Francesco Mazzaferro. The Anonymous Hungarian Translation of Cennino Cennini: an Update

CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION

Francesco Mazzaferro
The Anonymous Hungarian Translation of Cennino Cennini: an Update

Fig. 1) The two copies of the translation preserved at the library of the University of Fine Arts (MKE) in Budapest

In this blog we have already dedicated two posts to an anonymous translation of Cennino Cennini’s handbook, with the Italian title Trattato della Pittura (Treatise on Painting) on the cover page. Today, I am updating the readers on the latest findings.

On January 7, 2014 [1] my brother reported the news of the existence of four copies of the translation, two of which were reported in the library of the University of Fine Arts in Budapest (once called Academy of Fine Arts, than denominated University in 1971 and known as MKE since 2001) and two were available for purchase on the antiquarian market in the same city. One of the antiquarian web sites dated the text back to 1988 [2], while the other offered no date, but displayed on its web site an interesting quote from the introduction [3]. The online catalogue of the library at the MKE did not contain any indication on the date nor on the author of the translation. On 25 February of that year, I reported the purchase of one of the copies available in an antiquarian shop in the Hungarian capital, discovering that it was a booklet of 131 pages, binding photocopies of a typewritten text, indeed without any indication of the date and the author of the translation.

Fig. 2) The reading room of the MKE library in Budapest

On 14 June 2016, I had the opportunity to visit the library of the MKE, and I found the two copies of public property in their shelves. Their features were extremely similar to the one held today in the Mazzaferro Library (clearly, these are three copies of the same publication).

Fig. 3) The first page of the sample held at the Mazzaferro Library, with the signing of possession by Zsolnay Krisztina

By consulting the electronic archives of the University of Fine Arts (which offers, on the web, the list of all the students enrolled since 1871 to date), I also managed to find out that the possession signature contained in the copy of the Mazzaferro Library was the one of Krisztina Zsolnay [4], who studied there between 1973 and 1978, specializing in the conservation of medieval paintings. I also found on the internet numerous typewritten publications produced in the Budapest academic circles during the 1970s, which revealed clear similarities in the layout. I therefore believe that the booklet was created within the MKE, probably in the second half of the Seventies of the twentieth century.

Fig. 4) From the annual report of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1978.
Source: https://library.hungaricana.hu/en/view/MTAKonyvtarKiadvanyai_MBEJ_1978/?pg=6&layout=s

Fig. 5) Reports of the Council of the University of Fine Arts, 1971-1972.
Source: https://library.hungaricana.hu/en/view/BME_ET_1971-1972/?pg=0&layout=s

The two samples preserved at the Library of Fine Arts were recorded by the administration in September 1991 with the mark Lt. 33.689. A very kind librarian, however, explained that this was the date of the restructuring of the library catalogue, and all pre-existing volumes of which did not exist a certain date have been included in the IT system by referring to that date. In short, when the library catalogue was restructured, none of the librarians knew with certainty when the translation had been completed.

Fig. 6) The recording of one of the two copies at the MKE Library

The fiches in the two books indicate that one of the two copies was given in loan between 1995 and 1998 and the other between 2000 and 2009 [5]. It can therefore be concluded that, after the Seventies, the Budapest students and scholars have continued to make use of the publication over forty years. Since 2012, a new and more modern translation of Cennino’s text has become available in Hungarian. His author was András Heitler, who entered the University of Fine Arts in 1996, got there a conservation graduation in 2001 and continued his studies with a doctorate between 2007 and 2010, becoming a professor in the conservation department. This may explain why the last loan of the previous anonymous translation turned out to be 2009.

Fig. 7) The loan fiches in the two copies of MKE Library

Although the typewritten text was carried out in the MKE in the seventies, the original text must evidently have been drafted much before. Very probably, it existed (and possibly still exists in the archives of the University) a manuscript that was drafted (like the typewritten text) according to the spelling rules in force in Hungarian before 1954.

