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Francesco Mazzaferro
Dimitrie Belisare and the Romanian Translation of Cennino Cennini's Book of the art (around 1936-37)
Part One
[Original Version: May 2016 - New version April 2019]
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| Fig. 1) The cover-page of the 1936-1937 Romanian translation |
THE CENNINI PROJECT
This post is a part of the "Cennini Project", dedicated to the international reception of the Book of the Art since the first printed edition in 1821. Click here to see the list of all the posts.
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Between Practical Reasons and the Defense of Tradition
"I translated this book into Romanian and
commented it only because I was moved by the sole purpose of helping my fellow
painters who intend to work in fresco." This is how the Romanian
painter Dimitrie Belisare (1888-1947) [1] introduced himself to the reader in
the introduction of the Romanian translation of the Libro dell'arte (Book of the art) by Cennino Cennini [2]. The book – entitled “Tratatul de Pictura” in Romanian,
i.e. “Treatise on painting” – did not show
any date of publication. Some Romanian sources suggested 1936 [3], others mentioned
1937 [4]. These were years in which the
painter had just brought to an end a multi-annual cycle of frescoes in the Cathedral
of the Bucharest Patriarchate and had therefore achieved a great personal
success from a reputational perspective. At that time, as it was mentioned on
the cover page of the book [5] and as we shall see later, Belisare was also
vice-president of a brotherhood of painters [6].
From a
stylistic point of view, Belisare’s initiative to translate the text by Cennino
into Romanian was in line with the clear neo-Byzantine setting of his own painting,
and his love for mediaeval frescos. After all, throughout his career he worked at
religious painting (Pictura Religioasă)
and more specifically at the sacred painting for churches (Pictura Bisericească). If the translator was in love with the
painter of religious frescoes of the Trecento painters in Italy, nevertheless
he was well aware, as he himself wrote in the introduction, that the fresco
techniques described by Cennino "are completely fallen into
disrepute" and replaced by new techniques. And besides, if he first of all
recommended painters to use the raw materials to produce the colors by hand, he
however also advised them to save valuable time and to buy modern colors made
in Germany, which he himself used and appreciated [7].
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| Figures 2 and 3) Dimitrie Belisare, Frescos in the Patriarchal Cathedral of Bucharest, 1932-1935 |
Yet, the
text of Cennino served mainly to Belisare as a safeguard against technical
experiments that could reveal very dangerous, in his opinion, because they were
based only on theory and not on practice. And therefore his tone was firmly
opposing to modern times: "You will
find that this treaty is more than welcome especially as some painters - very
strong in terms of theory - have emerged recently and their techniques or new
interpretations have spread on the basis of different brochures; they are
indeed an obstacle to painting in fresco. Some of them propagate as novelty the
"Wasserglass", which Germans however know from ancient times. Others
proclaim scientific theories on the chemistry of colors that, when put into
practice, prove totally ineffective: their paintings - their so-called frescoes
- disappear after no more than 3-4 years." The Wasserglass is the sodium silicate, which was used as a protective
agent for murals since 1825. An industrial development from it was the
so-called silicate mineral paint according to the method invented by Adolf Keim
(1851-1913), who began industrial production in 1878. In 1884 Keim founded the
journal Technische Mitteilungen für
Malerei (Technical Notes for Painting), which propagated the new technique
as a safer alternative for murals than fresco painting.
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| Fig. 4) Gottfried Schiller and Julius Ostermaier, Archbishop Raymond bows in front of the St.Vasile Church, 1911 |
When
Belisare spoke of new painters emerging at the horizon of Romanian art, it is
hard to tell whom he meant: in those years, there was a widespread interest in
mural painting across Europe, often linked to the idea of a new religious art,
and countless painters experienced new techniques, also to adapt to the new
construction materials, and in particular in response to the spread of cement walls
(think of the Mexican murals of Diego Rivera). We will see that, at the
beginning of the century, two German painters of the Beuron school (Gottfried
Schiller and Iulius Ostermaier) were called from Germany to Bucharest by the
leader of the religious minority of the Eastern Rite Catholics, in order to
decorate the Greek-catholic cathedral with murals in industrial silicate colors
(only old black-and-white photos remain of those frescoes: they went lost first because of the 1940 earthquake, than of II World War bombing in 1944, and then finally because of the neglect in
which the cathedral was left by the Communist regime). Were Ostmeier and
Schiller the painters who arouse the wrath of Belisare, introducing new fresco
theories? Were their frescoes already emaciated in 1937? Was the polemic directed
against the Greek-catholic church that welcomed industrial techniques and
iconographic models, inspired by the school of Beuron? Or, rather, is the
target another one, and the two painters are among those who brought in Romania
the most appreciated German colors, whose use Belisare recommended the preface
to the Book of the art? Unfortunately, we do not have the answer.
