Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro
Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION
Theodore Turquet de Mayerne
Pittura scultura e delle arti minori 1620-1646
Ms. Sloane 2052 del British Museum di Londra
[On Painting, Sculpture and the Minor Arts 1620-1646
Ms. Sloane 2052 of the British Museum in London]
Edited by Simona Rinaldi
Preface by Michele Cordaro
Anzio (Rome), De Rubeis Publishing House, 1995
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| Fig. 1) Portrait of Sir Theodore de Mayerne by Peter Paul Rubens, in oil and black chalk with grey wash, c. 1630, British Museum PD 1860-6-16-36. © Trustees of the British Museum. Source: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/07/the-colourful-career-of-sir-theodore-de-mayerne.html |
An 'out of fashion' manuscript
The Sloane
manuscript No. 2052, kept at the British Library, and drafted by the court
physician Theodore Turquet de Mayerne between 1620 and 1646, is undoubtedly
unique, because it drew not only from written sources, but mainly from the
testimonies of more than 50 artists, including Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, and
sheds light on the techniques used in France, England and Flanders in those
decades of the seventeenth century. It was a unique writing - it was said - and
what is most striking is how reading de Mayerne’s work offers the initial
flavour of an out-of-season fruit. The first comparison that arises
spontaneously is in fact with the great medieval recipes, from Theophilus Presbyter
to Cennini, which, however, had lived several centuries before. The truth is
that de Mayerne wrote when recipes "genre" had been already a no
longer practiced genre, except sporadically, for a very long time. In
chronological order, the last document proposed by De Mayerne is dated 1646;
two years later, the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture was founded in
Paris. The academy was concerned to find texts on which to base the teaching of
design, identifying the principal one in Leonardo's Treatise on painting, published for the first time in Paris in 1651. The
debate, based on the already acquired concept of painting as a liberal art, was
oriented on theoretical questions (the "ideal beauty" concept was
about to be borne: Bellori’s speech on Idea
would be held at the Academia of St. Luke in 1664). The enhancement of art to a
liberal discipline and the publication of texts for teaching purposes or as a
moment of reflection on classicism, therefore leaving out the strictly
technical aspects were, however, phenomena that also affected the Netherlands.
Consider the De Pictura Veterum by Franciscus Junius (1637), a great treatise of antiquarian nature, and the Introduction to the high school of painting
by Samuel van Hoogstraten, published in Dordrecht in 1678.
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| Fig. 2) The hand-written title page of the Mayerne manuscript, 'Pictoria, sculptoria et quae subalternarum artium', England (London), 1620-1646, Sloane MS 2052, f. 2r Source: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/07/the-colourful-career-of-sir-theodore-de-mayerne.html |
The rediscovery of the work and its publishing
success
It is not
surprising, therefore, that de Mayerne’s manuscript ended in oblivion after his
death, in 1655. But the valuable information it contains were also the cause of
its rediscovery in 1847, when Charles Lock Eastlake drew abundantly from it for
his Materials for a History of Oil
Painting. We were half of the nineteenth century and, in England, to recover
the operational techniques of the old masters had become a priority, dictated
not only by intellectual curiosity, but mostly by the Victorian desire to raise
the level of national art. Eastlake, at the time, was secretary of the Commission of Fine Arts, which dealt in
concrete with decisions to be taken regarding the decoration of the new English
Parliament, but, more generally, with the collection of information on artistic
techniques, just to get the necessary information to determine what choices to
be made. He was also the Keeper of
the National Gallery, from which he would resign in 1847 for his criticism
received regarding the restoration of some works, except becoming director a
few years later. He enjoyed the unconditional trust of the government and in
fact, directly or through a third party (in particular thanks to Mary Philadelphia Merrifield) recovered fundamental manuscripts for the history of
artistic techniques, fresco, tempera and oil.
