Giovanni Mazzaferro. Cennino Cennini and the "Book of Art": a Check-list of the Printed Editions. Second part: from 1901 to 1950. Bologna, dicembre 2013

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EDITIONS FROM 1900 TO 1950

Agnolo Gaddi. The Legend of the True Cross (part,
Basilica di Santa Croce a Firenze
(1380-1390 circa)

Year 1911

Second edition in French

LE LIVRE DE L’ART OU TRAITÉ DE LA PEINTURE PAR CENNINO CENNINI

Nouvelle édition augmentée de dix-sept chapitres nouvellement traduits, précédés d’une lettre d’A. Renoir

Edited by Victor Mottez and Henry Mottez

Place of publication: Paris

Publisher: Bibliothèque de l’Occident

Other editions: 1922 (L. Rouart et J. Watelin), 1982 (de Nobele)

Conduct on manuscript VO, with additions form ML and R

Available on the Internet: no

In 1911 Henry Mottez dealt with looking after the second French edition of Cennini’s Book of the Art. Contrary to what has happened elsewhere, however, things unfold in this way: the text translated by Victor Mottez was maintained unaltered, as it had been derived from the Ottoboniano manuscript by Tambroni in 1821. Seventeen chapters from ML and R (in substance, translated by the Milanesi edition) were later added by Henry. It's just obvious that this is a messy solution, but the edition of 1911 was nevertheless particularly successful, resisted with various editions up to 1995, and was even translated (as we shall see) outside of France. Probably his success is due to the fact that it contains a foreword by Auguste Renoir in the form of a letter to Henry Mottez. The preface in reality will also have a life of its own and will appear in several anthologies (also Italian ones) of writings by Renoir.

Edition Victor and Henry Mottez
with a foreward by Renoir (1911)

Year 1913

Third edition in Italian 

CENNINO CENNINI

IL LIBRO DELL’ARTE

Edizione riveduta e corretta sui codici

Edited by Renzo Simi 

Place of publication: Lanciano

Publisher: R. Carabba

Other editions: 1933 (R. Carabba), 1943 (Marzocco)

Conduct on manuscript ML interpolated with R
Available on the Internet: no

The edition edited by Renzo Simi in 1933

The Simi edition is part of the series "Our Writers" of the historic publishing house Carabba. As part of the series, the editor (Rocco Carabba) aims to bring to the attention of the general public at affordable prices, works which were either hard to find or had very high price. Renzo Simi, who took charge of treating the volume of Cennini, was the son of Filadelfo Simi painter, and a painter himself. The work on Cennini was originally his graduation thesis. Simi takes advantage again of the manuscripts MR and L, in an effort to simplify; to this end, on the one hand he radically reduced many of the scholarly notes (by Tambroni and especially Milanesi) and on the other tried to simplify the readability of the text: "I was more exact in the spelling as previous editors, changing only what would make it tedious and less clear to read ... I tried an easier punctuation, I have healed a few steps which had been misunderstood "(p. 8 of the Preface). It is clear that the interest is totally oriented towards usability of text from an educational angle: the focus is on technique and transmission to new generations of the same. For the price and for the clarity of exposition, the Simi edition will be very successful. Will be reprinted in 1933, again from Carabba, and then during the Second World War (in 1943) by the publisher Marzocco of Florence. These were difficult years and probably the publisher tried to save money on everything. The reprint of 1943 appears without preface and notes. In the frontispiece there is no dating in Roman years of the fascist era anymore: July 25 1943(date of the loss of power of Benito Mussolini) had already past: "This book was printed in the August of 1943 at the Officine Grafiche Veronesi of the publisher Arnoldo Mondadori." Probably mine is just an insinuation, but I cannot help but notice that the agile, yet elegant reprint of the Book of Art falls in the same year of the death of Renzo Simi (1943 , in fact) . A pure coincidence?

Year 1916

Second edition in German

DES CENNINO CENNINI HANDBUCHLEIN DER KUNST

Edited by Willibrord Verkade 

Place of publication: Strasbourg

Publisher: Heitz

Conduct on manuscript ML interpolated with R

Available on the Internet: no

Cennino's second translation in German
by Jan (Father Willibrord) Verkade (1916)

