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Francesco Mazzaferro
Gino Severini and the Sacred Art in a European Context:
The Influence of Cennini’s Book of the Art
Part One
[Original Version: May 2016 - New version: April 2019]
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| Fig. 1) The Italian issue of From Cubism to Classicism, edited by Elena Pontiggia and published by Abscondita in 2001 |
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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Gino Severini and art literature
In the
memoirs, Gino Severini (1883 -1966) narrated his passionate encounter with art
literature, which marked his culture and artistic practice forever, in the years
when he was about to abandon Futurism. These are excerpts from the second part
of his autobiographical project [1],
consisting of a first volume published in 1946 and of a second tome completed in
the summer of 1965, a year before his death, and published posthumously in 1968
[2]. These pages of the second tome, entitled Tempo de «L’effort moderne». La vita di un pittore, which means The time of «L’effort moderne». The
life of a painter), reveal how contemporary artists can be enriched from understanding
the message which the artists from earlier eras, including those of many
centuries before, have left them. These were also the decades where art
literature was spreading as a new study genre, as evidenced by a series of posts on this blog on anthologies of art history sources. In those years,
developments in art literature, in the study of antique and in contemporary art
went hand in hand.
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| Fig. 2) The first edition of “Tutta la vita di un pittore”(The whole life of a painter) by Gino Severini, the first tome of the memoirs, published by Garzanti Publishers in 1946 |
Severini
recollects the months immediately following the armistice in World War I, and
recalls his search for rules governing colour, lines and forms. Since 1906, he was
living in Paris, where he was an integral part of the diverse world of the
artists of that city, the very centre of world art. He was looking for new
paths for the development of art. "It
was so that I began exploring ancient treaties. I went every day in libraries
and often my wife was with me. She copied the passages that interested me, while I
did further research. I began to consult architects and architecture theorists,
encompassing Vitruvius and Leon Battista Alberti, Viollet-le-Duc and Choisy. In
all of them I found the confirmation of what we painters had often discussed
between us, whithout never having a clear idea on their reasons, since, after
all, none of us had precise notions; in fact I found that, at the core of
architecture, there were geometrical and numerical laws serving as backbone.
(...) In many treatises on painting, like those of Bernard du Puy du Grès, or
Félibien, Henri Testelin, Algarotti, John Burnet, etc. (not counting the
ancient manuals, which were then above all rule books on craft, such as the
Treaty of Theophilus Presbyter, the Mappae Clavicula, the manuscript of Lucca,
and the famous treatise by Cennini), in all these books and many others I found
confirmation of clear and precise rules that had governed art creation in
ancient times, also in the field of painting. Both in the geometric and
mathematical structure of the work as well as in the technical execution. So, what
had to be fully re-established was an overall "craft", a know-how on
which academies had no idea, and on which only a few artists of my generation
had a presentiment.
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| Fig. 3) The first issue of the "Time of «L’effort moderne»", edited by Piero Pacini in 1968 |
In his book Théories (Theories), Maurice Denis often alluded to such craft, these laws. Indeed, in this respect, he spoke of a
Benedictine monastery located in Beuron, to the south of the Black Forest, where
some monks painted under strict and scientific methods, and not just painted
but created objects, made mosaics which were always inspired by the magnitude,
solemnity and dignity of hieratic Egyptian art or of ancient Greece, whose laws
they had discovered. The leader of this group of monks was Father Pierre (or
Desiderius) Lenz, whose theories are summarized in a little book translated into French by Paul Sérusier and introduced by a foreword by Maurice Denis:
Pierre Lenz, L’Estethique de Beuron (The Aesthetics of Beuron), Bibliothèque
de l'Occident, Paris, 1905. The aesthetics of the Beuron convent is summarized
by Lenz in these few lines: "The
simple, the clear, the typical, which have its roots in the numbers and simpler
measures, thus remain the basis of whole art, and to measure, to count and to weigh
remain the most important functions. The purpose of all great art is the
transmission, the specific application of the basic geometrical, arithmetic,
and symbolic forms, arising from nature, to serve the great ideas. (...) These
monks implemented in their own way another idea that made its way in the art
circles in Paris, especially among the Cubists of the Effort Moderne: that of a collective and
anti-individualistic art, in which anonymity was the rule, as in the time of
the Greeks, the Roman Republic and the early Christians. But then this idea
vanished, because with the development of the Parisian art market, artists were
instead encouraged, indeed driven by the merchants to realize their own
personality in the most distinctive and individualistic way; and on this line it
came to excesses." [3]
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| Fig. 4) Beuron Art School, Crucifixion (fresco in the Sanctuary of St. Benedict in Montecassino). The fresco was destroyed during the Second World War. Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0288 |
The just
quoted passage placed the meeting between Gino Severini and Cennini’s Book of the Art in the wider context of the
research by the Italian modern painter of a new rule unifying art as a science,
a research that took place on the benches of Paris libraries, among history of
art sources. It was an effort that eventually led to the publication in 1921 of
an essay in French entitled Du cubisme au
classicisme (Estétique du compas et du nombre) [4] - From Cubism to Classicism (The
Aesthetics of Compass and of Number). It was a personal quest about the past,
since none of the Parisian painters of those years ever executed such a
systematic study of art history sources to try to get that result; moreover,
none of the contemporaries tributed so clear a homage to Maurice Denis (whom Severini
considered the greatest theorist of contemporary art [5]), and the school of
Beuron. Moreover, as explained by Maurizio Calvesi [6], the publication of the essay
marked a split between Severini and the world of the French avant-garde [7].
