Giovanni Mazzaferro, The 'Book of the Art' by Cennino Cennini (1821-1950): An Example of Dissemination of Italian culture in the World. Part Three

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro

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Giovanni Mazzaferro
The Book of the Art by Cennino Cennini (1821-1950): An Example of Dissemination of Italian Culture in the World
Part Three

extract from
Zibaldone. Estudios italianos de la Torre del Virrey vol III, numero 1, gennaio 2015

Mariotto di Nardo (?). Frescoes of the Chapel of St. Nicholas, Santa Maria Novella, Florence

This essay has been published in Italian in the online magazine Zibaldone. Estudios italianos de la Torre del Virrey with the title "Il Libro dell'Arte di Cennino Cennini (1821-1950): un esempio di diffusione della cultura italiana nel mondo" (issue 1/2015). A pdf version (in Italian) is available here.

We're publishing below the English translation, in three parts.

Go back to Part One

Between the two great wars: Cennino around the world. World War I wipes out the world of Art Nouveau. Yet Cennino, after a decade of substantial silence, comes back to live and is spread again, following sometimes unexpected paths. Of course, the spiritual inspiration is lost, while the technical-scientific interest for the text increases. We do not have here time and opportunity to follow the many streams of dissemination that suddenly resurface around the world. We must however point out that, even before 1924, a Japanese edition is edited by Nakamura Tsune (unfortunately, the edition will be printed only after forty years); [38] and, going in chronological order, we must mention two Polish editions (1933 and 1934), [39] a Romanian one (1936?) [40] and one in Norwegian even during the Second World War (1942). [41]

The Japanese edition of the Book of the Art

The first page of the Book of the Art in the 1934 edition by Samuel Tyszkiewicz,
exhibited at the Historical Museum of Warsaw in 2009.
You can see the woodcuts used to print the xylographic frame, designed according to Renaissance models

The Romanian edition of the Book of the Art

I would like however to focus here on two contemporary editions, expression of two totally poled apart worlds: the American and the Russian ones of 1933.

Daniel Varney Thompson is the translator of the third English edition (the first in the United States) of the Book of Art. 

Daniel Varney Thompson

His study of the text is done directly on the manuscripts. In 1932 he publishes a new Italian version of Cennino’s work (the fourth, after Tambroni, Milanesi and Simi); the year after, he produces his English translation. [42] Thompson is, since 1926, university professor of History of Art and Tempera Painting at Yale. His text clearly has a didactic and popular footprint: "... I have tried in my translation to give first place wherever possible to the convenience of the student and practicing painter". [43] It is, in my opinion, the best translation of the text in another language. More than forty years later, Thompson made some observations on his youth effort, considerations which, fortunately, have been conserved through some recordings. Here I shall not propose them. But there is an awareness, which I have not found in any other previous or next translator. When one is faced with a text like the one of Cennino, he writes, the question which the translator has to cope with is twofold: on the one hand, to allow the reader to save the time that he would otherwise spend to consult a dictionary; on the other one (and long before) to understand and verify experimentally the recipes exhibited by the author. Thompson says, "I could summarize the difficulties [note of the editor: I have encountered in translating Cennini] by saying that normally it is not very difficult to translate accurately what you know that an author wants to say. But if you do not know, you end up committing the errors that I did." [44] Hard to disagree with him.

The Russian edition is translated by Alla Nicolaevna Luzhetskaya, with a commentary by Аleksey Aleksandrovich Rybnikov. [45] 

