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lunedì 25 gennaio 2016

Cennino Cennini: a modern or a traditionalist? An essay by Peter Seiler on the relations between Cennini and Giotto


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Cennino Cennini: a modern or a traditionalist?
An essay by Peter Seiler on the relations between Cennini and Giotto

Giotto – das unerreichte Vorbild? Elemente antiker imitatio auctorum-Lehren in Cennino Cenninis Libro dell’Arte

Published in: Ursula Rombach e Peter Seiler, Imitation als Transformation: Theorie und Praxis der Antikennachahmung in der frühen Neuzeit, Petersberg, Imhof Verlag, 2012, 173 pagine, pp. 44-86

(review by Francesco Mazzaferro)


Fig. 1) The poster of the conference "Imitation as transformation", curated by Peter Seiler and held in Berlin in April 2008


Have a look at the 'Cennini Project'!

Scholars of Cennino Cennini in the German-speaking world have often debated on whether the artist should be considered a modern or a traditionalist; therefore whether the Book of the Art should be read as the testimony of a personality that was fully aligned with the  tumultuous changes of his time, had an active part in the humanistic revolution and pre-announced the findings of the early Renaissance, or as the manifesto of a conservative author, who stubbornly rejected new developments, remained anchored to Giotto’s world and perhaps even believed that the peak of art had been already achieved with Giotto and would never be equaled. The textual references that fueled the discussion, contained in the first chapter of the Book, are famous: "And this Giotto translated the art of painting from Greek into Latin and put it into a modern idiom, and he was more accomplished at this art than anyone else has ever been" (translation by Lara Broecke). The phrase can in fact be interpreted in two ways. In the first sense: since Giotto there has been a revolution in the art, which was due to the modernization that he brought to it and in particular to the transition from the art of Byzantine style to that of western style. In the second sense: the art of Giotto has no longer been equaled by anyone, since he is the only one that has managed to offer a synthesis of different traditions, those of the past (Greek) and the local ones (Latin).

These are, of course, two very different readings from each other. Peter Seiler, a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin, working at the Institute of History of Art and Image, and the author of the essay we are reviewing (‘Giotto – das unerreichte Vorbild? Elemente antiker imitatio auctorum-Lehren in Cennino Cenninis Libro dell’Arte’), ends up rejecting them both. In his view, the 'modernist' thesis (which sees its main representative in Lionello Venturi, with an essay of 1925 [1]) is completely far-fetched: it is the result of a completely decontextualized reading of a sentence, which has been given an altogether improbable meaning for the personality of the author. As Cennino was most probably a traditionalist, the latter interpretation may perhaps be more likely. If so, one could read the book as a celebration of the art of Giotto, understood as the unreachable culmination of art. But ultimately this is also a reconstruction with the benefit of insight, which according to Seiler does not capture the full truth. Cennino Cennini - Seiler writes – lacked any critical capacity to think about art in terms of history and evolution of styles. The conclusion is that many of the concepts used by Cennino ('style', 'manner', 'imitation'), which were often seen as the first flowering of artistic terminology of the early Renaissance, should instead be interpreted in a different sense, confirming the nature of Cennini’s writing as a purely technical (and not theoretical) piece on art as craftsmanship.

All in all, Seiler takes the same view as Albert Ilg (with his introduction to the first German translation published in Vienna in 1871 [2]) who considered Cennini a failed artist, heir of an art now devoid of any creative capacity, and (more than a hundred years later) as Rudolf Kuhn in Munich, who did not recognize Cennino any ability to be a theorist of pictorial composition, capacity instead attributed to Leon Battista Alberti [3]. The other school in the German world is based on the earliest writings on the subject of Julius von Schlosser, drawn up in Vienna in 1914 and then included in his masterpiece treatise on Kunstliteratur (Art literature) of 1924; Cennini is here seen as the inventor of modern pictorial language. Cennino was perceived as a forerunner of modernity also by Jan Verkade, with his second German translation published in Strasbourg, then still a part of the German Empire, in 1916 [4]. More recently, this was the main thesis of the exhibition catalogue on Cennino Cennini, held in Berlin and organized by Wolf-Dietrich Löhr and Stefan Weppelmann [5]. The German capital seems to currently host two diverging schools of thought on the subject.