And yet
Severini’s direction of travel was also the expression of a collective effort.
Consulting for example the anthology of contemporary art history sources by Paul Westheim [8], published only some years later in Germany just to make the
German public acquainted with a classical and anti-expressionist idea of
contemporary art, we will not find any excerpts of Severini, but we will read
the text of Albert Gleizes on "La Mission créatrice de l'homme dans le
domaine plastique”
(The creative mission of man in the plastic domain), a conference held in Paris
in December 1921, which reveals the same ambition of the search for a universal
rule, even if resolved in a constructivist sense [9]), and the lecture "L'Esthétique
de la machine – l'objet fabriqué, l'artisan et l'artiste" by Fernand Léger, who in 1924
sanctioned the alleged mistakes made by the Renaissance, which had abandoned
universal rules in search of the imitation of nature [10]. Both themes (the
search of rules for the art construction and the errors of the Renaissance) were
two of the focuses of the writings of Severini in those years. It may surprise the
reader that the Italian artist, whose aesthetic is often associated with the iconographic
recovery of the Tuscan Quattrocento art (as rightly written by Marisa Vescovo
[11], with a special passion for Paolo Uccello, Domenico Veneziano, Piero della Francesca, Andrea del Castagno, and Luca Signorelli), used such severe tones against
Renaissance. A simple reading of his writings [12] will confirm that actually
Severini felt, in many respects, as a man of the Middle Ages, like Renoir did (and
he drew from his introduction to Cennini’s Book
of the Art many of arguments against the individualism of art, the real cause
of corruption of the spirit, in both’s view).
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| Fig. 5) The latest edition (2008) of the Vita di un Pittore (The Life of a Painter), published by Abscondita |
Renoir, Cennini and the rediscovery of craft in
the words of Severini
Having
returned to Italy in 1935, after a thirty year-stay in Paris, Severini
collected his writings in the book Ragionamenti
sulle arti figurative [13] (Reasoning on the visual arts), with which he
wanted to present himself to the Italian public (his French essay Du cubisme au classicisme was translated
in Italian only much later, in 1972). Already the choice of the cover page of
the work revealed the central role Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the artist who had abandoned
impressionism and theorized the return to craft and order, played for him. Here
is what Severini wrote about Renoir and the impact that Cennini’s Book of the Art had on him:
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| Fig. 6) The cover page of the Ragionamenti sulle arti figurative (Reasoning on visual arts) of 1935 |
"If there was a painter who sought to
express himself with absolute probity (always opposing to programs and
systems), it was certainly Renoir. His evolution, from an almost graphic and punchy
painting to one fully embedded in colour and, despite this, all marked by volume,
is a good example of sound and constructive logic. (...) Listen to Renoir, when
he says that it was necessary to return to order «if you did not want to see painting being permanently submerged», and to
return to order meant to go back to acquire a know-how that «no one knew anymore.» (...) He thus broke away from these young people,
full of good will, who were the Impressionists, realizing the weaknesses that
were hidden by these researches of 'novelty' and becoming almost as hostile as Delacroix
to the so-called innovators. (...) The casual discovery of the book of Cennini on
the banks of the Seine decided, perhaps, the future of Renoir. It began for him
a period of technical research, during which he came to draw the smallest
details in pen before painting, because of the hate to impressionism, as he
said, and fell into an excess of precision and dryness. He persisted to mimic
frescoes with oil painting, but corrected from himself this serious fundamental
error. From the beautiful flowering of his works and his 'means' one can see
how he became a master of his technique." [14]
Therefore,
the work of Cennino was mentioned in the writings of Severini with precise reference
to Renoir, to his search for the recovery of ancient techniques (the craft) and
his ethics of a return to order. These were all central slogans in those years
(not only in France but throughout Europe and particularly in Italy), but it is
clear that developments in France were crucial. Let us try to understand what
the relationship was between Cennini’s Book
of the art and the history of French art from the mid-nineteenth century
until the years of Severini in Paris.