Fig. 8) Sandor Nagy, Lake at Szentjakab, 1908

  

The introduction of the anonymous translator offers other pieces of information to try to date the translation. That's how it reads (the translation from Hungarian is by Eva Harangozo):

“There is no serious reference book on painting, in which you would not find repeatedly the sentence: "Also Cennini wrote...". Unfortunately, most of the time these references and quotations are not accurate, and sometimes they are even conflicting. At the Gödöllő school, Körosföi Krisch and Sandor Nagy made reference to the past standards of high quality painting. They did it, first of all, to eliminate any German influence on naturalistic impressionism, and second to re-establish the tradition of Hungarian murals. The Cennini methods and recipes can be rediscovered - through their artistic work - in their paintings. As a college professor, Sandor Nagy handed over to generations of painters the traditions from Cennini’s times, like tempera painting, gesso basis design, but did not follow exactly the way the master from Padua wrote more than five hundred years ago.

There are obviously several reasons for this. One of the principal is that the German translation, which was used in Gödöllő, was neither accurate nor complete. Moreover, their own experience gained from other methods originating elsewhere; the materials used by Cennini were not anymore available, and sometimes there were mistakes in trying to replace them (for instance, concerning the gypsum death).

More than twenty years ago, I managed to get the most complete edition of Cennini 's book in Rome, which is one of the many foreign and domestic technical books on painting, which I very thoroughly read, in order to learn all sectors of painting in my profession, including gilding and preparing tempera. If you try to learn Cennini’s book in theory and practice, it is like if you wanted to drink the purest ancient potion, from which you wanted to become a scientist possessing all secrets of painting. Of course, much better and more developed techniques exist now even for tempera preparation, even if we omit the use of plastic tempera to glue together binding agents. (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 we also benefit from new and better techniques of plastic binding agents, fitting well with today’s new existing plastic walls.

Fig. 9) Sandor Nagy, Ave Myriam, 1904

I have read more complete and better books than the Libro dell'Arte, but not nicer or more beautiful and also not more enlightening. Andrea Cennini [sic] from Colle di Valdensa [sic] limits himself to describe the craft profession, and only in the preface writes about art, but what is written there (if we are taking away a little bit the old dust) is essentially still shining the same way in which he shined at his time. The love, as he is writing about his profession, is perfectly timely and for all of us it is still a must - not only for us artists, but for all workers.

The recipes did not fall into disuse at all. The new efforts of modern painting to make the surfaces interesting, to work out a big diversity of results, was not unknown to quattrocento masters either. "The production technique" of surfaces (including gypsum relief, bronzing, etching, gilding, colouring in silver, using tin foil) are described in long chapters, in Cennini’s careful and detailed explanatory style.

What to love in and what to use from Cennini’s work is ultimately a matter for the reader to decide. I felt it was my duty to translate this work to give an opportunity to my fellow artists and those people who are increasingly interested in art, in order to know the true Cennini not only from quotations and references, but in its completeness. To be seen are: his own beautiful naivety on the creation of the world, calling for help from among others St. Luke, the first Christian painter; his description of drawing, painting, panel-painting of altarpieces, gilding, gypsum relieving, banner painting, forming of gypsum and finally using different artifices and techniques.

I am sure that the readers will hear that the voice of master of Padua’s is addressing today’s world as I have also heard it, when I had Il Libro dell'Arte in my hand for the first time. And they will not only hear it, but also love to use Cennini’s words, the oldest Christian book on painting.”

Fig. 10) Sandor Nagy, Double portrait, 1907

  

It is quite evident from the above that the text was not translated to help teaching the restoration techniques to students, but it was the work of a painter writing to support the work of his colleagues.

Fig. 11) Rauscher Alajos, Royal Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, 1871. Budapest, photo dated 1920

From a temporal point of view, the introduction defines three phases: the time when the translation was performed, the time at which the Italian text was acquired in Rome, the moment when the techniques inspired by Cennini got widely spread in Hungary.

