Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro
Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION
Studi di Memofonte No 16/2016
[Proceedings of the seminar "Treatises and recipe books for colours. A methodology of study in the field of humanities."]
Milan, December 6, 2013]
Florence, Foundation Memofonte, 2016
Part Two: Treatises and Recipe-books
Isabella della Franca
‘Modus preparandi colores pro scribendo’
Studi di Memofonte No 16/2016
[Proceedings of the seminar "Treatises and recipe books for colours. A methodology of study in the field of humanities."]
Milan, December 6, 2013]
Florence, Foundation Memofonte, 2016
Part Two: Treatises and Recipe-books
 |
| The Illuminated Letter P in the Bible of Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, England Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Sandro Baroni
'De generibus colorum et de colorum commixtione'. A few notes on the interpolation of Faventinus
'De generibus colorum et de colorum commixtione'. A few notes on the interpolation of Faventinus
 |
| Abstract of the essay |
The case of
the manuscript in question - or rather of a family of thirteen manuscripts that
testify to the interpolation of Faventinus’ text - is one of those where the
derivation from the ancient Roman content of the work is manifest. In the third
century d.c. Marcus Cetius Faventinus wrote an agile and little book that could
be called a summary (technically it is an epitome) of the De Architectura by Vitruvius. A family of manuscripts (of which the
parent seems to be preserved with signature Ludwig XII.5 at the manuscript section
of the Paul Getty Museum) displays an interpolation, with a text of a
technical-artistic nature structured in two sections: De generibus colorum (On the types of colours) and De colorum commixtione (On the mixture
of colours). It is of particular interest because the organisation of colours
proposes Aristotelian theories (according to which the main colours are
white and black) that testify to the resumption of these chromatic categories
in the Middle Ages (so much so that, in the case of the Getty manuscript, a
dating to the first half of the twelfth century is proposed). Among the
thirteen witnesses come down to us, in six cases we know the place where they
were copied and preserved: they were Cistercian abbeys located in an area
between northern France and southern England. Obviously, Faventinus’ writing
was considered functional to the building rules of the Cistercian order;
moreover, the interpolated recipes must have also been perfectly fitting with
their spiritual views (it should be remembered that the Cistercians were in
conflict with the Benedictines, as the former rediscovered and promoted a renewed
sober monastic-style against the latter). "The insertion of the two prescriptions
in question should be therefore framed in the prevailing line of gold imitation
without effectively making use of the precious metal. In fact, the first
describes the golden glow that can be obtained by superimposing saffron to a well-burnished
tin leaf [...]. The second, which is instead aiming at writing, explains how to
use the powder of gold or (and especially for us) that of copper, by applying
it with parchment glue, and then browning it up to obtain the gloss of the metallization"(p.
137).
Paola Travaglio
 |
| Abstract of the essay. |
Paola Travaglio
had already offered a critical edition of the “Book of colours according to
Bernarde” in 2008. A new edition has been made necessary by the discovery of a fourth
witness of the work at the Yale University, in addition to the three conserved
in Milan, Modena and Oxford. Nobody has the slightest idea of who "master Bernardo" may have been. To be precise, a witness attributes to him the authorship
of the work, a second even notes that the books of "Master Bernardo"
were four; the two others are silent. Against what know today, the most likely hypothesis
it is that Bernardo wrote this treatise in 1200 and then, later on, additional material
was added, which has been attributed later on to the same author simply by
contiguity argument.
"The
comparison of the witnesses shows that the Book
of colours was composed of little more than fifty recipes related to the illumination
techniques and had a coherent, rigorous and well-structured text [...].
Bernardo’s recipes describe, in most cases, how to temper and untemper pigments,
but not how to prepare them. This means that the raw materials were already
available, or that the author lived in an environment where he could easily
obtain them" (pp. 155-156). On the other hand, the lack of interest for
the treatment of blue, the uncertainty in the nomenclature with which it is
called, and finally the absence of any references to ultramarine light blue and
azurite suggest that the Treaty was drafted before these colours were spread
around 1200.
The Book of the colours which are placed on paper is a treatise on illumination which is contained in the second part
of a manuscript written by a same person in the sixteenth century (preserved
with signature 1195 at the National Library of Turin). In fact, it not clear to
which literary genre this text belongs, especially because of the frequent
interpolations that make it difficult to interpret it. On the one hand (as the
previous Liber colorum by master Bernardo)
there is very little attention to the preparation of the pigments and the focus
is rather on how to temper them, making it likely that the author did not
have the need to produce them, but it only did use of them. On the other hand,
two elements are characteristic: the brevity of the provided recipes and the
reference to colours in the abstract sense (white, black, green, red, and blue),
while in fact, in medieval times, it was most frequent to classify colours mentioning
the colouring agent that was at their base (indigo colour, brazil colour, etc.).