Cennini at the centre of French art
developments: 1858-1930
We
documented In this blog how Cennini’s Book
of the art was read from the mid nineteenth century in a perspective that went
far beyond a late medieval (or first-Renaissance) collection of recipes on colour
composition and art techniques. As a culmination of this reading, at the turn
of the century (perhaps in 1902) the French painter Maurice Denis (1870-1943)
convinced Henry Mottez (1855-1937) to work on the publication of a new edition
of the Book of the Art in French. The
choice was not random: Henry’s father, the Lyonnais Nazarene Victor Mottez, had
been one of the first artists to rediscover the medieval fresco technique in
France. In 1846, he had produced what he considered his masterpiece (the fresco
on the portal of the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxxerois [15] in Paris [16]),
but he soon understood that he was confronted with technical problems to which
he did not know any answer. For this reason, a few years later (in 1858), he
had translated, albeit imperfectly, Cennini’s Book of the Art and applied his techniques for the frescoes that he
painted in the church of Saint-Sulpice in 1860. There Mottez measured himself directly
with Delacroix, in an open challenge between classicism (Mottez) and romanticism
(Delacroix): to Delacroix’s Chapel of the
Holy Angels (1855-1861) Mottez responded with the Chapel of St. Martin (1860-1865).
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| Fig. 7) The lost frescoes by Victor Mottez in the doorway of the church of Saint Germain-l'Auxxerois. Left: The Sermon on the Mountain. Middle: The Holy Men and Women of France at the foot of Christ. Right: Christ appears to the apostles. To my knowledge, it is the only available image of the frescoes, already lost in 1913 when the photographs were published by Léon Rosenthal in the Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire de l'Art Français. Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/bshaf1913/0030?sid=a2976d0911c9bb6500a72b3818e091b4 |
Maurice
Denis was a great admirer of Mottez, believed that the comparison between the
two chapels in Saint-Sulpice was clearly to be resolved in favour of the
latter, and noted, however, that the frescoes of 1846 in the church of
Saint-Germain-l'Auxxerois and those of 1860 in the Saint-Sulpice church were
now irretrievably damaged. He urged therefore Henry, the son of Victor Mottez,
to cure a new translation of the Book of
the Art, in the hope that a better translation would help making Cennino’s methods
more reliable and therefore would offer new perspectives to the classically
inspired painters for their frescoes.
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| Fig. 8) The new translation of Cennini’s Book the Art by Victor Mottez, performed by his son Henry Mottez, with an introduction by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, in 1911 |
The fact
that the new French edition of Cennini’s Book
of the art, finally published in 1911, was preceded by a text by
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), a leading artist who until then had almost
left nothing written on his art, aroused great impression in France and
elsewhere. The content of the introduction of Renoir was in the form of a
letter (as it often happened in those years), but in fact that text, which was
inspired by Maurice Denis himself and on which Renoir had worked for long,
played the same role as a true manifesto [17]. Renoir had first read the text
of Cennini in 1883, just returning from the journey to Italy between 1881 and
1882, during which he had admired Raphael's frescoes in the Vatican and the
Roman wall paintings at Pompeii. These were the years in which the art of
Renoir turned clearly in a classical direction, and reading Cennino was part of
that rethinking.
Thirty
years later, for Renoir Cennino was not just a source of stylistic inspiration,
but the hero of ancient, joyful and anti-modern times, during which art was,
fortunately, still and mostly equivalent to craft, and its end was deeply
religious. In Montmartre, where a few years before the first forms of radical
avant-garde (Cubism, Fauvism) had seen their birth, and where artists were
passionate followers of Bacchus, tobacco and Venus, Renoir addressed a very
clear warning in favour of morality and religiosity in painting, even more than
a plea in favour of a return to craft. The Book
of Cennini was seen as the indispensable practical text to regain full control
of ancient fresco technique, i.e. of true art.