Fig. 2) The 2012 volume of Rombach and Seiler

Seiler’s essay, a rich and dense 43 page text, published in small fonts, with the addition of almost three hundred notes and an extensive bibliography, has a complex title, difficult to be translated in other languages: "Giotto – das unerreichte Vorbild? Elemente antiker imitatio auctorum-Lehren in Cennino Cenninis Libro dell’Arte". The title uses one of the typical rhetorical devices of German academic language: often the main theme of the writing is placed in dubitative terms as a question, in order to examine the various arguments for and against a given thesis, and in most cases to reject it. The English literal translation is: "Giotto: A never equaled model? Elements of the ancient doctrine of the imitation of authors in the Book of the art by Cennino Cennini."

Peter Seiler is one of the promoters of a vast interdisciplinary research program involving the collaboration of several institutions, including two universities in Berlin (Humboldt University and Free University of Berlin), the local Max Planck Institute and the State Museums of Berlin. The title of the project (started in 2008) is "The transformations of the antique"; the purpose is to investigate how much of the identity of every age, including today times, depends on a process of imitation and at the same time transformation of the image of the past; for this purpose are used interdisciplinary instruments, including art history. The most tangible result of the program is the publication, to date, of 34 volumes as part of a series that is precisely entitled "Transformations of the antique". [6] Seiler's essay is contained in the book “Imitatio als Transformation. Theorie und Praxis der Antikennachahmung in der frühen Neuzeit” [7], published by Ursula Rombach and Peter Seiler in 2012. The English translation is "Imitatio as transformation. Theory and practice of imitation of the antique in the first modern times."


The theoretical framework

Considering the theme of imitation in aesthetic theory, Seiler distinguishes between 'imitation of nature' and 'imitation of the authors'. In the first case, artists imitate the forms which are directly observable in nature; in the second case, they mimic the style of other authors. Implicitly, the second form is considered superior, because it allows the artist, as a creator, to 'beat' nature.

The first type of imitation goes back to the Aristotelian observation that art imitates nature and is constantly reflected in the writings of art literature, but also among philosophers, writers and poets, throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages. The theme is of course also present in Cennini, particularly in Chapter 28, which explains that the imitation of nature is the main way to achieve excellence. Hereafter is the text quoted in the recent version by Lara Broecke: "Pay attention to the fact that the triumphal gateway of copying from life is the most perfect guide and best helm that one can have. And this comes before all the other models. And always find a haven beneath this with an eager heart, especially when you develop a feeling for drawing. Make sure that every day, without a break, you draw at least something (since it could not be so little that it would not be plenty) and you will become very accomplished for it."

The second type (the imitatio auctorum referred to in the title of the essay by Seiler) identifies the model for the artist (here understood in the broadest sense, including literates) not in the direct observation of nature, but in the reproduction of the work of earlier artists (and authors). This second type of imitation continues to be common in the references to literary works (writers, poets, scholars of rhetoric continually make reference to literary or philosophical or rhetorical works of the Greek and Latin world), but disappears completely in the world of fine arts after the end of Greek-Latin antiquity. Seiler recalls that even Leon Battista Alberti noticed with astonishment this absence in the prologue to the De Pictura. References to imitation of the works of art of the ancient model, as a model for contemporary art, did not yet appear in art literature in 1300, remained a rarity in 1400 (the exception being the definition of Donatello by Cristoforer Landino as 'great imitator of the ancients') and rather spread only in 1500, as noted by Erwin Panofsky [8]. The only possible exception was made up by Cennino Cennini, and in particular by his exhortation to young artists to imitate the 'maniere' of the best masters, in chapter 27 of the Book of Art. Hence the question whether Cennino witnesses the existence in 1300 of a theoretical tradition on imitation of the works of the artists, now lost; or whether he is even the first to adapt the model of rhetoric (that imitatio auctorum, that had remained alive for literary work) to the fine arts; and finally whether the apprentice painter had to imitate only the works of art of his master (whoever he was), or he could also include the works of Giotto and the Giottesque painters, or even those of antiquity classic.