One of the hypotheses put forward by the authoress (who believes that the text was
originally laid out in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century in an Italian-speaking
region) is that the treaty, while having different purposes, was possibly
derived from a tabula colorum, i.e. from
"a kind of word list, a list of lexical forms indicating different colours,
for each of which the following elements are listed: synonyms or equivalent
terms in different languages, the etymology and the geographical location" (p.
210). The author of the text seems to have been a cultivated man, more a theorist
than a skilled craftsman, although the use and sometimes misuse of the Latin
prevent it from qualifying him a true writer (but here it is always possible
that mistakes were made by those who subsequently copied the original text).
Paola Travaglio
'Tractatus aliquorum
colorum'. An example of a treatise on rubrication in an interpolated recipe book |
| Abstract of the essay |
The Tractatus aliquorom colorum is part of
the ms. Antonelli 861 (better known as Antonelli Notebook), preserved at the Ariostea Library of Ferrara. The Antonelli Notebook has already been published
in 1993 in a version that the authoress elegantly did not explicitly criticise,
but which she evidently did not consider either as sufficiently accurate. The
Antonelli Notebook is a classic example of an interpolated recipe book, within
which it is possible to identify a short treatise on rubrication. "If one only
considers Latin prescriptions on colours [...], imagining to extract them from
the recipe book, one can recognize a coherent and well-structured text, with an
introduction [...] and dedicated to a specific topic: the decoration of the
manuscripts with a pen or rubrification, i.e. the execution of headings and
titles, as well as the enrichment of the watermarked capital letters and initial
letters" (p. 235). Consistent with this literary genre is the fact that
only a few colours are taken into account (red, blue and gold) with the obvious
predominance of red. The original date of the Treaty is brought back by the
curator to Mid-1300. Note how some recipes (especially in their interpolation
in the vernacular language) find correspondence with other well-known texts,
especially with recipes by Bartolomeo from Siena and Ser Pietro da Siena
preserved at the Intronati Library of Siena and in a recently discovered
manuscript at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (ms. lat. 18515).
‘Modus preparandi colores pro scribendo’
On this
text we are displaying hereafter the abstract: "The treatise on rubrication entitled
Modus preparandi colores pro scribendo,present at fol. 49 of the ms. 1939 in the Biblioteca Statale of Lucca,
is made up of two long and articulate recipes regarding the
red and blue pigments. The presence of these only colours is a clear
evidence of the purpose of the text, devoted to the making of decorated initials made woth pen. The analysis and trascription of the work, with Italian translation, is preceded by a wide and detailed classification of the other texts preserved in the manuscript."
.
Sandro Baroni
 |
| Abstract of the essay |
The treatise
'Capitulum de coloribus ad scribendum' is located within the Additional manuscript
41486 of the British Library in London. The title of the text is a proposal by
Sandro Baroni. In fact, the treaty lacks any introduction and (of course) also
any titration. In many ways, it is easy to recognize the characteristics of a
treatise on rubrication: few colours are taken into account, the verbs used
have to do with writing and not with painting, the instructions involve a
different untempering of some pigments according to the seasons (the atmospheric
temperature of rooms affects the fluidity of the ink). The author placed
chronologically the short text in the years between the twelfth century and the
fourth decade of the thirteenth century. For the purposes of the location of
the production area, he also notes the presence of lemmas with a Saxon origin. He
points out, however, that, at the end of the twelfth century, the Saxon was no
longer the language of a well-contained geographical area. "We can
tentatively place the genesis of our text in an area that historically
encompassed the southern and south eastern coasts of Britain, and the original
northern European regions between the Elbe, the Weser and the Eider rivers. In
fact, the language was broadly used on the northwest coast of Germany and in
Denmark where Saxon peoples precisely lived. But towards the end of the twelfth
century, the area occupied by Saxon peoples included a wider strip of the
Germanic lowlands, between the lower Rhine and the middle and lower Elbe. It is
precisely to this broader area that we have to think of"(p. 281), also by
virtue of the fact that parts of the same work appear in a trilingual manuscript
(German, Bohemian and Latin) preserved in Prague.
 |
| Abstract of the essay |
“Color sic fit” is also a short rubrication treatise, which was included
within the 1939 manuscript of the State Library of Lucca. It shows, however,
contents which are in some way abnormal compared to the genre, beginning with
the first recipe, in which, respecting the Aristotelian hierarchy of colours,
it first discusses the white and the black, and then goes to brazil (hence, in
essence, to red), green and blue. Cinnabar is missing, and it is so strange
that the author can explain it only with a possible loss occurred during the
transcription of a copy. The author of the treatise does not seem to know (and
then cannot draw from) the previous literature and seems to write independently
from it. "It could be a college student or player, a doctor or a notary,
as well as anyone who also carries occasionally to rubricate and decorate
texts that copy for his own accounts and probably for his own use" (p.