The theme
of the return to frescoes and monumental painting had already been theorized in
France by the Symbolist Gabriel-Albert Aurier in 1891, with an appeal in which
he asked that artists such as Gauguin and Puvis de Chavannes be given the
opportunity to paint murals: "Walls!
walls! give them some walls! " [18]. However, the Renoir restoration program, designed
in the introduction to the Book of the
Art, was characterized by a profound pessimism: the medieval purity of art was
in fact lost forever and modernity was seen as an age of decline from which
there was no possible return.
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| Fig. 9) Vienna Secession Exhibition (1905): Postcard on the Beuron art. (Copyright André M. Winter, published after his kind permission) |
A project of
'neo-conservative' art and painting (néo-traditionnisme)
had already ben enunciated by Maurice Denis in 1890 [19]. Since then Denis
weaved, along with Paul Sérusier, a network of contacts throughout Europe.
Great friends of Jan Verkade (the then famous painter-monk that translated Cennini
in German in 1916), Denis and Sérusier became the cultural counterpart of the
Beuron school in the French world of painting. As already mentioned, in
1904-1905 Sérusier translated the Divine Canon of Desiderius Lenz in French and
Denis wrote the introduction to it.
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| Fig. 10) The Good Guide, tapestry designed by Aladar Körösfői-Kriesch and created by Leo Belmonte, 1907 |
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| Fig. 11) Sándor Nagy, Church of the Marian Kingdom, fresco in the apse, 1910 (destroyed immediately after the Second World War by the communist regime of Matyas Rakosi). Source:http://postcards.hungaricana.hu/hu/193417/?query=SZO%3D(%22Templomok%22) |
In 1892,
Denis also made acquaintance with Aladár Körösfői Kriesch and Sandor Nagy at
the Académie Julian in Paris, where he was himself studying [20]. The two will
be the founders of a new Symbolist and Secessionist art movement in Hungary, established
a few years later in the town of Gödöllő, whose community of artists became a
model for a number of Symbolist art movements in Hungary, all inspired by
Cennini until the end thirties. Of Körösfői Kriesch, it was said that he never
forgot to bring a copy of Cennini’s Book with
himself; to the latter he also dedicated one of his most famous paintings, The Pilgrimage to the Fountain of Art, in the
Academy of Music in Budapest in 1907.
A disclaimer: not only Severini
This post
identifies the central role of Gino Severini in the implementation of Cennino’s
art techniques and in the framework of the rebirth of religious art in Europe
and in their dissemination in Italy. Obviously, it goes without saying that the
teaching of Cennini was not made known in Italy only via this Parisian and
French mediation, following the sequencing Mottez, Denis, Renoir and Severini,
which we are documenting here. Cennini was clearly well known to all learners
in Italian schools of art since Gaetano Previati (1852-1920) had explained and discussed
his fresco techniques in his treaty on painting technique, published in 1905
[22], and after Renzo Simi (son of the symbolist painter Filadelfo Simi) had
published a new edition of the Libro
dell'Arte in 1913 [23]. Just two years after the enormous upheaval created
by the introduction of Renoir in Paris, the Italian public had a new modern
edition of the Book of the Art at its
disposal.
The one who,
in the history of Italian art of those years, was at the centre of all these
European trends was Gino Severini (1883-1966), both as an artist and as a
theorist. It has already been said that Severini lived in Paris for three decades
(1906-1935) and experienced there a path that led him from futurism, which wanted
to destroy the art of the past, to an entirely classical setting of art. In
1921, the aforementioned essay Du Cubisme
au classicisme (Estétique du compas et du nombre) revealed that he was
already an important intellectual counterpart of Maurice Denis (whom he loved
as a theoretician, but not as a painter), and an enthusiastic reader of the Treaty
of Desiderius Lenz, but also of the theoretical texts of the Renaissance artists
and the manifestos on painting technique of the neo-impressionists Signac and
Seurat. And yet it should be noted that the essay of 1921 - all centred on the
idea of art as a science and the role of the number in art creation - did not
mention the Book of the Art by Cennini
(whom Severini probably regarded at that time as a merely 'artisanal' author and
therefore devoid of theoretical interest) nor assigned yet any specific role to
religious art.