With the second German edition, in 1916, we are confronted with a particular personality, that of the monk - painter Willibrod Verkade. Jan Verkade was a young Dutch painter who discovered Catholicism, converted and felt the vocation to the monastic life during a journey to Italy before the end of the century. Jan became monk in 1897, changed its first name in Willibrod and went to live in the Benedictine monastery of Beuron (in Germany). Beuron was famous because it expressed a very specific school of painting, particularly accentuated by the spiritual content. The members of that school (Verkade is one of them) make an intensive use of the fresco technique. It is understandable, thus, that what pushed Willibrod to translate Cennino was not the only " practical purpose " to allow his contemporaries to access and embrace the secrets of the old masters of painting on wall, but also a deep spiritual connection with Cennino’s monastic world. By way of abstraction, Cennino is considered as a monk and the workshop’s world (including teaching techniques from master to student and advising young people) is connected to the preaching of the Franciscan order. Margherita d' Ayala Valva reports that the translation of the Book of Art would have been ready since Easter 1914. Verkade translated the text without knowing about the Simi edition, and then - we presume – based himself on the text established by the Milanese. The publication of the book will eventually take place only in 1916, in the middle of the First World War. 

Year 1932

Fourth edition in Italian

CENNINO CENNINI

IL LIBRO DELL’ARTE

Edited by Daniel V. Thompson jr.

Place of publication: New Haven

Publisher: Yale University Press

Conduct on manuscript ML interpolated with R

Available on the Internet: no

The fourth edition in Italian of the Libro dell'Arte actually comes out in America, thanks to Daniel V. Thompson, supreme authority in the field of medieval cookbooks and, at the time, still young (30 years old) professor of art history and tempera painting at Yale University. Thompson opens a new kind of commentary: he is in fact supported in his text analysis by specific knowledge of chemistry, which can be used in the study of the pigments. The Italian edition, to be honest - and it is obvious that this is so – did not know any particular success in the United States; the contrary is true for the English translation, published a year later.

Year 1933

Third edition in English

CENNINO D’ANDREA CENNINI

THE CRAFTSMAN’S HANDBOOK. THE ITALIAN “IL LIBRO DELL’ARTE”

Edited by Daniel V. Thompson jr.

Place of publications: New Haven

Publisher: Yale University Press

Other editions: 1954 (Dover Publications), 1960 (Dover Publications), 2000 (Dover Publications)

Conduct on manuscript ML interpolated with R

Available on the Internet: yes

Internet address: http://www.noteaccess.com/Texts/Cennini/
See also Mark Clarke. Pentimenti : DV Thompson's reflections on his translation of Cennini

Cennino Cennini. Thompson edition 1933
(1954 reprint)

After having edited the fourth edition in Italian, Daniel V. Thompson released the following year, again with Yale University Press, the third one in English (as well as the first one originating in the United States). In the preface, he flags that the version Herringham shows inaccuracies in the understanding of the text and in the English translation of the same. The Thompson version had a great success, especially after it started to be printed by a publisher as Dover. It was reprinted on numerous occasions (surely so many, that we might have missed some of them), and still represents the most recent printed edition in the United States, where it is considered as the "final" edition. 

Year 1933

First edition in Russian language
Cennino Cennini

Книга об искусстве, или Трактат о живописи /

Kniga ob iskusstve, ili Traktat o zhivopisi

Edited by Alla Nikolaevna Luzhet︠s︡kai︠a︡ (traduzione); A. Rybnikov (commento e note)

Place of publication: Moscow

Publisher: Ogiz-Izogiz

Conduct on manuscript ML interpolated with R

Available on the Internet: yes

Internet address: http://art-con.ru/node/3922
See also: Francesco Mazzaferro. Cennino and Stalin's 'Neo-renaissance':  the Russian Translation of the "Book of the Art" (1933)

First Russian edition (1933)

Cited by Schlosser (p. 93) on a suggestion by Daniel V. Thompson, the Russian edition actually exists (the bibliographical indications were difficult to find so far, but today the Internet makes things much easier). If you dug with Russian and Cyrillic, you can also read it on the internet, otherwise you must be content to settle for the Google automatic translator, on which it is often fashionable to speak that badly, but which allowed me to understand a few things: the translation is conducted on the Milanesi edition, and the preface (and this is something that I would have expected in the Stalin era) lingers on the recovery of the "purity" of the old ways work was made, which has been lost due to the development of the capitalist mode of production. In general must be said that the Orthodox world (and it is therefore also the case of the Romanian edition Belisare) shows a particular sensitivity to Cennino’s book, because it finds it useful to better investigate the techniques of local artistic production, closely linked to the icons and the frescoes.