However, the
interested public will have to wait until 1901 to read the Ms. Sloane No. 2052,
when the text was presented in German by the painter Ernst Berger (Quellen für Maltechnik wāhrend der
Renaissance und Folgezeit (XVI-XVII. Jahrhundert) in Italien, Spanien, den
Niederlanden, Deutschland, Frankreich und England nebst dem De Mayerne
Manuskript, Munich, Georg Callwey Publishers). In the second half of the
twentieth century, the fame of the manuscript justifies a partial translation
into Dutch by Johannes Alexander Van de Graaf [1] and a (full) translation in
French [2]. Curiously (especially when you consider that Eastlake had credited
the discovery to Robert Henrie jr. and had announced Henrie's intention to publish a
critical edition in 1847, the first English edition was based
on the text by Van de Graaf; it was therefore incomplete and was released for
publication only in 1981 [3]. The first complete English version dates back to
2004 and was the work of Donald Fels Jr [4]. The general context of the reassessment
of the work and its author also naturally framed the present edition, curated
by Simona Rinaldi, an international level expert on artistic techniques, and
published in 1995.
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| Fig. 3) Mayerne’s notes on the mixing of colours, taken from Peter Paul Rubens while sitting for his portrait, Sloane MS 2052, f. 150r Source: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/07/the-colourful-career-of-sir-theodore-de-mayerne.html |
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| Fig. 4) Mayerne’s notes on oil, taken from Anthony van Dyck, Sloane MS 2052, f. 153r Source: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/07/the-colourful-career-of-sir-theodore-de-mayerne.html |
De Mayerne: biography
Turquet de
Mayerne (1573-1655) was one of Europe's most famous doctors. The family was
Huguenot (i.e. was part of the French Calvinist minority) and is certainly not
a coincidence that Theodore was born in Geneva, Switzerland, where the family
had taken refuge after the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the mass murder of
Huguenots in France the previous year. The religious element was key in the
life of Theodore; his wealthy and cultured family was one of the most prominent in
Calvinistic circles. The father was a religious leader; the godfather was
Theodore Beza, Calvin's successor in Geneva. Obviously his Huguenot background
created many acceptance problems when he returned to France and started
practicing his profession as a physician, taking care of the rich clientele of the
courts, on the basis of a reputation that he had built both with his work and
the controversial theses he supported. De Mayerne was a follower of Paracelsus
and supported an alchemical approach to medicine, whereby 'alchemical' did certainly
not mean the search for the transformation of metals into gold, but rather the
study of the impact of metals in medicine. It should also be mentioned that
Paracelsus had expressed himself in very harsh terms against the traditional
medicine, the Hippocratic and Galenic ones, to the point that he instructed his
students (at the University of Basel, where he taught medicine) to literally
burn the sacred texts of Galen and Avicenna. A major concern of de Mayerne,
when he moved to France, was to argue that the two types of medicine, the
traditional one and the one originating from Paracelsus, did not have inconsistent,
but rather complementary effects between them. Banished from what today we would
call the Association of Physicians of France and always viewed with suspicion because
of his Huguenot faith, Theodoree accepted the invitation in 1611 to move to the
Court of England, where he became the first physician to the king (in fact even
there the first years were not exempt from controversy with the professional
association). He will remain in London until his death.
On a
strictly professional plane, de Mayerne engaged to make sure that the role of
doctors would be separated and better valued than the one (which was originally
united) of the apothecaries. This is why he spent time inside the Royal College
of Physicians, supported the views of the Society of Pharmacists. which wanted
to separate from simple grocers, and founded the Society of Distillers. In
fact, from our point of view (as readers interested in the manuscript on
artistic techniques) his approach was clearly still that of a mere apothecary.