286).
 |
| Abstract of the essay. |
Among all
treaties presented within this issue of Studi di Memofonte, De clarea is certainly the best known, and also the
most analysed. It suffices to say that the first edition dates back to 1873, by
Hermann Hagen, and after four further editions, also an Italian version was
published in 2004. Baroni has however an attitude of disdain and discomfort vis-à-vis
it, assessing not only its weakness, but also proving the often verbatim debt
to previous comments in other languages. De
clarea has a specific characteristic: it exists in only one witness, kept at
the Berne Municipal Library with signature A 91.17. The existence of a single
copy (at least for now) proves, first of all, that the text was not publicly
circulating (or had only a very narrow circulation, being limited for example
to the same circuit of production of manuscripts). Moreover, this uniqueness also
complicates our task, because there is no possibility to supplement the
shortcomings of the text with the help of other witnesses.
The
manuscript has survived mutilated, on a fragment of five folios of parchment.
It is strange - says Baroni - that until now the De clarea has been discussed in terms of a treatise on illumination,
while, obviously, what remains is rather a treatise on rubrication, referring
to the use of the pen and not the brush. In this context, it must be added that
the author of the treatise (who wrote in a good Latin) demonstrates distinctive
knowledge and specific interest not so much for the preparation of pigments,
but for the auxiliary technical material, such as binders, the flabellum and the
writing table. "He want to ensure the transmission of the know-how on how
to realize the letters, knowing that there are essential factors for the
perfect outcome of rubrication, such as the viscosity of the binder, the
porosity of the surface and its inclination, and the cleaning of the clay membrane.
These are the accessory conditions, in short, that determine the application of
colour through a tool like a pen" (p. 303).
In the last
few lines of the text fragment which came to us, the author (who was also
called Anonymous Bernense with an entirely misleading indication: it is the
manuscript that is located in Bern, not the author who came from there)
indicates that, in the following text, he will speak instead of aspects related
to the "pictura" and therefore aspects related to the illumination
(and no longer to the rubrication). Thus, it appears that, originally, the De clarea may have been a
"mixed" treatise, where both rubrication and illumination were taken
into consideration. Unfortunately, to date, the second part is missing.
I am
quoting the abstract: "The paper is a sort of introduction to
the section devoted to the texts about blue ultramarine: first, it is given a definition of blue lapislazzuli, and the terms of its diffusion are presented; second, the text forms' classification of colour's recipes are emphasised; then the paper tries to
put in order the texts, both in Latin and in Italian vernacular, about blue ultramarine that are presented in the section, The paper aims also to underline the general question of Alchemy, as a basis for this kind of production: that is why the paper is concluded by the transcription and the translation in modern Italian of a fragment text attributable to Paolo di Taranto, such a source for the following texts."
More specifically,
it can be said with good reason that blue ultramarine (which
originated from Afghanistan) and the azurite (discovered around 1240 in the
copper mines of Saxony) are the two great "inventions" in the field
of medieval blue, so as to allow us to date the recipe books that include or do
not include them. In general, as the author writes citing Sandro Baroni:
"All cases where the blue shades are not mentioned, or are in a laconic
and secluded way from the adopted chromatic hierarchy, belong, most likely, to the
High Middle Ages, where the blue colour was not the focus of interest, being
not available as a commodity [...]. The lapis lazuli is virtually unknown in
use, before the Crusades and the formation of the Christian kingdoms in the East" (p. 317). For its imports Venetian merchants played a leading role.
 |
| Abstract of the essay |
One of the
oldest witnesses on the use of the blu ultramarine seems to be the 'Capitulum ad faciendum lazurium ultramarinum', which is at the end of the manuscript Additional
41486 of the British Library in London, already quoted when talking about the 'Capitulum de coloribus to scribendum'.