The Russian edition of the Book of the Art

We are in the years of the Stalinist regime. To mention it allows me to refer to a very interesting aspect, namely the policy pursued by the regime through the translation of the Renaissance treatises and, more generally, of the great classics of art history. To be clear, it is certainly not an enlightened policy. But we are faced with yet another attempt to revive, after Rome and Byzantium, the myth of the 'Third Rome' (a commonplace, which actually was not the exclusive monopoly of dictatorships: even in Victorian London there was a talk of "Third Rome"). To improve the level of Russian artists and architects, it is essential, in fact, to produce the translations. Of course, all works according to the methods of the most severe Stalinism: between 1933 and 1941 the second and third five-year plans of the regime stipulate that all Renaissance treaties on architecture shall be translated into Russian; other texts are added, such as the De Pictura of Leon Battista Alberti. Indeed, to our knowledge, the Book of the Art by Cennino is not one of the works to be compulsorily translated, but there is no doubt that the publication should be inserted in this climate of mandatory (or unspontaneous) publications. Limiting itself to the mere examination of the introductory sections, the translation, conducted by Ms Luzhetskaya on the basis of the Milanesi edition, could well be that of a democratic country. Where the 'Soviet' interpretation by Cennino becomes evident is the introduction of Rybnikov (the impact of capitalism on the separation between science and art, the reduction of artistic production in pure trade following the changed modes of production), however without reaching the propaganda levels well known in other circumstances.

Until 1950. Strangely (and perhaps for random reasons), in the five years following the Second World War numerous translations of Cennino’s treatise are edited. I am omitting (also because I did not have the opportunity to examine them) the first edition in Czech (1946), [46] the first in Sweden (1947) [47] and the one in the Serbian-Croatian (1950). [48] 

The Czech edition of the Book of the Art

The Serbo-Croatian edition of the Book of the Art

In fact, it seemed appropriate to extend the analysis up to 1950 because it is in the narrow bounds of these years that are published the first two editions in Spanish, to my knowledge conceived independently the one from the other (but with caveats that I shall mention). Spain, let us face it, was the big absent in the editions of Cennino’s Treaty. The isolation in which the Spanish text will find itself in those years and in the following decades is witnessed by an obvious fact: none of the later editions (whether Italian or not) cited the Spanish translations in the bibliography.

The first edition in Spanish of the Book of Art does not actually appear in Spain. It is published in Buenos Aires in 1947 with a preface by Aldo Mieli and a translation of Ricardo Resta. [49] 

The first Spanish edition of the Book of the Art

I do not think that there is someone who may have experienced the tragedies of the twentieth century more than Aldo Mieli, university professor and historian of Italian science with a boundless culture, escaped from Italy to France in 1928 because socialist; then fleeing from France to Argentina in 1939 because conscious of the Nazi threat (he was also Jew); and finally deprived of the opportunity to pursue his university studies by the 1943 pro-fascist coup in Argentine. Yet, Mieli was a worldwide known personality. He founded and directed Archeion, at the time a famous journal of the History of Science (Daniel V. Thompson, the translator of the American edition of 1933, had written several times in it). In 1947, Mieli is a man who is reduced in absolute poverty and ill. Likely, he survives writing texts accompanying the classics of Italian culture, which in Argentina have their own market, a bit for the extraordinary high number of Italian immigrants, and a bit because in those years the community of political refugees is very large. The pair Mieli-Resta had specialized in art of history sources. In 1946 they published the Divine Proportion by Luca Pacioli; in 1947, indeed, the Book of the Art by Cennino Cennini (based on the Simi edition). To be noted (we will see why) that Mieli and Resta write for publishers (Argos and Losada) which are managed and owned by Italian refugees and, above all, by émigrés from the Spanish Civil War.

In reality, though published later (in 1950), the second Spanish edition, edited by Francisco Pérez-Dolz seems to have been completed earlier than that of Mieli, as the preface is dated "Summer 1945". [50] 

The second Spanish edition of the Book of the Art

All I know on Francisco Pérez-Dolz is taken from the (very simple and pleasant) website that was dedicated to him by family members. [51] The artist is defined as ‘a renaissance man in the twentieth century', meaning by that statement that it was a very educated person and versatile; indeed, among his many writings, are to be found not only works dedicated to the art (and in particular on the artistic techniques and the colour theory) but also texts of literature, music and theatre. Pérez-Dolz long lived in Barcelona, ​​where he taught art history at the local Academy, of which he was also secretary. His edition of Cennino, based on the version of Renzo Simi, is absolutely nice. His introduction fits perfectly in the Art Nouveau climate of which we saw the versions published in the 1910s were impregnated. We are back to the principle of the priesthood of the art, the pursuit of the spirit of truth, a spirit that has vanished because we have lost the moral conscience: "This book by Cennino Cennini entirely breathes of this truth, the goodness of the robust and healthy things of craft, of the rectitude of intention, all virtues - among others of a different order ­- glowing in the ancient works and later centuries, until the time when the "illustration" taught men to counterfeit things, i.e., to counterfeit themselves". [52]

