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Francesco Mazzaferro
Cennino Cennini between Europe and Japan
GO TO CENNINI PROJECT
Francesco Mazzaferro
Cennino Cennini between Europe and Japan
And why the failed attempt by Tsune Nakamura to translate the Book of Art
was not in vain, after all
was not in vain, after all
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| Rembrandt van Rjin, Self-portrait (1659) |
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| Tsune Nakamura, Self portrait wearing hat (1909) |
The Japanese terms yōga (洋画) and nihonga (日本画) can be easily misunderstood as referring to a well-known spiritual practice of Buddhist origin, which is universally known across the world. Our hero, Tsune Nakamura (中村彝, was a champion of yōga, but in quite different sense. In fact, yōga and nihonga are technical terms of the history of painting and culture in Japan. Yōga means painting with a Western (i.e. European) influence. Nihonga means painting of Japanese style. Along the last centuries, Japanese artists split among those who remained attached to their own traditional conventions, techniques and materials, and those who adventured in a cultural, and often real journey towards Europe. The dispute between the two streams was also a mark of the country’s approach vis-à-vis the rest of the world, in a broad sense, pursuing at times a policy of ‘De-asianiation’ (a term coined in an editorial of a newspaper in 1885) and refocusing at other times on its own identity.
Yōga (the painting with Western influence) became an important part of Japanese cultural life at the time of the Meij period (1868-1912), a well-known historical phase characterised by a strong impulsion to political, administrative, industrial and military modernisation. In painting an important role was played by our Antonio Fontanesi, who lived in Japan between 1876 and 1878. However, the natural magnet for Japanese painters at that time was Paris, as the birthplace of impressionism and modern art. Starting from the 1870s, it became frequent to see Japanese painters in the French capital. Vice-versa, its influence was so strong that the term ‘Paris in Japan’ became often used, and has been since then the title of several art exhibitions in Japan and around the world.
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| Auguste Renoir, Young girl bathing (1892) |
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| Tsune Nakamura
Nude girl 1914
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Tsune Nakamura’s artist production (and his activity as translator) took place in the following (and much less known) period of the Japanese history, the Taishō Period (1912-1926). This is a fifteen-year fortunate parenthesis in Japan’s history. Indeed a short period, but also Tsune had a short life (1887-1924) dying at 37 years for a lung disease which accompanied his life as from the age of 17 (also his elder brother died of tubercolosis, as reported by Sakae Ōsugi, one of the national political heroes of the Taisho period, who was a friend of him). The Taishō Period is also known as the 'age of individuality’ in Japanese art. Politically, it was a time characterized by a drive to liberalism and democracy. By then, Japan had already made important headway towards reaching its status of a global industrial and military power, but the country had not yet entered into the phase of aggressive militarism which would lead Japan, one generation later, into World War II.
Tsune was in love with France, a country of which he mastered the language, but which he however had never managed to visit, also given his precarious health conditions: a case which Goethe would have perhaps described with his term of ‘Elective affinities’. The National Museum of Modern Art of Tokio reports that the young Nakamura borrowed once a book on Renoir from a friend, under condition to return it after three days, and that he finished it after having read it almost without sleeping. A passion had exploded.
Tsune’s acquaintance with Europe was a completely intellectual exercise, with books playing a central role. The Bridgeton Museum in Tokio reports that “according to recollections by Tsune's friend Nakahara Teijiro, a sculptor, Tsune purchased a very expensive book of Rembrandt paintings at the Maruzen bookstore in about 1909 and studied it so thoroughly that the pages became grimy from repeated turning.”
Reading or consulting books is an important aspect of Tsune’s attitude towards painting. In an attempt to understand western painting in depth, he measured himself with the translation of two texts from French: the Philosophie de l’Art by Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) and the 1911 French edition of the Libro de l’arte by Cennino Cennini. An interesting combination: the first book offers a positivist interpretation of art from an aesthetics point of view, with at the centre the idea that art production is a technology; the second provides the summa of mediaeval knowledge on painting techniques.