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| Fig. 12) Art er scolastique by Jacques Maritain (1930) |
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| Fig. 13) The essay which Maritain published on Severini 1930 |
It was
thanks to Maritain that Severini got the first religious commission in the
Swiss town of Semsales, in the canton of Fribourg: "The spirit in which Severini went to Semsales, in 1924, is that of a
man who wanted to draw from this occasion the opportunity for a social and collective, interdisciplinary, maybe medieval-type
experience, which of course would have emphasized his sincere belief in the
return to "craft", based on a know-how mediating between the treatise of Cennini and the pages on which Vasari
described the work of Renaissance artists, but also making treasure of
suggestions that came from craftsmen and ordinary house painters, or mosaicists,
(as had happened in Montegufoni) who were handing their secrets down from
father to son” [36].
[Unfortunately, due to copyright issues, images of the artworks by Gino Severini cannot be shown anymore in the new version of this article.]
NOTES
[1] Severini, Gino - La vita di un pittore, Con uno scritto di Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco (The
life of a painter, with a writing by Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco), Abscondita,
2008, 334 pages. The volume
brings together the two parts of the autobiography completed by Severini. The
first was Tutta la Vita di un Pittore
(The whole life of a painter) (Garzanti, 1946), the second was Tempo de «L’effort moderne» (The time of «L’effort moderne» ) (Vallecchi, 1968). The first joint
publication of the two parts was by Feltrinelli Publishers 1983.
[2] As
in many other cases of painters, who were overwhelmed by the events of history
(think of Paul Klee, who interrupted his memoirs in 1918, after having
participated in the Spartacus League and in the failed attempt to establish a
Soviet regime in Munich, or Emil Nolde, who withdrew and rewrote them after
having professed anti-Semitic and Nazi theses in the 1930s), also the memoirs
of Severini were incomplete, and were probably dictated by the need to offer to the public a new reading of life in the presence of sudden changes in the
course of politics. In 1942, during the war and still under fascism, he had
re-published the second edition of the Reasoning
on figurative art. Fascism fell in 1943. Between 1943 and 1946, the artist drafted
in Rome the first part of his own biography, culminating in 1917. The
publication in 1946, therefore, allowed him to offer to the public a new
reading of his biography, albeit incomplete, immediately after World War II.
Twenty years later Severini worked on a second phase, the one between 1918 and
1924. The last episode recalled in the second tome was his meeting with
Alexandre Cingria, which marked the start of the sacred art experience to which
is dedicated to this post. The autobiography does not entail, therefore, the Swiss
years and especially the thorny issue of his accession to Italian fascist
aesthetics as from the V Triennial Art Exhibition in Milan 1933.
[3] Severini, Gino – La vita di un pittore (quoted),
pp. 211-212.
[4] Severini, Gino - Dal cubismo al classicismo (From
cubism to classicism), edited by Elena Pontiggia, Milan, Abscondita, 2001, 130
pages. The French original
edition (available in internet: https://archive.org/stream/ducubismeauclass00seve#page/n7/mode/2up) was: Severini, Gino - Du cubisme au
classicisme : esthétique du compas et du nombre, Paris, J. Povolozky and C., 1921, 123 pages. The last French edition was 1931. The first Italian
translation was edited by Piero Pacini: Severini, Gino - From Cubism to
Classicism and other essays on the divine proportion and the golden number. By
Piero Pacini, Florence, Marchi e Bertolli, 1972, 258 pages. In 1993 a Spanish edition was edited by Francisco Javier San Martín and Alfonso Carmona
González. In 2001 it was also released an English translation (published
together with a second essay by Albert Gleizes): Gino Severini - From Cubism to
Classicism / Albert Gleizes - Painting and its Laws, Translation, introduction
and notes by Peter Brooke, Francis Boutle Publishers, London, 2001, 218 pages.
[5] Gino Severini, Dal cubismo al classicismo, (quoted),
p. 18.
[6] Calvesi, Maurizio – La regola di Severini (The
Severini rule), in Gino Severini dal 1916 al 1936, a cura di Marisa Vescovo,
catalogue of the exhibition in Alessandria, 24 April-14 June 1987, Il Quadrante
Edizioni, 1987, pp. 14-19.