Here is Chapter 27, in Lara Broecke’s translation: "How you should contrive to copy and draw after as few masters as possible. But you need to press ahead so that you can press on along the path of this discipline. You have made your prepared papers: it is time to draw. This is the way you should do it: once you have got used to drawing for a while in the way that I described to you above (that is, on a tablet), strive and delight always to copy the best things that you can find, made by the hand of great masters. And if you are in a place where there have been many good masters, so much the better for you. But I give you this advice: be careful always to pick out the best and the one that has the best reputation. And if, day in day out, you follow one like that it will be odd if nothing of his style and manner rubs off on you. However, if you decide to copy this master today and that tomorrow you will get the style of neither the one nor the other, and you will not be able to avoid getting into a muddle because you love to have every style tugging at your sympathies: now you want to do it in the style of this artist, tomorrow in the style of some other, and as a result you will not get any of them properly. If you follow the path of one, by continuous practice your mind would be completely flabby not to get some fodder from it. You will then find, if nature has endowed you with a modicum of imagination, that you will end up taking on a style all of your own and it cannot but be good because, if you mind is used to picking only flowers, your hand would not know how to grasp a thorn. ''

According to Seiler, interpreting the chapter as if it prescribed a rule, according to which any painter must imitate only one master, and in particular the best one of his time, creating an exclusive canon of reference for all the artists of an era, would stretch the intentions of Cennini. Paragraph 27 in fact explicitly excludes those artists who operate in a large artistic center (such as Florence and Padua) and explicitly urges them (in this case) to try different models, searching the best works of the great masters. Chapter 122 even includes an invitation to be inspired by other masters, "and you can copy and look at things done by other good masters, there is no shame for you in that." The recommendation to avoid any excessive eclecticism is therefore not a general rule, but it seems a pure teaching advice, mainly addressed to those painters who live in smaller municipalities, where it probably would be more difficult to find alternative models that would merit being considered a reference point for an artist.


Cennino and the antique

Seiler observes that the Book of the Art contains no mention of artists or works of art of the ancient world (as we already said, this was the rule in those years). There are only two indirect references to ancient art [9], in years where the rediscovery of the antique was a fundamental theme of the new humanist world (think of the statement of Leon Battista Alberti, who, only a few decades later, says he wanted to establish his De Pictura on the foundations of ancient times). On the contrary, the Book includes frequent references to religion (the Trinity, the Virgin Mary, the saints). Seiler hypothesizes that this may have two reasons. On the one hand, Cennino probably frequented a very traditionalist and conservative milieu, perhaps related to an ecclesiastical world that did not look with favour to the growing interest in the ancient pagan world. On the other hand, he did not possess a sufficient level of education to make specific use of textual sources of Greek and Latin. For these reasons Seiler strongly doubts Cennino had read Horace. The comparison between painting and poetry, which is also stated at the beginning of the Book, originates from him. However, Seiler does not exclude that, despite not having had access to the texts of the ancient Greek and Latin world, Cennino used written sources on art techniques and colors - probably medieval compendia - that he could find in monasteries. The statement, contained in paragraph 63, that Cennino had drawn the knowledge to compose the treatise exclusively from teaching at Agnolo Gaddi’s and from his own experiences as a painter, is not considered credible. Seiler also believes it possible that in many cases Cennino has also benefited from oral sources, again through contacts with members of monastic orders. Much less likely, in his opinion, are iterations with humanist circles in Florence and Padua, as we shall see.


Fig. 3) Giotto, Mourning over the Dead Christ - Padua, Scrovegni Chapel, 1303-1305

Fig 5) Cennino Cennini, Birth of Mary, Town Museum, Colle Val d'Elsa
Source: Museum Bozar, Brussels, http://www.bozar.be/dbfiles/pfile/201410/pfile254528_activity14090.jpg

Cennino and Giotto

To the contrary, the cultural references to the age of Giotto are very frequent. Giotto was born one hundred years before Cennino, and was active in Padua probably exactly one century before his stay in the same town. Thus, the Giotto era represented for Cennino a long-gone period, but still sufficiently influential to elicit awe and respect, and therefore justify imitation. Does this therefore means that Cennino inaugurates a new paradigm, no longer recommending artists to imitate ancient artists but always and only Giotto?