One would imagine that Tsune opted for the translation of books having a natural link with Japan, or offering a global view of art. Interestingly, however, Taine’s main message on art is not about its universality across cultures. In Europe, in France and elsewhere Taine provided cultural arguments to growing nationalism. Moreover, his key reference to ‘race, milieu and moment’ as factors decisively shaping art implies that every culture must produce different art. In a certain sense, Taine would offer more motives supporting the nihonga than the yōga painting. Paraphrasing Taine, art in Japan should be Japanese, not Western. His concept of race, although much attenuated compared to developments only a few years after, is not usually fostering multi- cultural understanding.
Tsune’s acquaintance with Cennino Cennini is first of all a product of his love for Auguste Renoir. In his preface to the 1911 edition by Hervé Mottez – which Tsune translated – Renoir shares many of the aspects of Taine’s intellectual motives. He presents Cennino as an ‘icon of conservatism’, of an age in which art was not based on genius, but on craft and obedience, tradition, order and continuity, simplicity and manual ability (see Herbert).
How does such a conservative iconic symbolism fit with Tsune Makamura’s painting? Let us try a possible interpretation. On the one hand, Tsune is classified – as mentioned above – among the main figures of the fifteen years of the 'age of individuality’ in the Taisho Period. For him and his generation, inspiration from Europe was not simply a form of imitation, but – much to the contrary – an act of freedom in an age of unprecedented liberty in the country. On the other hand, Cennini is sometimes considered as the first author having provided for a theory of maniera (Kuhn[i]; Walter[ii]), thanks to his chapter 27, quoted below in Thompson’s translation. Here Cennino recommends every painter to inspire his own design (the essence of painting) to the way of one (and only one) master for several years (“di suo' maniera e di suo'aria”, in Tambroni’s Italian edition), before endeavoring his own way (maniera propia). The English version (using the modern term ‘way’), does not capture the ‘maniera’ concept).
How you Should Endeavor to Copy and Draw After as Few masters as Possible
Chapter XXVII
Now you must forge ahead again, so that you may pursue the course of this theory. You have made your tinted papers; the next thing is to draw. You should adopt this method. Having first practiced [p. 14] drawing for a while as I have taught you above, that is, on a little panel, take pains and pleasure in constantly copying the best things which you can find done by the hand of great masters. And if you are in a place where many good masters have been, so much the better for you. But I give you this advice: take care to select the best one every time, and the one who has the greatest reputation. And, as you go on from day to day, it will be against nature if you do not get some grasp of his style and of his spirit. For if you undertake to copy after one master today and after another one tomorrow, you will not acquire the style of either one or the other, and you will inevitably, through enthusiasm, become capricious, because each style will be distracting your mind. You will try to work in this man's way today, and in the other's tomorrow, and so you will not get either of them right. If you follow the course of one man through constant practice, your intelligence would have to be crude indeed for you not to get some nourishment from it. Then you will find, if nature has granted you any imagination at all, that you will eventually acquire a style individual to yourself, and it cannot help being good; because your hand and your mind, being always accustomed to gather flowers, would ill know how to pluck thorns.
Of Cennino’s advice, Tsune made an eclectic use. He oriented his own style to Western painting (yōga); however, he did not inspire himself to a single master, but to three: Rembrandt, Renoir, and Cezanne. Perhaps, also the interest for Taine can be understood along this line of interpretation: conceiving art as pure technique would offer an important support to the adoption of others’ techniques.
We did not have any evidence of what eventually happened with the attempt to translate Taine’s Philosophie de l’Art into Japanese, until one of our readers (Osahiro Nishihata) kindly informed us recently that it was indeed published in Japan in 1924 (the same year as the one of Tsune’s death), with a translation by Satoshi Hirose (広瀬哲士 1883-1952), a Professor of French literature at the Keio University, who also translated Flaubert into Japanese. Five editions of his translation were published since then (some of which with different publishers) between 1924 and 1946.
Also the attempt to translate Cennino Cennini was not in vain. Ms. Hisae Fujii (藤井久栄) (at that time a young critic of art, later on Senior Research Officer at the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art, Professor at the Institute of Art and Design - University of Tsukuba - and authoress of several monographs on the art of photography in Japan) found the way to finish Cennino’s translation. The Nakamura-Hisae translation of Cennino was eventually published in 1964. It was reprinted in 1976 and – electronically – in 2004. Another Japanese translation was produced in 1991 by Tsuji Shigeru (辻茂) (1930- ), author of several books and essays on Renaissance.
