Studi di Memofonte 16/2016. [Proceedings of the seminar "Treaties and recipe books for colours. A methodology of study in the field of humanities."]. Part One: Methodological Issues

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro

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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

Logo of the Memofonte Foundation, established by Paola Barocchi in 2000.

The reason for a title

I would like to apologize, straight from the beginning, with the editors of the latest issue of the Journal Studi di Memofonte, released in July 2016 (you can read it free by clicking here), and with the authors of the essays presented in the same issue, as I felt the need to allocate a single title to the entire volume (almost 400 pages), in order to somehow unify all contributions. I got inspiration from what written by Simona Rinaldi in her introduction: "The contributions published here were presented at the seminar «Treaties and recipe books for colours. A methodology of study in the field of humanities», organized as part of the activities promoted by the SISCA (Italian Society for the History of Art Criticism) [...] and held [...] at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies of the Polytechnic of Milan"(p. 1).

Ms Rinaldi adds that the main purpose of the seminar consisted of the presentation of a series of annotated editions of unpublished recipe books or, if published, of texts still deprived until now of a critical apparatus worthy of the name. The critical editions were derived from the master theses of a group of young scholars, which were jointly inspired by the use of the same methodological approach.

And here one should immediately clarify: this really amazing issue of Studi di Memofonte is specifically divided into two parts: the first (which includes the first 130 pages) is devoted to the illustration of the method with which, according to the editors, one must approach the study of recipe books; the second concerns the critical illustration of individual texts, with their transcription, their Italian translation and a commentary. The analysis refers to a group of writings about the techniques of book decoration, from illumination to rubrication, encompassing recipes on one single colour and mixed ones.

Studi di Memofonte: Frontcover of  no. 16/2016 

Methodological issues

Why insist so much on questions of method? First of all in order to claim that the study of recipes permits to identify a real separate literate genre, that includes types, structures, rhetorical structures, and different users. The development of laboratory instruments – one would understand between the lines – has been dangerously causing (especially outside Italy) the creation of huge databases that contain the individual requirements of recipes, where the latter are regarded as they were the many pieces of a mosaic, without taking account of when, how and why that mosaic was produced. The idea that the recipe books constitute the most direct evidence of what was done in medieval workshops and simply by way of experimental replication we can reach substantially similar results (especially for restoration purposes) is, in itself, an approach that was born in the nineteenth century, with the revival of the Middle Ages, and that united all main experts, as well as the large "hunters" of manuscripts (starting with Mary Philadelphia Merrifield). To replicate today the same vision of the world, simply benefiting of a much larger sample of data and more powerful analytical tools, can be a mistake. There is a previous stage that cannot be neglected, and that is a philological approach to the text; one that allows you to reveal the steps taken to achieve the materiality of a particular manuscript, to grasp the tradition from which it is drawn, what was the profession of the probable author or editor, and what was the final public. Without this type of analysis - write Baroni and Travaglio – one may run the risk of incurring outrageous mistakes, like for instance taking the view "that the Compositiones Lucenses are the 'monument of the treatises of medieval art', «the oldest of the manuals which the High Middle Ages devoted to the art of making art», whereas they were only a valuable but – due to the confused transmission – still messed testimony of the Latin translation of a Hellenistic source, which was in origin perfectly organized and coherent. [...] Even the Mappae clavicula is everything except a medieval text: this title, which is in fact the result of an inaccurate translation from Greek, hides a commentary on Alexandrian works of alchemy, also translated into Latin in the end of the ancient world" (p. 18). One needs only to recall that Baroni and Travaglio were the curators of the recent edition of Mappae clavicula, which has been extensively reviewed on this blog.

In essence, what linguists have of course given for granted for centuries, namely that our language is of ancient origin, Greek or Roman, despite fractures and upheavals of history, and that a series of countless transformations over the millennia has transformed it as it stands today, is hardly applied to the recipe books in history of the art techniques. The "recipe" as such is considered a medieval invention, while in reality it is, more often, the reworking of much more ancient texts, from which of course one must be able to distinguish the more innovative and modern inputs.

It is certainly not the case here to browse across all the pages dedicated to the methodology (which, however, should be read with great attention), but it is nevertheless worthy to delineate some milestones.

The first is to make a first distinction between treatises and recipe books. The term 'treatise' means an authored writing that is presumed to give personal contributions to the study of a field; 'recipe books', to the contrary, are "collections which assembly and organise recipes drawn mainly from other sources" (p. 25). It follows that the ‘treatises’ are typically a subset of the ‘recipe books’, which collect compilations of various type. In theory, there might be treatises made of a single recipe (and, in concrete, some of the essays discuss treatises composed of two recipes only). These compilations, due to an infinite number of situations, ranging from human mistakes in the transcription to the change in the page order of the files, or the deliberate reworking of previous materials, may, at first sight, appear as totally inconsistent, as to be called "formless recipe books". But their lack of form is nothing else but synonymous with disorder. The task of a philological examination is nothing more than to "restore order" to the recipes, outlining the original structure, and (if possible) the possible derivation.