The relationship between Cennino and Giotto is at the center of Seiler’s essay. It is known that Cennino proclaims with great pride that he belongs to a school of art that originated from Giotto and was continued by Taddeo and Agnolo Gaddi. Already the first few lines of the text explain that the book was "... devised and compiled … in honour of Giotto, of Taddeo and of Agnolo" (translation by Lara Broecke). In the same chapter follow the aforementioned lines on the role of Giotto, from which originates the question if Cennino considers Giotto the starting point of a process of modernization of the art, or the no longer reached pinnacle of art itself.

However, Seiler wants to highlight some critical aspects. First, he notes that, in the literature of Cennino’s time, it was obvious that the authors of treatises on rhetoric and poetry invited students to compete directly with the works of the leaders of those disciplines (think of the role that was always attributed to Cicero as a model for rhetoric). Nowhere in the Book, on the contrary, does the treatise require that the apprentice painter must learn drawing or painting by copying the works of Giotto; Cennino did not even invite the painters who already finished their training and were now operating independently to use Giotto’s masterpieces as a benchmark. The reference to Giotto in the first pages of the Book does not intend to raise him to new art canon, but rather aims to use his reputation in order to validate the pages of Cennino as the latest manifestation of his school, one hundred years from the artist’s stay in the locations where the treaty was drafted.

The reference to Greek and Latin art must be reinterpreted too, in the light of Cennino’s coordinates. The author of the Book lacks the idea that artists can develop their own aesthetic system, in the modern sense of a personal art style; he considers painting as a complex manual task, requiring mastery of different skills, but not as the expression of an independent idea of art. So Cennini cannot refer, in Seiler’s view, to the ‘Latin’ and ‘Greek’ art as two different art styles, justified by their aesthetic systems which would be opposed to each other (either the hieratic Byzantine art or the naturalist Western art). The expression "he translated the art of painting from Greek into Latin and put it into a modern idiom" must therefore be read differently, even with reference to similar expressions in Ghiberti and Boccaccio, without giving a pejorative meaning to the tradition, whether Greek or Byzantine. Giotto is praised as the one who forwarded the traditional (Greek) know-how to the (Latin) artists of his day, while updating it.


Cennino and his time

The issue may be discussed in two different connotations. The first is the relationship between Cennino and the art of his time. The second is that of the relationship between Cennino and the intellectuals of his time, i.e the humanists.

On the first point, Seiler asked whether Cennino’s statements on Giotto’s “accomplished art" (and even “more accomplished” that any other art) even want to indicate that the painters have to reproduce the art of Giotto, but not the Giottesque art that followed, and of which Cennino was direct apprentice. In fact, critical accents vis-à-vis Taddeo Gaddi (the first student of Giotto) are not missing in the Book. Cennino writes that his son Agnolo (i.e. his teacher) ‘painted in a much more beautiful and fresh way than his father, Taddeo, did”, as stated in Chapter 67 (translation by Lara Broecke). Therefore, it looks like if he wanted to take a critical distance against the art of the immediately preceding decades. Moreover, Cennino can not have ignored that many authors of his era had implicitly or explicitly expressed criticism on the art of Giottesque painters. In particular Filippo Villani (although he had sung the praises of Taddeo) had compared them to the rivulets (rivuli) with respect to the role of Giotto, who had been the source (fons) of a new art capable of imitating nature. Sacchetti, in his Novella 136, gives even the word to Taddeo Gaddi for him to say that art is in full decay since Giotto: "For certain, some very talented painters existed and they painted in a form which cannot be replicated by human beings; but this art has disappeared and is missing every day."

Yet, Seiler hesitates again to attribute to Cennino the critical skills of an art historian. He believes that, at the end, Cennino simply wants to defend the tradition of Giotto as a pure form of legitimization of his own knowledge, without mentioning any other art form, but also without calling the ability of the Giottesque into question to achieve the aesthetic results of the teacher.