It is so true that, before 1620, Theodore was seemingly not interested in art topics,
but it is equally undeniable that his interest in techniques derived from his professional
background where, basically, there was no distinction between the preparation
of a medicine and that of a pigment [6]. It is equally clear, from the reading
of the work, that de Mayerne applied the experimental method to the materials
and recipes that he gathered from written sources and oral testimonies. The manuscript
is full of marginal notes in which Theodore added his personal considerations
("I did it", "Not working" and so on, as well as some practical
advice with respect to the reader); there is no shortage of personal "speculations"
i.e. assumptions and possible improvements that the author included in addition
to recipes and which he feels would deserve to be experienced, as well as real
experiments and "inventions" which he produced.
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| Fig. 5) Watercolour sketch of a priming knife, Sloane MS 2052, f. 5r Source: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/07/the-colourful-career-of-sir-theodore-de-mayerne.html |
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| Fig. 6) Sketch of an artist’s palette and the location of colours, Sloane MS 2052, f. 90v Source: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/07/the-colourful-career-of-sir-theodore-de-mayerne.html |
The manuscript
From his angle
as physician to the king, de Mayerne was a privileged interlocutor of the world
of artists who attended the court and did not hesitate to gather testimonies
about the techniques they used. Theodore looked after the health of James I
and Charles I. If, from a political point of view, they were certainly not easy
years, that ended up with the outbreak of the revolution in 1642, and with the
beheading of Charles I in 1649 (Mayerne took progressive distance from the
monarchy and retired to private life, not being affected by the deposition of
Charles), in cultural terms the two Stuart opened to the art of the continent
and attracted (mainly Dutch) painters to the court as Paul Van Somer, Abraham
van Blijenberch, Daniel Mytens and the miniaturist Cornelius Jonson. In 1632
(after a first unsuccessful episode, dating back to twelve years earlier) Anthony Van Dyck arrived at court and became the official painter of the Court, with a huge success.
Albeit in a tucked position, Italian painters were also not lacking, like Orazio
Gentileschi (named in 1626 when the king got in love with Caravaggio's style of
paintings) and his daughter Artemisia. Between 1629 and 1630 stayed in London
also Rubens, engaged in diplomatic mission to Spain and England. De Mayerne
mentioned more than fifty artists in his manuscript. They also include, in
truth, references to written sources. The work opens with an invitation to
consider the technical arguments proposed in 1584 by Raffaello Borghini inside Il Riposo (The Rest); by way of example, we are also mentioning an extract from the present edition on pp. 156-157, which comes from Timoteo Rosselli’s Somma de Secreti
universali in ogni materia (The
sum of Universal Secrets in all matters).
Overall,
the manuscript consisted of 170 recto/verso sheets written mostly in French, but
with recipes written in Italian, English, German and Dutch. Almost all
documents which de Mayerne transcribed were dated, so one can precisely say
that the material covered the years between 1620 and 1646. Almost always
writing was handwritten by Theodore, but when the texts are in English they were
at the hand of John Colladon, the assistant of the Geneva-born physician,
suggesting that his command of the language may have not been at a sufficiently
high level.
The title
is On Painting, Sculpture and the Minor Arts.
[7] Actually, the manuscript was devoted to painting and, albeit in minor
measure, to the minor arts, such as, for example, leather work or the paper
restoration. The role of the sculpture was marginal. The most suggestive pages
are, of course, those illustrated. Fascinating, for example, are the sheets
from card 80 recto to card 81 verso, where a "Vera presentazione dei colori più comuni” (True presentation of the
most common colours) is proposed; for each colour are proposed the Latin and
the German-Flemish name, but one can certainly also remember the card 5 recto, with
the watercolour image appears of a primer knife (fig. 6), and the card 90 verso, where are
sketched two drawings of palettes (fig. 6).