[7] See also: Iamurri, Laura - Note Sulla Polemica Tra
Gino Severini e L’Esprit Nouveau (Note on the polemic between Gino Severini and
L’Esprit Nouveau), in: "L’Italia di Le Corbusier 1907-1965" di Marida
Talamona, Jean-Louis Cohen, Stanislaus Moos, Barbara Cinelli, Laura Iamurri, Giorgio
Ciucci, Romy Golan, Letizia Tedeschi, Bruno Reichlin, Paolo Nicoloso Et Al..,
Electa, Milano, pp. 232-239, 2012. Available in Internet: https://www.academia.edu/5498990/Note_sulla_polemica_tra_Gino_Severini_e_L_Esprit_Nouveau_
[8] Westheim,
Paul - Künstlerbekenntnisse:
Briefe, Tagebücher, Betrachtungen heutiger Künstler, Berlin, Propyläen, 1923, 359 pages, with 32 tables
and 16 drawings in the text.
[9] Both
texts of Severini and Gleizes, who were regularly in contact, were published by
Jacques Povolozsky (a Russian-Polish publisher and gallery owner who worked in
Paris in those years).
[10] Léger, Fernand - L'esthétique de la machine:
l'objet fabriqué, l'artisan et l'artiste, in : "Sélection", Year 3,
N.4, February 1924, pages 374-382.
[11] Vescovo, Marisa – Gino Severini: favola, teatro, e
fede per una committenza (Gino Severini: fairy tale, theater, and faith for
customers), in: Gino Severini dal 1916 al 1936, edited by Marisa Vescovo,
catalogue of the exhibition in Alessandria, 24 April -14 June 1987, Il
Quadrante Edizioni, 1987, pp. 20-34.
[12] See,
for example, a page of the 1921 essay "From Cubism to Classicism":
"With these eternal “means ",
based on the eternal laws of number, every era was able to create its own
style. When, during the Renaissance, the 'individual' began wanting to isolate
himself and elevate with respect to ground, the artist was able to assert his
personality and achieve originality, which, incidentally, was the beginning of
the decline. This is why to claim to invent new and necessarily empirical
means, under the guise of seeking novelty and originality, is a pure madness,
and to want to ignore each method based on science is just as absurd and
inconclusive." (Severini, Gino - From Cubism to classicism, (quoted),
p. 17). The same concept was repeated in the introduction to Reasoning on figurative art in 1935, where
he basically challenged the avant-garde expressionistic painters: "These are the reasons why most of the
average art works are based on temperament, which is inherent to the
individual, and therefore on a physical level, like 'enthusiasm' (which often
is interpreted as 'will') and of which one is not 'responsible'. These artists
are accused not to represent the social atmosphere of their time, but I think
generally that they rather excessively match this individualism, this
materialism of which we are saturated, and which are the extreme consequences
caused from the Renaissance." See Severini, Gino, Ragionamenti sulle
arti visive (Reasoning on figurative art), Second increased edition, Editore Ulrico
Hoepli., Milan, 1942, 299 pages, Quotation at pages XII-XIII.
[13] Severini, Gino - Ragionamenti sulle arti
figurative (Reasoning on figurative art), Milan, Editore Ulrico Hoepli, 1936,
270 pages.
[14] Severini, Gino, Ragionamenti, (…) quoted, 1942, p.
221.
[15] On
February 17, 1865 Mottez complained, in a programmatic letter on fresco
painting, that none of the paint shops in Paris was in a position to procure
the colours suitable for a fresco that could withstand moisture to an exterior
wall. See: Mottez, Victor - Lettre sur la peinture à fresque, in: Mémoires de
la Société des sciences, de l'agriculture et des arts de Lille, III Serie, 2°
Volume, pp. 721-729, Lille, Impr. de L. Danel, 1866.
[16] Rosenthal,
Léon -Les fresques de Mottez a Saint-Germain-L'Auxerrois, in: Bulletin de la
Société de l'Histoire de l'Art Français, 1913, Paris, Édouard Champion, pp.
20-21. See: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/bshaf1913/0027?sid=a2976d0911c9bb6500a72b3818e091b4
[17] Herbert
Robert L, Nature's workshop: Renoir's writings on the decorative art, New
Haven, Yale University Press, 2000, 278 pages.
[18] Aurier,
Gabriel-Albert - Le Symbolisme en Peinture: Paul Gauguin, in: Mercure de
France, N. 15, March 1891, pages 155-165
[19] Denis,
Maurice - Définition du Néo-traditionnisme (1890) in: Denis, Maurice - Théories,
1890-1910; du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique, Paris, L.