Year 1933

First edition in Polish 

CENNINO CENNINI

RZECZ O MALARSTWIE

Con a letter of introduction by Adolfo Venturi and an introduction by Mary Pittaluga

Edited by Samuel Tyszkiewicz (translation by Jan Zamoysky)

Place of publication: Florence

Publisher: Samuel Tyszkiewicz

Conduct on manuscript ML interpolated with R

Available on the Internet: yes

Internet address: http://polona.pl/item/8379277/6/

First Polish edition
(Firenze, 1933)

The first Polish edition of the Book of Art is also the one that has raised the biggest problems in terms of matching available information. The existence of a Polish translation was known, but the few quotes about were contradictory: some said that the place of printing was Florence (in 1933) while others claimed it was in Warsaw in 1934 (among them Schlosser, who – as well known – was very seldom wrong). Finally, thanks to the internet, we solved the mystery: there have been two editions: one in Florence in 1933 and one in Warsaw, published one year later. However, not everything is by itself fully clear, as we shall see. It may seem strange that a Polish edition is printed in Florence, among other things, with an introductory letter (on letterhead of the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy) by Adolfo Venturi (in Italian), and an introduction by Mary Pittallunga in Polish. I do not know how all of this materialised, but it is clear that a predominant role in this complex affair was played by the figure of Samuel Tyszkiewicz , who was one of the most famous printers then operating in Italy (and probably across Europe). Tyszkiewicz , while maintaining contacts with Warsaw opened in Florence a private printing press in 1925 and specialized in the publication of texts of the highest quality . Among these, in fact, the Book of the Art of Cennino Cennini, with engraved plates by renowned printmaker Pietro Parigi. We do not know, in all honesty, who conducted the translation into Polish, since no display appears. Moreover, the edition is normally cited as edited by Tyszkiewiz himself. We comply with this indication. 

ADDENDA: a few minutes before finalising this text, I learned from Adam Pawlikowski (and I thank him vey much) that more information can be found at p. 142. The translation of the work was conducted by the painter Jan Zamoysky in July 1931. The florentine edition of 1934 was printed in 200 copies only. The traduction is mostly conduct on Simi edition, having always a look at Tambroni and Milanesi ones. Summarizing: the tranaslation was made in 1931; the first edition was printed at Florence in 1933 (with the addition of Adolfo Venturi's and Pittaluga's texts and the was republished with a completely different frontcover in 1934 at Warsaw.

Year 1934

Second edition in Polish

CENNINO CENNINI

RZECZ O MALARSTWIE

rękopis z Roku Pańskiego MCCCCXXXVII przechowany w Bibljotece Laurencjańskiej we Florencji, opracowany na podstawie trzech wydań włoskich, na język polski przełożony oraz przypisami opatrzony przez typografa, wydawcę, a w stownictwie fachowem sumiennie sprawdzony dzięki współpracy malarza imć. Jana Zamoyskiego członka Bractwa św. Łukasza A.D. 1931

With a letter of introduction by Adolfo Venturi and an introduction by Mary Pittaluga

Edited by Samuel Tyszkiewicz and Jan Zamoysky

Place of publication: Warsaw

Publishers: Samuel Tyszkiewicz and Society for the Promotion of the Arts

Conduct on manuscript ML interpolated with R

Available on the Internet: yes

Internet address: http://polona.pl/item/8379439/6/

Second edition in Polish
(Warsaw, 1934)

The following year a new edition is released in Warsaw, with a completely different title page in which - as editors - appears the name of the famous Polish typographer living in Italy, but also the Society for the Promotion of the Arts. The long subtitle that appears in the frontpage clarifies some issues: the edition was prepared on the basis of three different Italian editions (I assume Tambroni, Milanesi and Simi), the curatorship is from Tyszkiewicz . The collaboration with the painter Jan Zamoyski, academic of San Luca, is quoted (but I cannot honestly understand what constitutes such collaboration). Especially, a year is reported (1931) that is not consistent with that of printing. Of course, a careful analysis of the differences between the two editions would be highly desirable (but I can not deliver, due to the ignorance of the language).

Year 1936 (?)

First edition in Romanian language

TRATATUL DE PICTURA AL LUI CENNINO CENNINI

tradus si comparat cu textele germane si franceze

Edited by Dimitrie Belisare

Place of publication: Bucarest

Printer: Tipografia Fantana Darurilor

Conduct on manuscript ML interpolated with R

Available on the Internet: yes

Internet address:

http://clublectura.ro/citeste.php?carte=Tratatul-de-pictura-al-lui-Cennino-Cennini

Cennino Cennini
Romanian edition by Dimitrie Belisare
(post 1925)