In this sense, it can help to make a distinction between chronological recipe books (in which the material from two or more manuscripts is written one after the other, generally for private use), thematic recipe books (with the original preparation of a number of booklets equal to the number of the topics, and the inclusion in each tome of uniform recipes by subject, originating from different witnesses), or, finally, interpolated recipe books (with the systematic - and consistent - merger between materials of different manuscripts).

Of course, there are also many other phenomena of which one should take account: for example, the formation of "heads" or "tails" as part of each booklet, or the subsequent addition of material that is written in the blank spaces of the manuscript. Very often the booklets had originally a blank initial and final page to avoid the risk that the text could be damaged due to accidental causes. In successive moments, such spaces may have been used due to paper shortage. Imagine what can happen when a thematic recipe book, made up of many files, has as many heads and many queues as his files are; and how complex it becomes to follow what happened, if the files are disrupted, and some have been even destroyed etc. 

Palazzo Vettori-Barocchi, headquarters of the Memofonte Foundation in Florence.
Source: http://www.memofonte.it/

The decoration of books

With reference to the decoration of books, it is important, first of all, to distinguish between genres. It is immediately natural, in these cases, to speak outright of miniature treatises. In reality, the illumination (which provides for the use of the brush to decorate a page) is only one of these kinds. In particular, we can distinguish (p. 62):

• (i) treatises on calligraphy and writing, which have more to do with the creation and use of inks, and which have an "expanded" public including clerks and scribes; 
• (ii) treatises on chrysography, argyrography and purple codes, i.e. for writing with gold or silver ink on purple. Purple was used since ancient times as an aid to writing, even if it experienced a progressive decline with the pace of the centuries; 
• (iii) treatises on rubrication: they have to do with the custom of decorating books especially in red to highlight initials and titles. The rubrication is operated with a pen, and not a brush, and not coincidentally treatises on rubrication are distinguished by a different lexicon (which has to do with writing, and not with painting); they also provide instructions on preparation of a few colours (at most four), because few were the colours that were used for this purpose; 
• (iv) treatises on illumination: the brush plays here a very relevant role and expands the range of colours and pigments of the investigations;
• (v) treatises on one colour only: these are writings dedicated to recognize and work a single pigment. The instructions included in them suggest that, rather than being elaborated in a craftsman's workshop, they were due to professionals who, starting roughly from the time of the Crusades, were involved in the commerce between Europe and the East of pigments like lapis lazuli for the realization of ultramarine blue;
• (vi) mixing tables: "requirements of this type were born from the need to avoid mixtures of pigments designed to produce alterable colours and probably had an ancestral form (or prototype) in the late antique Greek-speaking world [...]. Despite being associated with any other materials [...], these mixing tables can be considered a literary genre in its own right, as they appear frequently either independently or merged with other works [...]. It is also conceivable that these tables have had the function to standardize the executions within the same scriptorium or copying area, where various operators could alternate themselves at the decoration of a voluminous code and where, therefore, the need could be felt to standardize the different executions"(p. 72).

The individual manuscripts

Once treated the methodological part (certainly in a much more complete way than I did here), the work proceeds with the review of the manuscript. The choice - as stated by Simona Rinaldi - was not accidental: "We wanted to sort the texts from an example of continuity with the late antiquity tradition (see Sandro Baroni’s essay on ‘De generibus colorum et de colorum commixtione ' and his notes on the Faventino interpolation), then continuing with the examination of miniature treatises (Paola Travaglio, the 'Liber colorum secundum magistrum Bernardum': a thirteenth century treatise on miniature; Gaia Caprotti, The Liber de coloribus qui ponuntur in carta’), which should be kept separate from the treatises on rubrification (Paola Travaglio, “'Tractatus aliquorum colorum: an example of a rubrification treatise in an interpolated recipe book”; Isabella della Franca, ‘Modus preparandi colores pro scribendo’; Sandro Baroni,'Capitulum de coloribus ad scribendum’': a discussion of rubrification of Saxon tradition; Isabella della Franca, 'Color sic fit') and the mixed treatments (Sandro Baroni,'De clarea'), finally concluding with a large number of testimonies dedicated to a single colour, choosing in particular the precious ultramarine blue (Micaela Mander, “Treatises on one color: the alchemy of the thirteenth century by Paolo from Taranto and Michele Scoto at the origins of the texts on refining the ultramarine blue”; Sandro Baroni, Giuseppe Pizzigoni, ‘Capitulum ad faciendum lazurium ultramarinum'; Micaela Mander, “'Pastellus fit isto modo’: a discussion tied to the ultramarine blue”; Paola Travaglio, “‘Ad faciendum azurrum’: some examples of discussion on ultramarine blue in the Recipe book of Pseudo-Savonarola”; Marika Manciullo, “To produce ultramarine blue: a discussion on ultramarine in the 'Segreti diversi' (Florence, National Central Library, ms. Palatino 857)" (p. 1).

In the second (and final) part of this review we will talk briefly about each of the writings in question.

End of Part One

Go to Part Two