Dionisio da Furnà, Ermeneutica della pittura [Hermeneutics of Painting], (a cura di Giovanna Donata Grasso)

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro

CLICK HERE FOR THE ITALIAN VERSION

Dionisio da Furnà
Ermeneutica della pittura

[Hermeneutics of Painting]
Edited by Giovanna Donato Grasso
Introduction by Sergio Bettini

Fiorentino Publishing House, 1971

[1] This is the story of a fake medieval Byzantine manuscript. While the manuscript was recognised as a forgery since the beginning of 1900, still today someone is so obstinate (or simply not informed) to pass it off as original. In 1839, Adolphe Napoléon Didron went to Greece to study the Byzantine art. And there, wandering among the monasteries of Mount Athos, got in his hands a guide to making art, the author of which (the painter Dionisio da Furnà) provided guidance on technical measures to be followed and iconographic characteristics to be respected. Mr Didron thought he had stumbled on a manuscript which, though completed in sec. XV or at the latest in the next one, reported norms and behaviours of a much elder age, dating back to the Tenth or Eleventh century, as claimed by local monks. This would have been the time when the well-known controversy on the religious legitimacy of the use of the images had been just resolved. 

[2] The text, translated by Paul Durand and supplemented by a presentation and the notes by Mr Didron, appeared in Paris in 1845. The work immediately attracted the interest of scholars and, at least initially, gained their consent. In 1847, in the first volume of his Materials for a history of Oil Painting, Charles L. Eastlake spoke of the "Byzantine manuscript lately edited by Messrs. Didron and Durand "and recalled that "the present inhabitants of Mount Athos suppose that it was written in the Tenth or Eleventh century." A few years later the first edition in modern Greek came out, greatly influenced by Didron. Later on, a German translation by Schäfer (Trier, 1855) became the version commonly used by scholars for years. 

[3] Over time, however, the enthusiasm faded and then cooled, giving rise to various reserves. At p. 16 of the Letteratura Artistica, Schlosser attributed to Heinrich Brockhaus and the "Greek publisher Papadopulos Kerameus [in 1909] the merit of having shown that [the Treaty] does not belong at all, as was thought, to the days of the dispute on iconography" or to any time close to it. The manuscript of Mount Athos, made known by Mr Didron, is not a code of Byzantine art, but is due to an author (in fact Dionisio da Furnà) who wrote it in the middle of the Eighteenth century. The text of Dionysus was then partially manipulated by a known forger, Constantine Simonidis, packaged as if it were medieval and delivered to Didron, who naively fell in that trap. It is useless to search for the presence of a very remote tradition: anyone who reads these pages would identify, if anything, a clear connection with the late Venetian art, as evidenced by the presence of a few terms (such as, for example, the entry νατουράλε) that are typical of Italian art workshops. 

[4] These findings are confirmed by Sergio Bettini, who, in an article published in 1941 in the Atti dell’Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, insists on Didron’s naivety as well as the credulous nature of those who scrambled to see in the guide of Dionysius "even the ‘master code’ of the Byzantine pure technique." Dionysius - is said on p. 181 - "appears, in the light of the documents and the examination of the works, as a belated... Greek-Venetian painter, in short, a ‘madonnero’. Indeed, the technique he encoded and the iconography he described, appear as typical for a ‘madonnero’, both in terms of technics and 'iconography’.” And later, at p. 183: "the same sources that [Dionysus] used are not at all pure Byzantine, reflecting at most the technique... by Theophanes the Cretan and, above all, the one by Panselino: in both cases, artists who were already deeply influenced by Italian art". 

[5] The idea of having discovered a manuscript with the secrets of Byzantine art is however fascinating and captivated even the most unexpected. In 1940, the ‘Osservatore Romano’ proposed to translate the writings of Dionysius in Italian, using the work of Didron. In his earlier mentioned writing Bettini took a firm view exactly against this proposal. "The inaccuracies and the ingenuity of a Didron, perhaps excusable at his time - is told at p. 196 – would not be excusable any more today, especially if being the consequence of a second-hand examination: therefore, producing today, as proposed, an Italian translation of the bad French translation by Didron... would not "fill" any gap: worse than useless, it would be simply shameful for our culture." 

[6] Bettini’s claims resulted so convincing, that we had to wait until 1971 to see this Italian version of hermeneutics of Dionisio da Furnà, which was however conducted on very different assumptions. The curator, in fact, has used the 1909 edition of the Papadopolo-Kerameus, based on cod. gr. 708 Saltykov-Shchedrin Library in St. Petersburg, and has abandoned the lessons of Didron. And most importantly, she is well aware that this is a manuscript of an Eighteenth century artist coming from the Cretan area. 

[7] It is Bettini himself who wrote the introduction to the work of Giovanna Donato Grasso 's writing. Bettini’s piece is of great interest. Here it is enough to point out that according to the scholar (see p. liv), the translation presented here "is the first reliable, to appear in a Western language." The old French version presented by Adolphe N. Didron in 1845 and repeatedly used by various scholars, offers limited reliance, "and – in a countless number of cases – does not intend and misrepresents the meaning of the writing". Often "curious, incomprehensible or even absurd expressions will arise." 

[8] However, it is curious that, periodically, Didron’s text is being passed off again as original, like if it tried coming back, as if nothing had happened. In 2003, Arkeios editions have published the translation of the Didron edition (edited by PierLuigi Zoccatelli), talking, once again, of the ancient Byzantine manuscript, of secrets jealously guarded for centuries and now fortunately exposed to our view, without saying anything about the controversy that had erupted from 1909 onwards. No comment. 

[9] In more recent years the "false Byzantine manuscript" of Dionisio da Furnà came back again to the fore following the debate (which has had extensive press coverage) on the authenticity or otherwise of the so-called Artemidorus Papyrus. Luciano Canfora took a strong stance against the originality of the same, and argued that it is precisely a work by Constantin Simonidis, the same forger that would have contributed to render the text of Dionisio da Furnà more "Byzantine", by way of manipulation. In this regard, Luciano Canfora noted in the opening words the amazing coincidences in the incipit between the two works, which seem to support the thesis that a single hand might have drafted the two texts.