We should
not hide it: if Belisare was a highly educated man (he translated Cennino from
the French version of Heny Mottez checking the text with the German translation of Jan Verkade; he announced the intention of writing an essay on Christian
iconography and a treatise on fresco painting, of which we have not yet found
any trace, however), his world was nevertheless a very conservative one, and
its activity was not only a manifestation of faith and support for the national
culture, but also a testimony against modernity. This therefore explains why
the clash between modern and ancient was one of the basic issues for the
Romanian painter.
In this
regard, it is worth telling an episode: the main Romanian philosopher and Orthodox
theologian of those years, Nae Ionescu (1890-1940) came into conflict with the Church hierarchy. He was the master of Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran and Eugène
Ionesco, i.e. the most famous intellectuals of Romania between the two wars.
Well, at the request of Patriarch Miron Christea, Belisare depicted him as
Lucifer in the Last Judgement for the Cathedral of the
Patriarchate in Bucharest, the main church in the country [8].
And indeed the
fresco of the Last Judgement clearly
shows the persistence of traditional iconographic motifs in the neo-Byzantine
art between the wars. Here are some pictures of Belisare’s frescoes, contrasted
with Italian iconographs of the Middle Ages clearly influenced by Byzantine
art.
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| Figures 5 and 6) Dimitrie Belisare, Details of Doomsday, Patriarchal Cathedral of Bucharest, 1932-1935 |
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| Fig. 7) Last Judgement, Hell, The Damned, Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello (XII century) |
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| Fig. 8) Coppo di Marcovaldo, Last Judgment (Hell), Florence, Baptistery of Saint John,1260-1270 |
To allow
everyone to get an idea about modern and ancient aspects of the Romanian introduction
to the Art Book, we are publishing the text as attachment to second part of this post, with warm thanks to Daniel Daianu for helping me to
get the English translation of the text.
At the Service of Religiuos Art
At a time
when the Romanian edition of Cennino’s Book
of the Art was released, Dimitrie Belisare was certainly a well-known
personality in the country, especially in the world of religious painting. The
beautiful cover page of the 1936/1937 translation, illustrated with an
engraving of the image of St. Paul, contained the indication that Belisare was
officially "pictor expert al sf patriarhii", i.e. a specialist painter
at the Holy Patriarchy, with which he may have been contractually bound. In
fact, even today the patriarchy has a Committee
for sacred art [9]. In the cover page of the translation,
it was also added that Belisare was the vice president of the Sindicatul Artelor Frumoase (the
Brotherhood of Fine Arts). As already mentioned, we have some information on
the Brotherhood in those years thanks to Professor Traian Marza [10]: in 1937, the president of the Brotherhood was
Dumitru Pavelescu-Timo (1870-1944), a sculptor with a different aesthetic
orientation. In sum, the Brotherhood must not have been a circle of artists
bound by the same aesthetic goals, and in particular not to promote sacred art.
The association, created in Bucharest in 1921, rather had sustenance function to needy
and elderly painters (with the construction of retirement homes, including the
one which Belisare referred to at the end of the introduction, whose building
he financed in his region of origin).
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| Fig. 9) Dumitru Pavelescu-Dimo, Monument to Trajan, Brăila, 1906 |
The
introduction included a long list of the religious-themed cycles of frescoes,
which Belisare had painted. They had all been executed in churches, during a
thirty-year career, which began in 1907 with the decoration of the Church of
the Monastery Caldarusani. The success came as from 1925, when the Romanian
Orthodox Church became a patriarchy and launched a multiannual program for the
national religious revival: new churches were built, as for Costeşti church in
1931 and the Orthodox Cathedral of Orăştie of 1936, or it was decided to
replace irretrievably lost frescoes (as in the patriarchal Cathedral of
Bucharest, where Belisare’s new cycle substituted damaged frescoes of 1884).
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| Fig. 10) The architect D. Ionescu-Berechet and the painter Dimitrie Belisare follow the construction of the Costeşti - Argeş church, 1931 Source: http://dulciu.blogspot.de/2014/08/arh-d-ionescu-berechet-si -pictor.html |
The
neo-Byzantine revival program was part of a more comprehensive project of
national reshaping of the territory, seen as necessary once the country (the so-called
"Greater Romania") had incorporated many regions that previously were
part of the Austro-Hungarian and the Tsarist Empires, after the vicissitudes of
the First World War and the victory in the Romanian-Hungarian war (1918-1919).