I do not have the faintest idea why the treatise, prepared in 1944, was printed in 1950. An entirely provisional and easily disprovable hypothesis could be this: Cennino is printed in Argentina in 1947 by a socialist (Mieli) and by a publisher who is headed by exiles from the civil war. An uncomfortable circumstance for the Spanish regime, especially if some copies had begun to circulate in the Iberian Peninsula (and the fact that - ultimately - it is a recipe book could arouse the interest of Spanish artists). Hence the push to defuse the Argentine edition and to get a Spanish one, welcome to the authorities. It might be the case of the Pérez-Dolz edition.

But we are only formulating hypotheses. What is certain is that the translation of the Spanish artist was published (like many of his texts) by Meseguer publisher in Barcelona in 1950, as part of the Manuales Meseguer series (to emphasize its practical nature). I do not exclude that it may have been the subject of study in academic teaching, given that it was printed at least four times: in 1950, in 1956, in 1968 and 1979. What is certain is that the reputation of the effort by Francisco Pérez-Dolz remained confined to Spain alone, and that since 1988 a new edition is present on the Iberian market, which is the literal translation (including the introduction) of the Italian edition of 1971 by Franco Brunello.

NOTES

[38] C. Cennini, Libro dell’Arte, edited by Nakamura Tsune, 1964.

[39] C. Cennini, Rzecz o Malarstwie, Firenze, 1933 and C. Cennini, Rzecz o Malarstwie, Warsaw, 1934. Both versions are edited by Samuel Tyszkiewicz. Please refer to Francesco Mazzaferro, Florence - Warsaw, 1931 - 1934: Jan Zamoyski, Samuel Tyszkiewicz and a collective translation of Cennino Cennini's Book of the Art into Polish.

[40] C. Cennini, Tratatul de Pictura al lui Cennino Cennini, edited by D. Belisarie, Bucarest, 1936 (?).

[41] C. Cennini, Boka om Kunsten, edited by T. Norum, Oslo, 1942.

[42] C. Cennini, Il Libro dell’Arte, edited by Daniel V. Thompson, New Haven, 1932; C. Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook. The Italian “Il Libro dell’Arte”, edited by Daniel V. Thompson, New Haven, 1933.

[43] C. Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook…, Thompson edition…cit. , p. XIII.

[44] Please refer to M. Clarke, Mark Clarke. Pentimenti: DV Thompson's reflections on his translation of Cennini.

[45] C. Cennini, Kniga ob iskusstve, ili Traktat o zhivopisi, edited by Alla Nikolaevna Luzhet︠s︡kai︠a︡ e A. Rybnikov, Moscow, 1933. Please refer to Francesco Mazzaferro, Cennino and Stalin's 'Neo-renaissance': the Russian Translation of the "Book of the Art"(1933).

[46] C. Cennini, Kniha o Umĕni Středovĕku, edited by F. Topinka, Prague, 1946.

[47] C. Cennini, Boken om Malarkonsten, edited by S. Möller, Goteborg, 1947.

[48] C. Cennini, Traktat o Slikarstvu, edited by D. Nažić, Belgrad, 1950.

[49] C. Cennini, El Libro del Arte, edited by A. Mieli e R. Resta, Buenos Aires, 1947. Please refer to Giovanni Mazzaferro, The first Spanish translation of the Book of Art by Cennino Cennini: a small Italian-Argentine miracle

[50] C. Cennini, Tratado de la Pintura (El Libro del Arte), edited by F. Pérez-Dolz, Barcelona, 1950.

[51]See http://www.perez-dolz.org/.

[52] C. Cennini, Tratado de la Pintura… quoted, p. 9.