The Aesop moral of this story is that a youngster’s short-term sacrifice – reading a book over three days without any sleep – may have long-standing benefit for the future of many other youngsters. Eventually, every generation of Japanese art students (and Japanese artists and scholars) had a possibility to have access to a text of Cennino’s Book of the Art in its own language, easily available at the bookshop, and without the need to search for foreign language editions in public libraries. This is Tsune’s ultimate personal merit: a painter belonging to pre-war Japan in the Taishō Period, however at a time of Japanese history forerunning in many respects (in policy and culture) the world open and affluent country we all know.
Where is the rest of Asia? Researches in Asian search engines - (including not only the People’s Republic, but also Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) and Korean - have confirmed that there is no translation available – even not simply in the web – of Cennino’s Book of Art in Cantonese. The catalogues of national libraries across Far East include all English and Japanese editions, and often Italian, French, German, Russian and Polish ones. In practice, Cennino’s work is available to the larger public across Asia in English only, in particular through electronic editions which seem to be very popular there.
However, something may be moving. Recently, a dissertation for degree has been published in China by Dr. Ma Shang Cheng (马善程) (1978- ) at the Ningbo University. They include ‘The Craftman’s manual and Cennini’s narrative techniques’ (2012) and ‘Techniques and Theory – Cennini, Alberti, Leonardo, Vasari’s painting techniques and related theoretical writings’ (2013), as well as other writings on Italian art theory in the Renaissance. Ma Shang Cheng has also a webpage as artist.
The French language functioned as a cultural intermediary between Cennino and Asia, in Japan of one hundred years ago. To expand the larger public’s acquaintance with Cennino across Asia, that role can be played only by English, today. No new English translation of Cennino has come to light since the 1930s. This may also explain why Asian publishers may hesitate to follow Japan’s patterns of the last decades. As soon as new English translations will be available, one may expect Cennino will make his triumphal entry into Beijing’s Gate of Heavenly Peace.
[i] Rudolf Kuhn, Cennino Cennini, Sein Verständnis dessen, was die Kunst in der Malerei sei, und seine Lehre vom Entwurfs- und vom Werkprozeß, Zuerst gedruckt in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft vol. 36, 1991, 104 – 153 (http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/4689/1/Kuhn_Rudolf_4689.pdf)
[ii] Manuela Walter, Der Manier-Begriff in Cennino Cennini’s Libro dell‘ arte, Tübingen, 2005.
[i] Rudolf Kuhn, Cennino Cennini, Sein Verständnis dessen, was die Kunst in der Malerei sei, und seine Lehre vom Entwurfs- und vom Werkprozeß, Zuerst gedruckt in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft vol. 36, 1991, 104 – 153 (http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/4689/1/Kuhn_Rudolf_4689.pdf)
[ii] Manuela Walter, Der Manier-Begriff in Cennino Cennini’s Libro dell‘ arte, Tübingen, 2005.
Sources:
1 - On Yōga painting – resources in
the internet
·
Asian Art from mobile reference.