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| Fig. 7) Mayerne’s 'True presentantion of the most common colours', Sloane MS 2052, f. 80v Source: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/07/the-colourful-career-of-sir-theodore-de-mayerne.html# |
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| Fig. 8) Mayerne’s 'True presentantion of the most common colours', Sloane MS 2052, f. 81v Source: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/07/the-colourful-career-of-sir-theodore-de-mayerne.html# |
It should also be stressed that a second manuscript of de Mayerne, also preserved in the British Library, is known since the mid-60s: it is the Ms. Sloane No. 1990. The latter is also composed of 170 cards and has a structure similar to the first. Yet we know very little on it. The manuscript is, to date, unpublished and only specific recipes - which seem to be different from those of Ms. Sloane No. 2052 - are cited, to be contrasted with the more famous "brother". According to what is written in the presentation notes of the MS. 1990 "in content it resembles the already well-known de Mayerne manuscript "Pictoria, Sculpturia et quae subalternarum artium" (manuscript Sloane 2052) also in the British Museum and already published by Berger and van de Graaf. However there are also sections on the applied arts such as painting and drawing, etching, sculpture, glass, enameling, ceramics, metalwork and dyeing which give interesting information on the 17th century methods in these fields."[8]. Simona Rinaldi added that the first 130 pages of the Ms. 1990 appear hand-written by de Mayerne, and date back to the years between 1623 and 1644, while the last 40 are written at the hand of John Colladon and reflect the biennium 1674-1675 (when Theodore was already dead for twenty years).
Bringing order to the manuscript, without distorting
it
The real shortcoming
(but also the specificity) of de Mayerne’s work is that it was messy and
proceeded by successive layers. Surely, the sequencing of the arguments was not
by topic; if anything, it was the one along which de Mayerne met the artists.
Simona Rinaldi assumes (although the manuscript included a number of references
perfectly usable by the reader) that the top twenty cards "actually served
as a summary, recapping the topics covered in the body of the manuscript. According
to this interpretation, the first cards would have been drafted in a subsequent
phase to that of the original core, therefore after 1620" (p. 5).
That said,
the real task of the interpreter (which is the case of Rinaldi) is to try to
present the contents of the manuscript by sets of homogeneous topics in the
introductory essay, while displaying the manuscript as it stands. With
reference to painting techniques, for example, the editor extrapolates
considerations regarding media, preparatory layers, the paint film (including
pigments), binders, drying agents, gilding, varnishes, brushes and palettes
respectively. In general, she does not fail to make readers aware that de
Mayerne’s attention was not directed so much to the material creation
procedures (e.g. pigments): in those years, the purchase of the colours from
the traders was already a fact. In the case of the pictorial film, for example,
"the attention thus appears more focused on the final effect, i.e. the
ways to mix and stratify colouring materials to achieve the desired colour
output, as if de Mayerne wanted to steal painters of the secret... of the tint composition"(p. 32). Underlying trends, especially if different than in
Italian painting, are stressed carefully. Thus Rinaldi notes, with
reference to supports, that fresco painting is virtually absent; but also that,
in the priming process, gypsum (typical of Italian preparations) is replaced by
clay (a habit of Nordic, in particular German-Flemish derivation); the examination
of binders and drying agents (so basically oil) in the many proposed recipes shows
"a clear awareness by the painters about the strengths and weaknesses of
each type of oil, from which depend the various proposed solutions, according
to their subjective scale of priorities: they may have required that the oil
with which to paint would first of all be colourless and transparent, and then
also siccative" (p. 47) or vice versa.
Restoration at de Mayerne’s times [9]
Finally, it
seems useful to remember that the attention of the interpreters turned to the Sloane
manuscript in recent years with particular reference to restoration practices.