In the nineteenth century, Romanian sacred art had developed on two tracks (a
more pro-Western one in urban centers and a more traditional one in the
countryside), although there had always been some contamination between the two
streams (See Figure 11). In the interwar years the political powers clearly choose a strict neo-Byzantine
painting as a national style [11]. Therefore
Belisare’s uncompromising attitude on the technical method (and perhaps also
his polemic against Gottfried Schiller and Iulius Ostermaier and the role that
the German Benedictines of Beuron placed to adorn the Greek-catholic cathedral
of Bucarest according to western techniques) was fully in line with the
priorities of government: to promote a traditional religious art in
neo-byzantine style.
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| Fig. 11) Nicolae Teodorescu, The Assumption of the Virgin Mary, Archbishop's Cathedral of Buzau (undated) |
End of Part One
NOTES
[1] Dimitrie
Belisare is the version of the name to be found in the Romanian translation of
the Libro dell'arte, and therefore it
is the one I used in this post. It should, however, also be mentioned that I
found him also mentioned elsewhere as Dumutru Belisare, Dimitrie Belizarie and
Dimitrie Belizaire, perhaps due to the spelling reforms (in particular, in 1954
and 1993) of the Romanian language. I understand that, besides usual updates
due to time passing, those changes in orthography were often more due to ideological
than to grammar reasons, marking in the first case the plan to introduce a Soviet
imprint on the language and in the second case to delete each communist legacy
from it. These discontinuities in spelling display the broad fragmentation in
the historical narrative of Romanian religious art, which is really an obstacle
to the full understanding of what happened in those years. During the communist
period, it is probable that not much was written on Belisare. Indeed, one of
the main churches he painted with his frescos, i.e. the St Venerius church in
Bucharest, was demolished by the regime quite recently in 1987 (and is now being
rebuilt). This discontinuity also explains many uncertainties on the painter’s
biography. As for his date of birth, for example, there are sources that
mention the date 1883 and others 1884. We preferred 1888 (although this date was
not included in any other source that we could see) on the basis of what the
artist himself wrote in his introduction: he mentioned that he was 19 years in
1907.
[2] Tratatul de Pictura al Lui Cennino
Cennini, Tradus şi compara cu textele germane şi franceze de Dimitrie
Belisare-Muscel, pictorul expert al patriarhii romane – Vice Preşidente al
Sindacatului artelor rumoase, Bucureşti, Tipografia “Fāntāna Daruor”, Calea 13
September No. 74. The text is
available on the Internet at: https://www.scribd.com/doc/137318895/Tratatul-de-pictura-Cennino-Cennini-pdf
[3] Dimitrie Belisare, Bucuresti, 1936, in:
[4] D.Belisare-Muscel, Tratatul de pictură al lui Cennino Cennini (Bucureşti, 1937) in http://ftoub.ro/dmdocuments/I.%20Icoana%20si%20Iconomie.pdf
[5] I
wondered whether the Romanian text has perhaps not been completed already a few years
before 1936/1937. In fact, while Belisare showed to know perfectly all the work
translations, his introduction did not include any reference to the 1933 English
translation.
[6] We
owe this information to the Facebook page of Professor Traian Marza. https://www.facebook.com/marza.traian/posts/944347528991083
[7] The
same was written, on the same matter, by the other painters-translators of Cennino
in those decades, all convinced (albeit reluctantly) that Cennini’s craft
traditions had been overcome by the spread of new industrial colours for wall-painting.
Alf Rolfsen, in the Norwegian translation of 1942, warned: “This tradition has been broken. Colours are
no longer extracted by artists from the bosom of the earth. Those who now
produce colours may be more proficient, and the colours they produce may be
better. But artists have lost their intimate connection with the materials, the
deep-seated knowledge of their precious nature and of the demands this makes
and the inspiration it provides. The image of the young Cennino discovering the
vein of ochre (…) has very different associations from those aroused by the
words ‘Aktiengesellschaft Farbenindustrie’". The IG-Farben producer had
spread his industrial colours everywhere from Germany since the mid-thirties.
In 1946 the translator and Swedish painter Sigurd Möller cautioned the reader:
"Environments change and disappear,
traditions die out, and today it would be impossible and quite wrong to follow
all Cennini’s practical advice and rules." The same was also stated by
the anonymous painter who produced the Hungarian translation; we ignore the
date of the translation, but it must probably not be much later, since it was
written in the Hungarian spelling before 1954: "Of course, it would be a mistake to miss the new techniques. Cennini himself was also of the view that the
modern painting methodology is better than the old one). Also the practice of
wall painting cannot stop with the fresco painting. Here it also breaks into
the new and better technique of plastic binding agents, fitting well with
today’s new existing plastic walls."
[11] See:
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