See http://books.google.be/books?id=NWJI4bK9kQ8C&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr#v=onepage&q&f=false
·
Four Stories : Paths to Japanese
Modern Art - Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art. See: http://kawamura-museum.dic.co.jp/en/exhibition/200906_fourStories.html
·
Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of
Eastern and Western Art, University of California press, 1989. See: http://books.google.be/books?id=PMFwC1gP0BkC&pg=PA303&dq=%E2%80%9Cnakamura+tsune%E2%80%9D&hl=fr&sa=X&ei=w9TXUva6DevI0AWAiYGQAg&ved=0CEoQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9Cnakamura%20tsune%E2%80%9D&f=false
·
Taisho Period, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taish%C5%8D_period
·
Shūji Takashina, J. Thomas
Rimer, Gerald D. Bolas, Paris in Japan: the Japanese encounter with European
painting, Japan House Gallery, Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, Japan
Foundation, 1987 - 287 pages. See http://books.google.be/books?id=2tnqAAAAMAAJ&q=%E2%80%9Cnakamura+tsune%E2%80%9D&dq=%E2%80%9Cnakamura+tsune%E2%80%9D&hl=fr&sa=X&ei=w9TXUva6DevI0AWAiYGQAg&ved=0CFcQ6AEwBQ
·
Yōga (art), Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga_(art)
2 - On Tsune Nakamura – resources in the internet:
·
National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Art of Modern
Europe and Japan: looking across, Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, 1996 -
267 pages, see page 202 (in Japanese). 交差するまなざし:ヨーロッパと近代日本の美術 ・国立西洋美術館所藏作品 東京国立近代美術館, 1996 - 267 pages. See http://books.google.be/books?id=GYfrAAAAMAAJ&q=%E2%80%9Cnakamura+tsune%E2%80%9D&dq=%E2%80%9Cnakamura+tsune%E2%80%9D&hl=fr&sa=X&ei=TNXXUojtCKqm0wWK_oCYAg&ved=0CFIQ6AEwBTgU
·
Sakae Ōsugi, The Autobiography of Ōsugi Sakae, University of
California Press, 1992, p. 68
·
Self-portrait wearing hat, Bridgetone Museum, See: http://www.bridgestone-museum.gr.jp/en/collection/works/140/
3 - On Renoir and Taine:
On the letter of Auguste Renoir to Henry Mottez,
published as preface to the French translation of the Libro dell’arte of 1911, and three
previously unknown draft versions of it, see
Robert L. Herbert, Nature's Workshop: Renoir's Writings on the
Decorative Arts, Chapter 3: Renoir and Cennino Cennini, pages 41-62, Yale
University Press, 2000. See http://books.google.it/books?id=APNSZ7tyf8UC&printsec=frontcover&hl=it#v=onepage&q&f=false
The text of the Philosophie de l’Art by Hippolyte Taine
is available in different formats at https://archive.org/details/philosophiedelar00tainuoft
or http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206166p.
On a political reading of Taine, see R. A. Jones, Taine
and the nationalists, The social and political ideas of some representative
thinkers of the Victorian Age : a series of lectures delivered at King's
College University of London during the session 1931-32. - London [u.a.] :
Harrap. - 1933, S. 222-250. Available in different formats at http://archive.org/stream/social00inhear/social00inhear_djvu.txt
and http://archive.org/stream/socialpoliticvictor00hear#page/222/mode/2up
4 - On Tune’s translation of Cennino
and Taine
Funaki, Rikiei – The conundrum of texts under
translation by Tsue Nakamure: the Philosophy of Art and the Book of Art by
Cennino Cennini, in "Ibarakiken Kindai Bijyutukan Kenkyu Kiyo", 12, pp1-26,
ill: 14 tables. (2005) (in Japanese)
舟木力英: 中村彝の訳稿問題―テーヌの『藝術の哲学』とチェンニーニの『藝術の書』 『茨城県近代美術館
研究紀要』 （茨城県近代美術館） 12p 1-26,図版 14枚 (2005)
Tsukuba Museum of Art, Ibaraki - Commentaries of the
Director of the museum, Funaki Rikiei – On the secrets of two translations by
Tsune Nakamure(in Japanese)
(舟木力英） 通信 No.10 （2008.5.11）中村彝、文字原稿の秘密 ― リンクする二つの翻訳原稿 中村彝がテーヌの『藝術の哲学』を翻訳した原稿が3分冊になって茨城県近代美術館に残されている。
5 – Recent Chinese studies by Ma Shang
Cheng
Ma Shan Cheng: "The Craftsman’s Book" mode and Cennini’s narrative techniques,
(in Chinese), published in ‘New Art’ (新美术), China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, No 6, 2012 See: http://www.cnki.com.cn/Article/CJFDTotal-XMSH201206007.htm 马善程 《艺匠手册》的叙述模式与琴尼尼的技法观
Ma Shan Cheng : Techniques and theory - Cennini, Alberti, Leonardo, Vasari’s painting techniques and related theoretical writings, University Dissertation, Nanjing Normal University, 2013 (in Chinese). See: http://cdmd.cnki.com.cn/Article/CDMD-10319-1013339377.htm 马善程 技法与理论
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Ma Shan Cheng : Techniques and theory - Cennini, Alberti, Leonardo, Vasari’s painting techniques and related theoretical writings, University Dissertation, Nanjing Normal University, 2013 (in Chinese). See: http://cdmd.cnki.com.cn/Article/CDMD-10319-1013339377.htm 马善程 技法与理论
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