It must be said however, in this regard, that a scholar like Miklos Boskovits concluded, to the contrary, that Cennino was an innovator of classic Giottism in an 'expressionist' direction, and would therefore no longer be a follower of Giotto. This shows how, in the case of Cennino, the interpretation of some key lines of the Book of the Art is linked to personal and interpretive criteria which can give very different results.

Much has been discussed on the second issue, namely whether Cennino has been part of the humanist circles in Florence and Padua. To the relations between Cennino and the humanists in Florence is dedicated a beautiful essay by Wolf-Dietrich Löhr in the catalogue of the exhibition in Berlin [10], which concluded that Cennino was a highly cultivated artist, and that he had reached Padua being already part of the Florentine humanist circles. In his recent new English version of the Book of Art, Lara Broecke argues that Cennino was completely plunged in that environment during his presence at the court of Carrara, between 1300 and 1400, to the point of conceiving the work as a attempt of self-promotion, aimed essentially to compete with other personalities of that milieu [11].

As I have already noted, Seiler has a very different opinion. In fact, his essay comes to the conclusion that the parallels between the Tuscan painter and intellectuals of his time are very risky. Cennino was raised at the Gaddi’s workshop, and therefore not only in the heart of the Tuscan artistic culture, but also in very close circles to Filippo Villani. As mentioned above, Villani had in fact made the praises of Taddeo Gaddi. It is also proven that Angelo Gaddi, a nephew of Taddeo, possessed a manuscript copy of the Liber de origine civitatis. Seiler observes that, despite occasional references to Villani, "it is surprising that the statements of Villani did not find a more pronounced echo" in the Book. "The critical distance of Cennini from humanistic circles offers the most obvious explanation."

The Berlin catalogue of 2008 also focused on the relationship between Cennino and the humanist Pier Paolo Vergerio, counting on a tradition of studies in this regard. The issue is important, because both Vergerius and Cennino operated in Padua in the same years, although there is no evidence that they knew each other. In fact, some scholars [12] - explains Seiler - drew a parallel between the aforementioned chapter 27 of the Book of the Art and the passage in a letter of Vergerius to Lodovico Buzzacarino dated 1396. In both texts, the authors advise young people to identify a single master and to follow his work; in the letter of Vergerius there is an explicit reference to Giotto for painting. On the basis of that parallel, one can believe that, at the court of Padua, Giotto was universally assumed to be the only source to be imitated in those years. This would therefore be the first form of imitatio auctorum in the history of art of modern times.

This interpretation seems excessive to the scholar from Berlin. Vergerius - Seiler explains - simply intended to contradict Seneca, who had proclaimed an eclectic thesis and had proposed, in the Moral Letters,  that the poets would owe to derive inspiration from the largest possible number of literary sources, such as a bee collects nectar landing on any flower. Vergerius, instead, had recommended, for rhetoric, to always adapt to Cicero and, for art, to study the pictures of the best artists, but then only and always to follow the example of Giotto. Seneca, Vergerius and Cennino all refer to the same similarity of a bee.

Seiler is not convinced, however, that the similarities between the passages of Cennino and Vergerius reveal a common intention. As already explained, no passage in the Book of the art would contain specific exhortation to imitate the works of Giotto, while Cennino invites students to always imitate their masters, whatever they may be. Moreover, Vergerius had very limited knowledge in the arts, and his references to Giotto were purely rhetorical, since he had adapted the same claims that Cicero had made about Lysippos to the most famous painter of his time.

Fig. 4) The essay by Peter Seiler, also available in the electronic database of the University of Heidelberg (http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/artdok/3181/1/Seiler_Giotto_das_unerreichte_Vorbild_2012.pdf)

Some important implications for the reading of Cennino

It is obvious that the above considerations have important consequences for Seiler on the conceptual interpretation of the text. Reference is made in particular to some of the terms and categories which called for the attention of scholars in the last hundred and fifty years of studies on Cennini.