Fig. 12) Jenő Remsey, Portrait of the Artist's Wife, 1910

1. The completion of the translation. An introduction is always the last text to be compiled into a publication. The author of the translation wrote that he had finished his work in a historical phase in which the teaching of Cennini was still considered topical, since he observed that the most used technical texts on painting still referred to the Book of the Art as an authoritative source. The introduction indeed starts with the statement: "There is no serious reference book on painting, in which you would not find repeatedly the sentence: ‘Also Cennini wrote…’ ". Could the author have written such a thing in the 1970s? I would guess it is very unlikely. In those years, Cennini’s teaching was very valuable for painting conservation, but it was no longer used as a source by contemporary painters to test old techniques for new fresco and tempera art creations. The latest generation of contemporary artists to consider the Book of the Art as an inspirational tool was the one flourishing in the Thirties, which did not extend its activity much beyond the mid-Forties: think of the Swiss frescoes by Severini, of those of the Brotherhood of St. Luke in Poland, or of the Brotherhood of the fresco in Norway. As explained by Zsuzsanna Benkő, in Hungary the teaching by Cennini [6] had a central role in the aesthetic discussion between the early 1900s (when Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch and Sándor Nagy created the Gödöllő colony) and 1944, when the last of the society of artists inspired by that experience, i.e. the Spirituális Művészek Szövetsége (Society of spiritual artists) created by Jenő Remsey in 1924, was dissolved.

Fig. 13) Jenő Remsey, Choir, 1943

It can be assumed that the Hungarian anonymous was among the last painters to be interested in Cennino as a source of knowledge for contemporary painters. Thus, we can imagine that he operated as an artist over the 1930s-early 1940s and that the translation may have been made in the 1950s. There are two other elements that suggest this might be the period when the Italian text was translated. First, the translation has never been published: one of the reasons may lie in the collapse of the political regime of Marshal Horthy 1944, during the Second World War, and the permanent occupation of the country by Soviet troops. Second, the text recommended painters to make use of new industrial colours for both painting in tempera and fresco, instead of Cennini’s techniques: this theme of the use of industrial colours is present in other translations of Cennino in the 1930-1940s, as evidenced by the introduction ofthe Romanian edition in 1936-1937 and the Norwegian one in 1942.

Fig. 14) The edition of the Libro dell'Arte curated by Renzo Simi in 1933

2. The acquisition of the Italian text. The author wrote: "More than twenty years ago, I managed to get the most complete edition of Cennini 's book in Rome." The adjective 'most comprehensive' should be read with reference to the previous statement, according to which the German version of Cennini’s Treaty of painting, used by Hungarian masters, "was neither accurate nor complete." Therefore, the anonymous made a jump in the past of two decades, going back to a time between the 1920s and 1930s. However, he made an inaccurate statement. The incomplete versions of Cennino in circulation over those years were the French one of 1911, famous for the introduction of Renoir, and the aforementioned Romanian translation, but not the German one (to be precise, there were two of them: one by Albert Ilg published in Vienna in 1871, and one by Jan Verkade published in Strasbourg in 1916). It is likely that the author went to Rome for a study tour and that he got to learn Italian with a sufficient degree of proficiency to be able to read (and even translate) a text written in an Italian vernacular idiom of the fourteenth century (something certainly not easy for a foreigner). It is possible that he purchased the version edited by Renzo Simi (first released in 1913, but republished in 1933 and in 1943) or the one by Thompson (1932). As explained in a previous post on the topic, a survey by Beáta Szlavikovszky contained an indication that at least four Hungarian artists belonging to compatible stylistic guidelines travelled to Italy to study in the 1920-1930s [7]: among them there was György Leszkovszky (1891-1968), the founder of the Cennini Society (Cennini Társaság), who was in Italy in 1930. The others were Ernö Jeges (1898-1956) in 1931, Béla Kontuly (1904-1983) in 1928 and 1929, and finally C. Pal Molnar (1894-1981) in 1928, 1929 and 1930. It should be added that a valuable article by Julianna P. Szűcs [8] clarified the important role that Italian art had on the Hungarian art of religious inspiration in those years. There were certainly many other artists who felt the charm of Italian culture, settled in Italy for some time, and who therefore might have perhaps been able to translate the text later on, when they were back in Hungary.