Let me explain better: the processes illustrated by de Mayerne are obviously
useful for today’s conservators to study the works of that era. Within the work
of the Geneva doctor, again unsystematically, there are references that allow
us to understand what were the solutions practiced at the time for the recovery
of works endangered of ruin. The most famous procedure is of course the one
contained card 14 verso, under the
heading "Speculation on the cleaning of paintings of King Charles that were sent from
Italy to London on a ship loaded with currants where also a few barrels
of sublimed quicksilver, the vapours of which, caused by the heat of the currants, darkened both the oil and the distemper paintings as black as ink". He is in fact referring to a famous
episode: Nicholas Lanier in 1627, thanks to the mediation of the merchant
Daniel Nijs, accomplished to complete the purchase of good part of the Mantua
collection of paintings of the Gonzagas. Part of these paintings was loaded on
a ship full of grapes and (for reasons not entirely clear) on arrival in London
the artworks looked like almost completely blackened. We know that the task to
(try to) clean them was assigned to Jerome Lanier, cousin of Nicholas and that
the attempt was judged successful only as to oil paintings, but not for those
in tempera. The "speculation" of de Mayerne is a passage in which
Theodore, in light of his knowledge, proposes a different approach which, if
followed, would prove more productive. But this is not the only reference to
the preservation of materials. In a text of 2004, Gudrun Bischoff reported
notes relating to the restoration with reference to nine different topics [10]: "straightening the canvas, repairing cracked layers and layers of paint, conservation of layers of paint, cleaning of the surface (excluding the removal of varnish), removal of varnish,
restoration of varnish that have turned blue, fixing a hole in a
wood panel and retouching paintings". All topics are addressed by Ulrike Kern
in his recent contribution, appeared in The Burlington Magazine, and showing
that the study of Theodore de Mayerne’s papers continue to reserve us great
surprises.
NOTES
[1] Het de Mayerne Manuscript als Bron Voor de
Schildertechniek van de Barok: British
Museum, Sloane 2052, edited by Johannes Alexander van de Graaf (Mijdrecht,
Drukkerij, 1958).
[2] Pictoria, Sculptoria et quae Subalternarum
Artium: Le Manuscrit de Turquet de Mayerne, edited by Marcel Faidutti and
Camille Versini (Lyon, Audin Imprimeurs, the issue is generally shown on the
Internet as from the 1960s; the citation of British Library is therefore manifestly
wrong. indicating the year 1981, namely before the first English partial
translation; Simona Rinaldi defines it as dating from 1965-1967).
[3] The
issue appears within Mansfield Kirby Talley, Portrait painting in England: studies in the technical literature
before 1700, London, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1981.
[4] Lost Secrets of Flemish Painting: Including
the First Complete English Translation of the de Mayerne Manuscript, B.M.
Sloane 2052, edited by Donald C. Fels (Floyd, VA, Alchemist Inc., 2004).
[5] These
notes are published also drawing from Ulrike Kern, Theodore de Mayerne, the King’s black paintings and
seventeenth-century methods of restoring and conserving paintings in The
Burlington Magazine, October 2015 - CLVII, pp. 700-708. De Mayerne’s real
surname was Turquet, but he never signed with the family name because he
thought it was plebeian.
[6] It must
be said, in fairness, that there are those who claim that Theodore had not
really any interest in the art world before 1620 and that this interest in
techniques was derived from the discovery in 1618 of a partial translation made
by the father of the preface to Vasari's Lives
(where, in fact, the technical pages of the painter from Arezzo are contained).
Cfr. Ulrike Kern, Theodore de Mayerne…
quoted, n. 3.
[7] In fact
Ulrike Kern (cit., N. 2) notes that de Mayerne seems to have changed the title
at least twice. In essence, the work identifies at least three titrations, of which
Painting, Sculpture and the Minor Arts
would be chronologically the second.
[8] We are
quoting the abstract of A.E. Werner, A
New de Mayerne Manuscript published in Studies
on Conservation, Volume 9, Number 4, pp. 130-134, 1964. The fiche is
available on the internet at https://www.iiconservation.org/node/201.
[9] The
contents of this paragraph are related to the reading of Ulrike Kern, Theodoree de Mayerne… quoted.
[10] Gudrun
Bischoff, Das de Mayerne-Manuskript. Die Rezepte der Werkstoffe, Maltechniken
und Gemālderestaurierung, Munich, 2004.
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