Maniera - Style
Often we read chapter 27 as if Cennino claimed that, only relying to the imitation of the master's style during his long apprenticeship, the student painter can develop his own personal style. Seiler believes that this is a misunderstanding. In fact, according to the German scholar, 'maniera' is not what Dante describes as 'the beautiful style that I honoured' and even less the 'good manner' of Vasari. "The acquired manner is instead, in the first place, simply a way of working that is achieved through the continuous copying of examples." Characteristic of the maniera is in particular the fact that it can be the subject of a description, therefore consisting of elements of a technical nature which can be learned through a continuous and relentless repetition.

Aria - Manner
The term Aria, which is used only one time in the Book of Art (indeed in chapter 27) can not be understood as a modern style, in the sense of the individual characteristic of the creation of an artist. However, according to Seiler, it consists of those aspects of the routine activity of a painter "which can not be described with concepts and rules" but can still be acquired through imitation. A comparative study of the use of the term by many other authors of the fourteenth and fifteenth identifies ‘aria’ with ease of implementation.

Fantasia - Imagination
The use of the term imagination by Cennini as one of the foundations of art - along with 'intellectual activity' and 'manual dexterity' - has often been seen as the evidence that the author has not only a technical concept of art, but that he also makes the first steps towards the awerness that artists have the role of creators and as such can compete with nature and may even beat it, provided they know how to boost their capacity and develop a style oriented to beauty. The theme of imagination in Cennino is at the center of the aforementioned studies by Boskovits and the catalogue of the exhibition on Cennino in Berlin 2008. Again, Seiler is sceptical: other authors, but not Cennino, used the term in its modern sense. Dante had already talked in this respect of high imagination, while Alberti would write the artist as 'alter deus’, a second God who possesses his own ability to create. Cennini instead would refer to imagination just as the natural ability to make full use of personal qualities, as is clear already from Chapter 1 ("what little understanding God may have given them" – translation by Lara Broecke).



NOTES

[1] Venturi, Lionello - La critica d’arte alla fine del Trecento (Filippo Villani e Cennino Cennini) (Art criticism at the end of the fourteenth century - Filippo Villani and Cennino Cennini), in: L’arte. Rivista di storia dell’arte medievale e moderna (Art. Magazine of the history of medieval and modern art) 28/4, 1925, pp. 233-244. See: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/arte1925/0261?sid=4e7a93ea0aae0979cfd48cee654f4b71.




[5] See: Mazzaferro, Francesco - Cennino Cennini in Berlin. Review to: Fantasy and manual skill: Cennino Cennini and the tradition of Tuscan painting from Giotto to Lorenzo Monaco.

[6] For a list of the publications, see: http://www.sfb-antike.de/index.php?id=248&L=6.

[7] Rombach, Ursula and Seiler, Peter - Imitation als Transformation: Theorie und Praxis der Antikennachahmung in der frühen Neuzeit, Petersberg Imhof Verlag, 2012, 173 pages.

[8] Panofsy, Erwin - Die Renaissancen der europäischen Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, ​​1960.

[9] A reference to a 'triumphal gateway' in chapter 28 and the quality of nudes in ancient sculpture in chapter 185.

[10] Löhr, Wolf-Dietrich - Handwerk und Denkwerk des Malers. Kontexte für Cenninis Theorie der Praxis (Manual work and intellectual activities of the painter. Contexts for the theory of the practice of Cennini), in "Fantasie und Handwerk – Cennino Cennini und die Tradition der toskanischen Malerei von Giotto bis Lorenzo Monaco" ("Imagination and manual skill. Cennino Cennini and the tradition of Tuscan painting from Giotto to Lorenzo Monaco"), Munich, Hirmer, 2008, 334 pages. The essay is on pages 153-176.

[11] See in this blog: Broecke, Lara - Cennino Cennini's 'The Book of the art'. A New English translation and commentary with Italian transcription.

[12] Bolland, Andrew - Art and Humanism in Early Renaissance Padua: Cennini, Vergerio and Petrarch, in: Renaissance Quarterly, 1996, pp. 469-487; Kemp, Martin - Der Blick hinter die Bilder. Text und Kunst in der italienischen Renissance, Köln, 1977


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