Figures 15-17) Extracts from the writings of Sandor Nagy on ‘Painting Technique’
in the 1934-1935 Yearbook of the Hungarian Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest

3. The spreading of Cennino’s painting techniques in Hungary. The introduction points out that "As a college professor, Sandor Nagy handed over to generations of painters the traditions from Cennini’s times". Proof of this is the yearbook 1934-1935 of the Academy of Fine Arts, which includes a long essay by Sandor Nagy (displayed between page 27 and 44) on "The painting technique" (A festészeti technikáról). The text, which opened with a quote from Cennino, contained a detailed discussion on tempera. It should be noted that an industrial company producing colours, Müller’s in Budapest, started in 1911 the marketing of the Gödöllő tempera colours (see the advertising of this corporation in the catalogue of the Hungarian National Exhibition 1915) [9]. The theme of the comparison between Cennino’s techniques and those possible thanks to industrial techniques was also the focus of a previous article by the painter Erik Bogdánffy Pauly (1869-1918) on "Painting and technology", published in the magazine Művészet (Art) in 1910 [10]. Again, the article started with a quote from Cennini, and continued with a description of new industrial products imported from Germany.

Fig. 18) Advertising of the Gödöllő tempera colours, produced by the Müller company.
Source: https://library.hungaricana.hu/hu/view/ORSZ_NEMG_NemzetiSzalon_1915_1917/?pg=620&layout=s

In conclusion: none of the information collected in these three years, unfortunately, allows us to trace the anonymous translator of the translation. And yet we have elements to believe that he was a painter who spent some time in Italy in the Thirties and translated the text later on, at the latest in the Fifties. Then we lost all trace of him.

This chronological reconstruction may also help explain why the knowledge of the author's identity was lost. It is indeed likely that the translation of the Treatise on Painting was completed in the very years in which the radical change in the political regime prevented the author - perhaps a painter who worked as a teacher at the University of Fine Arts – to finalise the work with the publication: in fact, under communism, the Gödöllő School had fallen out of favour politically and the last group of artists inspired by them (the above-mentioned Company of spiritual artists) had been dismantled. To make public his past as a follower of Cennino Cennini, revealing it to the new authorities, even just by signing a translation of a medieval Italian art treatise, could have been very dangerous in those years. In my view, the manuscript was therefore secretly kept at the Academy of Fine Arts until someone (the same author, now an old man? One of his students? A professor of restoration techniques?) decided to transcribe it in the form of a typescript, perhaps in the second half of the Seventies, to make the text available to the restoration students of the University of Fine Arts. Nothing can be ruled out: perhaps the identity of the author of the translation was known, but it was decided to omit his name on the front page to protect it; or the memory of who the author was had already been lost, but nevertheless it was decided to publish the text as a teaching material for students of restoration of medieval works. In any case, the interest was no longer focused on the short introduction by the anonymous translator and on the considerations about the Hungarian art of the twentieth century (the two initial pages that perhaps none read anymore), but the painting techniques of the Giotto school. It is the same parable which Cennino’s handbook experienced anywhere in Europe, but in Hungary it is still characterized by an unresolved secret.

We already said that the key - if it exists - to unravel the mystery of the identity of the translator is perhaps still contained in the archives of the MKE. Only a research by art historians in these archives will perhaps allow one day to find the manuscript and see if it includes a signature. At that point, we will know whether the text of Cennino was translated by one of the great artists of the Hungarian secession, by another important art maker or a today forgotten painter, and to fully understand the significance of this translation, today anonymous.

Just in recent months (between 21 October and 4 December 2016) it was held at the MKE an exhibition entitled "Before the revolution. The Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts between 1945 and 1956." The English documentation [11] explains that the resumption of academic activities (initiated in 1945) was characterized by a relatively small number of removals and a fairly traditional approach until 1949. In particular, for what interests us, conservation was part of the painting training, and not yet a different branch of studies, like it would happen as from the 1960s. Immediately after the war, conservation was taught by the painter Nándor Kapos (1900-1969?).

