and with a different version than the other witnesses; 
• however, it should be also stressed that a considerable part of Theophilus’ Treaty is not present in the Liber diversarum arcium. One possibility is that the author of the Liber did not have it at his disposal. But, at a closer examination, we note that these are the prologues, Books II (on processing of glass) and III (on metallurgy). The reality is that only a small part of the Theophilus’ Treaty has to do with the painting (about one fifth) and that the specific part is there, while all those sections that have to do with other craft skill are expunged. The strong suspicion is that this had been a deliberate "editorial" choice, the idea being - as already mentioned - to create a "painting course" and we stick to the initial plan.

[6] Why all the attention on the relationship between the Liber and Theophilus? It's simple: because the latter has always been considered as the reference manuscript for artistic practices in Northern Europe, and in particular has been cited whenever the question arose of the "discovery" of oil painting by the Van Eycks (the discussion on the matter is boundless: please refer to Paola Del Vescovo, Il trattato di Teofilo e il problema dell’origine della pittura ad olio (The Treaty of Theophilus and the problem of the origin of oil painting), Ferrara, 2006. However, if it is certain that Theophilus testifies to the presence of oil painting since the twelfth century, it is equally beyond doubt - says Clarke – that the Liber (who was drafted in 1300) returns the state of the art immediately before the "discovery". That is why it should be studied carefully. All this is part of a thesis, by now well-established, that there was nothing to discover, in the sense that the technique was practiced for centuries, but that the Van Eycks - or anybody else for them - managed to make it "efficient" in terms of qualitative yield and processing times. 

[7] A brief comparison between the Liber and the Book of Art by Cennino Cennini is worth. Obviously there are no tight relationships between the two texts, which are ultimately expressions of two different worlds: the Liber gives much greater importance to oil painting, Cennino to tempera and fresco. The two manuscripts can rightly be regarded as complementary in terms of substance and roughly coeval in chronological terms (the Liber is written in 1300, probably at the beginning; Cennino at the end of 1300). The purpose of the two authors may have been the same: to create a manual of painting for the consumption of contemporary artists.

[8] It is to say - but there will be a special review on it - that Mark Clarke is the author of an extraordinary repertoire of manuscripts on medieval artistic techniques (he catalogued about 400 of them) which was also published by Archetype in 2001. This is The Art of All Colours. Mediaeval Recipe Books for Painters and Illuminators.