18th December 2013: Not mentioned in any of the other editions that I was able to consult, I fortunately retrieved it from the internet, where it is available. There are indeed many questions: who was Dimitrie Belisare? On which edition was conducted the translation? When was it published? It is impossible to answer all of them. In the frontpage, Dimitrie Belisare, originally from Campulung Muscel, shows off his credentials. We learn that he is an "expert painter" of the Patriarchate of Romania and the Vice - President of the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest. Of him I do not know anything more, except that - other information I could retrieve from the internet – he was still alive between 1940 and 1942, a period in which he executed several frescoes in some religious buildings of Orastie, in Transylvania. Unfortunately, the publication is not dated, and here we can only proceed by successive approximations: the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest was founded in 1921, the Patriarchate of Romania in 1925. 1925 is therefore the ‘post quem’ term for the printing of the Treaty. The title shows that the work has been translated and compared with the relevant French and German editions. Of course, if we could understand Romanian, we would probably offer more accurate information; however, the examination of the preface reveals some essential aspects: Belisare knows all previous editions, and, except for an error in the year of publication of the Ilg version, cites everything correctly. He recognizes that the Tambroni edition is incorrect and that the Milanese and Simi ones are certainly better, but it seems to feel more sympathy for the versions of Mottez father and son and of Verkade, which is the one which he considers "spiritually " closest to the origin of the writing. He decides to base himself on both translations, but we do not understand well how he did it. Surely, we see the introduction by Tambroni in the version mutilated by Mottez father. It seems likely to us that he followed the Paris edition of 1911. In the footer appear notes both from Tambroni, Bottez, Verkade and finally Belisare himself. Definitely – as it is clear from the preface - the interest of the curator is for the fresco technique. We are definitely again in the context of those "practical purposes" mentioned by Margherita d’Ayala Valva in his contribution published in 2005 in Paragone. Of another thing we are pretty sure: Belisare speaks of the Verkade edition as recently issued, and he does not quote any other following that. In particular, he does not quote the Thompson version dated 1932. For this reason, our personal opinion is that the translation dates back to the '20s or very early in the next decade.

5th January 2014: at first I had identified 1925 as a date post quem to assess the publication’s year. I think I have gained a few more elements of information from a (laborious) reading of the introduction in Romanian. In the introduction there are two pictures: one at page VII with the picture of the main church of the Monastery of Calderusani, where Belisare (always in the introduction) says he painted in 1907, at age 19; it follows that Belisare was born in 1888; a second one at page X with the image of a class at the School of Fine Arts (I cannot say where). The photo is dated 1903. Among the many pupils is also mentioned Dimitrie Belisare. At page VI the author claims to have a more than thirty year artistic experience. Now, I do not know if all the claims of Belisare can be taken for good, but it appears that the translation date must be later than 1933. In a work on Dionysius by Furna that I tracked down on the Internet, however, I found the following bibliographic citation, which displays the publication as dated 1936 : "Cennini , Tratatul de pictura , trad , de D. Belisare , Bucharest (1936) ." This is the Internet address of reference :

http://archive.org/stream/dionisieDinFurnaErminiaPicturiiBizantine/dionisieDinFurnaErminiaPicturiiBizantine_djvu.txt

  

Year 1942

First edition in Norvegian language

CENNINO CENNINI

BOKA OM KUNSTEN

Editeb by Tryggve Norum 

Place of publication: Oslo

Publisher: Johan Grund Tanum 

Conduct on manuscript ?

Available on the Internet: no

The 1942 Norwegian edition edited by Tryggve Norum  and illustrated by Terje Strand

The edition is quoted in Simona Rinaldi, Memoria della tempera dei Primitivi nelle testimonianze tecniche del Novecento (Memory of the temperature of the Primitives in the testimonies of the Twentieth century techniques) in OPD Restauro 21/2009. The occurrence was reported to me by Margherita D'Ayala Valva, whom I thank. I never expected a Norwegian edition of Cennino in full wartime. I do not know the work, but I think some questions arise spontaneously. At the time in Norway a puppet government was in power, imposed by the Nazis after the invasion of 1940. In Oslo, between April and May 1942 they held an exhibition entitled "Kunst og ukunst " that, in the wake of the famous Nazi exhibition of Monaco, 1937, brought examples of the so called "degenerate" art alongside examples of “virtuous” one. It would be important to understand whether the publication of Cennino has taken place precisely in the context of this campaign of cultural propaganda. On Tryggve Norum (1911-1987) I cannot help but report what I found on Wikipedia: he was a teacher and theatre critic, but also played incessantly an activity of translation from Italian and French; the one of Cennino seems to be the first translation of a certain level, but then the list becomes very long and ranges from Benvenuto Cellini to Balzac, but also to Guareschi. There is no evidence, however, that Norum had specific expertise in arts .