Rouart et J. Watelin, 1920
[20] Keserű
Katalin, Tumbász András - A
váci Karolina-kápolna és Körösfői-Kriesch Aladár, Arcus, 2013, 72 pages.
[21] Denis,
Maurice - Nouvelles théories sur l'art moderne, sur l'art sacré, 1914-1921,
Paris, L. Rouart et J. Watelin, 1922. See:
[22] Previati, La tecnica della pittura, Torino,
Fratelli Bocca Editore, 1905. 305
pagine. See: https://archive.org/stream/latecnicadellap00prevgoog#page/n0/mode/2up. The treaty was subject to new
regular publications until 1930 and, more recently, in 1990. See:
Previati, Gaetano - La tecnica della pittura, Milano, SugarCo, 1990, 386
pages.
[23] Cennini, Cennino - Il libro dell'arte. Edizione
riveduta e corretta sui codici (Book of the Art - revised edition on codes).
Edited by Renzo Simi, Lanciano, R. Carabba, 1913, 144 pages.
[24] See,
in chronological order: Memorie
dell’Antico nell’arte del Novecento (Memories of the antique in the
twentieth century), edited by Ornella Casazza and Riccardo Gennaioli, catalogue
of the exhibition at Palazzo Pitti, Florence, 14 March-12 July 2009, Florence,
Giunti, 288 pages; Anni ’30. Arti in
Italia oltre il fascismo (30s. Arts in Italy beyond fascism) edited by
Antonello Negri, catalogue of the exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 22
September 2012 – 27 January 2013, Firenze, Giunti, 253 pages; La seduzione dell’Antico. Da Picasso a Duchamp, da De Chirico a
Pistoletto (Seduction of the Antique. Picasso, Duchamp, De Chirico,
Pistoletto), edited by Claudio Spadoni, catalogue of the exhibition at the
Loggetta Lombardesca, Ravenna, 21 February-26 June 2016, Florence, Mandragora,
2016, 235 pages.
[25] Venturi, Lionello, Il gusto dei primitivi,
Bologna, Nicola Zanichelli editore, 1926, 328 pages.
[26] Longhi, Roberto, Piero della Francesca, Roma,
Valori Plastici, 1927, 193 pages.
[27] Longhi, Roberto - Piero della Francesca,
translated by Jean Chuzeville, Parigi, G. Crès and C., 1927, 207 pages.
[28] Longhi,
Roberto - Piero della Francesca, translated by Penlock, Londra and New York, F.
Warne and Co, 1930, 176 pages.
[29] Severini, Gino – La vita di un pittore (quoted), p.
260.
[30] Maritain,
Jacques, Art et scolastique, Paris, Librairie de l'art catholique, 1920, 188
pagine. English translation: Maritain, Jacques, The Philosophy of Art: Being
"Art Et Scholastique", translated by John O'Connor, Londra, St.
Dominic's Press, 1923, 182 pages.
[31] Please see two recent articles: Jones, Zoë Marie -'Spiritual crisis and the 'call to order': the early aesthetic writings of Gino Severini and Jacques Maritain', in: Word and Image, 2010, pages 59 — 67 and Grace, Justine - The Spirit of Collaboration: Gino Severini, Jacques Maritain, Anton Luigi Gajoni and the Roman Mosaicists, in: text theory critique 22, 2011, pagine 89-112. (http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/wp-content/arts-files/colloquy/colloquy_issue_twenty-two/grace.pdf)
[32] Benzi, Fabio – Gino Severini. Le opera monumentali
(Gino Severini. The monumental works), in: Gino Severini. Affreschi, mosaici,
decorazioni monumentali, 1921-1941, Catalogue of the exhibition at the Galleria
Arco Farnese, Roma, 12 May – 30 May 1992, Leonardo-De Luca Editori, 1992, p.
119. Quotation at page 12.
[33] Il carteggio Gino Severini – Jacques Maritain
(1923 - 1966), Edited by Giulia Radin, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di
Trento e Rovereto, vol. 14, 2011 - 298 pages
[34] Correspondence Gino Severini – Jacques Maritain
(1923 - 1966), Édition établie,
présentée et annotée par Giulia Radin, Museo di arte moderna e
contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, vol. 14, 2011, 304 pages.
[35] Maritain
Jacques, - Gino Severini, Paris, Gallimard, 1930, 63 pages.
[36] Vescovo, Marisa – Gino Severini: favola…
(quoted), p. 30.
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