Fig. 19) Nándor Kapos, Flooring, undated (pastel on canvas)

Fig. 20) Nándor Kapos, Meditation, without date (pastel on canvas)

The few purged painting teachers between 1945 and 1950 [12] had all important contacts with Italy, but no one seems to have been stylistically close to the Gödöllő-inspired schools. In 1950, to the contrary, all but two teachers with whom school activities had been resumed after the war were removed, marking a brutal clean-up [13]; among them there was also Béla Kontuly, the artist we already mentioned for his stay in Italy between 1928 and 1929. Moreover, the teaching of humanities was suspended and replaced with Marxism and Russian. So-called “Ideological Conferences’ were being held and a phase of repression began, involving as victims - in full Stalinist style - also the same teachers appointed by the new regime. When the uprising against the Soviet occupation took place in 1956, the Academy was one of the centres of the uprising (with a "Revolutionary Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts") and just in front of the building took place some of the most violent fights, leading to the death of some students. A second repression would follow shortly. It is perhaps possible that the text was translated by one of the painters teaching who where purged in 1950, kept hidden for twenty years and rediscovered in the 1970s?

Fig. 21) Nándor Szilvásy, Changing the mode of production, 1950

I cannot help but conclude with an appeal. What could be done by us from outside Hungary to identify the painter who translated the Treaty of Cennini in Hungarian has been made. Now, my plea is that it is up to the MKE to look in its own documentation. It's highly time for the Budapest institution to try to identify who, in those troublesome decades, may have been the author of the translation.

NOTES

[1] See, Giovanni Mazzaferro. Cennini, a mysterious edition and Hungary after 1900. 

[2] See: http://vonnegutantikvarium.com/konyvek/search

[3] See: http://antikva.hu/festeszet/trattato-della-pittura

[4] See: http://www.mke.hu/about/hallgatoi_adatbazis.php/z?order=title&sort=desc. Krisztina Zsolnay was a renowned restorer in the 1980s and 1990s in Hungary.

[5] The first copy was also consulted by Barbara Follárd, an affirmed today artist, born in 1976; she was a student at the academy between 1995 and 2000 (the book was borrowed during the October 1995, i.e. in the first year of study) . Another borrower was Tibor Gyori, a student in the late eighties, and today a cartoonist and comic book writer (he also took the book on loan during the first year of his studies, in 1997).

[6] See the excellent essay by Zsuzsanna Benkő on "Cennini Company. The influence of the Cennini Treatise on Painting on the life and works of Hungarian artists' colony of Gödöllő and György Leszkovszky" published in this blog. By the same author you can read a summary in English of a recent exhibition of Jenő Remsey
(http://godolloimuzeum.hu/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/GVM_Remsey-katalogus_2010.pdf).

[7] Beáta Szlavikovszky, Fejezetek a Magyar-olasz kulturális kapcsolatokról 1880-1945 között (Chapters of the Hungarian-Italian cultural relations between 1880 and 1945), Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Faculty of Art, 2009
http://phd.btk.ppke.hu/tortenelemtudomany/szlavikovszky_beata/disszertacio.pdf

[8] Julianna P. Szőcs, Az egyázmövészet útja a Római Iskola felé (From ecclesiastic art to the Rome school), in Ars Hungarica 1981/1. I would like to thank Dorottya Nagy for an English translation of this article, whose content goes much beyond the scope of this post, but provides a very useful picture of the religious art movements between Italy and Hungary between the two world wars.

[9] These colours must have been marketed all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire, since there is a reference to them in German as well, as Gödöllöer Temperafarben. See Beltinger Karoline and Nadolny Jileen, in Painting in Tempera, c. 1900, organized by the Swiss Institute for Research on Art, London, 2016, Archetype Publications, 263 pages. Quote p. 150.

[10] See: http://www.mke.hu/lyka/09/242-249-technika.htm. 

[11] See: http://www.mke.hu/forradalom_elott/en/before_revolution.html

[12] They were Gyula Rudnay, István Boldizsár and Rezső Burghardt.

[13] They were: Nándor Lajos Varga (rector), Béla Kontuly, Gedeon Gerlóczy, Emil Krocsák, István Szőnyi, László Kandó, Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl, Jenő Elekfy, István Kákonyi.