Year 1946

First edition in Czech

CENNINO CENNINI

KNIHA O UMĚNÍ STŘEDOVĚKU

Edited by F. Topinka

Place of publication: Praha

Publisher: VLADIMÍR ŽIKEŠ

Conduct on manuscript: ?

Available on the Internet: no

1946 edition in czech

Cennino's first edition after World War II is in Czech and is printed in Praha. We don't have further information. Edition found on the Internet by Francesco Mazzaferro

Year 1947

First edition in Spanish

CENNINO CENNINI

EL LIBRO DEL ARTE

Preface by Aldo Mieli. Translation by Ricardo Resta

Place of publication: Buenos Aires

Publisher: Argos

Other editions: 2008 (Editorial Maxtor)

Conduct on manuscript ?

Available on the Internet: no

First edition in Spanish:
Buenos Aires, 1947

The first Spanish-language edition of the Book of Art is actually in Argentina.It is due to the translation by Ricardo Resta. We do not know on which Italian edition it has been conducted. Nothing is known, moreover, also about the figure of the translator. A few words should be said instead of Aldo Mieli. Mieli was an Italian chemist of some notoriety, who in 1928 (a jew and socialist) moved to France for political reasons. From here he passed to Argentina in 1939, fearing the invasion of France by the Nazis. He invested most of his life in cultural and publishing initiatives at the service of history of science, and here he was probably associated to the work not only as a well-know figure in Buenos Aires’s cultural life, but also as a chemist. 

Year 1947

First edition in Swedish

CENNINO CENNINI

BOKEN OM MALARKONSTEN

Edited by Sigurd Möller

Place of publication: Goteborg

Publisher: Vinga Press

Other editions: 1986 (Vinga Press; reprint reported by Mark Clarke), 2000 (Stoccolma, Till & från förl)

Conduct on manuscript VO, with additions from ML and R

Available on the Internet: no

The first edition in Swedish of the Book of the Art is a work by Sigurd Möller. It seems reasonable to think that this was the painter Sigurd Möller (1895-1984). Once again, we would be faced (even though chronologically it would be one of the last examples) with the case of a translation made by an artist. There is a peculiarity: the translation into Swedish is made from French, and in particular the edition of Henry and Victor Mottez, 1911. Evidently Möller did not master well enough Italian. For the first translation into Swedish from Italian we will instead have to wait until 2011.

Year 1950

Second edition in Spanish

CENNINO CENNINI

TRATADO DE LA PITURA

El Libro del Arte

Edited by Francisco Pérez Dolz

Place of publication: Barcellona

Publisher: Meseguer

Other editions: 2° ed 1956 (Sucesor de E. Meseguer), 3° ed 1968, 4° ed 1979 (Sucesor de E. Meseguer), 5° ed 1988

Conduct on manuscript ?

Available on the Internet: no

Only three years passed, and a second edition of the Spanish language appeared, this time printed in the Iberian Peninsula. Translation, prologue and notes are by Francisco Pérez Dolz. We do not know anything else, but that the shabby appearance of the publication, its low price, the publication in the series "Manuals Meseguer" and the frequent reprints inducate that this is an edition with basically practical and / or educational purposes.

Year 1950
First edition in Serbo Croatian
Cenina Čeninija
TRAKTAT O SLIKARSTVU
Edited by Dragoljub Nažić
Place of Publication: Belgrade
Publisher: 1950
Conduct on the manuscript ?
Available on-line: no

Edition traced by Francesco Mazzaferro. I know very little on it. First of all, it consists of two quite short volumes. The first results to be of 51 pages and the other of 46. The cover page of the first volume refers to Cennino Cennini, Eugène Fromentin, and Rembrandt; the one of the second one only refers to Cennino. Now, it's worth opening a small parenthesis: Fromentin 's masterpiece is undoubtedly Les Maitres d'autrefois, published in France in 1875 and in Italy in 1943 with the title I maestri d'un tempo (De Silva publisher, Turin, with a preface by Mary Pittaluga). Fromentin is considered the re-discoverer of primitive Flemish and Dutch painting. In Les Maitres d'autrefois he also writes on Rembrandt (which was not a primitive, obviously). I suppose that the choice of the editor may have been to reproduce the pages written by Fromentin on Rembrandt. Two complementary texts, therefore, to Cennino, with the Italian tradition, and one on Rembrandt and the painting of Northern Europe. It would seem to express a different approach than other choices in the Orthodox world, where the focus was, if anything, the relationship between Cennino and the world of the icons of Byzantine origin. As to the language in which the work is written, in Tito's Yugoslavia was – formally – in use a joined language called Serbo-Croatian. Even if I am uncertain, I stick to this terminology in the indication on the language.

  

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