Normally, in the recipe books on the ultramarine, the viscous mixture that is
used to extract the mineral (the lazurite) from the lapis lazuli is called pastel
(or pastillum in Latin). Here, however, it is not the pastel to be mentioned,
but the “poma de ista goma” ("bullets
of this rubber"). A precise term that defines the object in itself is
therefore still missing. According to Baroni and Pizzigoni, the fragment (a
single recipe) is from an earlier time than the Mid-fourteenth century.
 |
| Abstract of the essay |
'Pastellus fit isto modo' is a single, long prescription that is to be
found, well detached from the other materials, within the ms Canonici Misc. 128
of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. As the title explains (which is nothing but
the beginning of the recipe) it is a prescription (in Latin) on the creation of
pastel required to extract the mineral from the lapis lazuli. Interestingly, it
seems to have triggered subsequent treatises in vernacular as ‘A fare l’azuro oltramarino vero e perfecto
ad ogni paranghone’ (now at the Town Library of Lodi ms. XXI 32),
which is transcribed in the essay. "Our text seems to be extracted from a
broader Latin composition, where the proceedings had to look better
contextualized. This composition had to definitely represent, along with
others, the systematization of the first processes to refine the product,
translated or described by alchemical circles that bring together the names of
Michele Scoto and Paolo da Taranto, certainly involved in the first dissemination
of the proceedings. It is thus believed that, thanks to translations from
Arabic science, the selective purification process of lapis lazuli entered the
West around the middle of the thirteenth century, following the substantial
import of materials, through the Christian kingdoms of the East, the Crusades
and a rejuvenated maritime exchange with the markets of Islamized countries.
Paola Travaglio
‘Ad faciendum azurrum’: some examples of discussions on blue ultramarine in the Recipe Book of Pseudo-Savonarola
 |
| Abstract of the essay |
The Recipe Book of Pseudo-Savonarola is
preserved with signature ms. Cl.II.147 at the Ariostea Library of Ferrara.
Subject of previous partial editions, it is called the Pseudo-Savonarola
because it was (incorrectly) attributed, in the early nineteenth century, to the
doctor and humanist Michele Savonarola. For long time, it was considered a
"formless recipe book" or a set of prescriptions without rhyme or
reason. To the contrary, Paola Travaglio points out that it is a classic case
of thematic recipe book where individual files had ended up in disorder.
"Once we understand this mechanism, we can find in the recipe book some
textual portions which are traceable to known works or are real prescriptions
mixed with other literary materials. Dwelling only on sections of the
manuscript about the blue ultramarine [...], in the Ferrara recipe book at
least two short texts related to the genre of the 'treatises for a single colour'
can be identified, one in Latin (Ad
faciendum azurrum et cognoscendum locum ubi nascitur) and the other in the vernacular (Modo di fare azuro oltramarino)" (p. 341). By itself, the lead author of
the manuscript appears to be a man of culture, with a good knowledge of Latin
and capable to draw from a number of different sources. Hence the hypothesis
that the recipe book of Pseudo-Savonarola was originally the prototype of a
study manual; a kind of textbook, in short, where the author had divided
thematically recipes originating from various other writings, arranging them
according to his own order of priority. From this point of view, the
Pseudo-Savonarola reveals similarities with another famous recipe book known
since the mid nineteenth century, the Bolognese
Manuscript displayed by Mary Philadelphia Merrifield in her Original Treatises (1849). The similarity
is not only in the structure: in the Bolognese
manuscript appears a vernacular translation of the Ad faciendum azurrum et cognoscendum locum ubi nascitur. To note
that just in the first section in Latin "the author also warns the reader
of the existence of minerals from Trabzon that are sold as lapis lazuli: To
prevent fraud, he suggests a functional test to recognize the original stone from
imitations" (p. 352). These recommendations probably do not originate from
the world of craft workshops, but from those mercantile circles, where to recognize
the real from the fake material was a fundamental prerequisite.
Marika Minciullo
‘A fare azurro oltramarino’: a discussion on the ultramarine in Segreti diversi (Florence, Biblioteca
Nazionale Centrale, ms. Palatino 857) |
| Abstract of the essay |
'A far azurro oltramarino' is a treatise in the vernacular included in the Diverse Secrets, which is reported in the
Palatine manuscript 857 at the National Central Library of Florence. "The
text provides a professional processing of the ultramarine for large quantities
and almost continuous production. The expected large purchases of semi-precious
stone requires making use of considerable capital for the time; the absence of
any application mode in painting would seem to rule out that the author is a
painter, but rather a clever transformer operating in a context where it appears
possible to purchase and trade the product on a large scale. In this sense, one
might think either of a member of a religious order, such as that of the Jesuates,
or of somebody working in a big apothecary placed in a prominent centre. The
text appears in fact comparable to similar treatises that we know written by
authors who work within religious orders, as in the case of the A fare l’azurro oltramarino vero e perfecto
ad ogni paranghone, written by a Jesuate, and even the composite work by
the Carmelite Father Baffo" (p. 384). The authoress adds that the work possibly
belong to the eldest treatises on the ultramarine, because it contemplates the
working of pastel with two sticks (not just one), a fact which is mentioned
only in the works of Cennino Cennini, in the Pseudo Savonarola and in other
writings, all following the mid-fourteenth century.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento