The «as he pleases» by Cennino Cennini
Published in:
Scritti di storia dell'arte in onore di Ugo Procacci
Edited by Maria Grazia Ciardi Duprè Dal Poggetto and Paolo Dal Poggetto,
Milano, Electa, 1977, 2 volumes, 663 pages. First volume, pages 32-34
Edited by Maria Grazia Ciardi Duprè Dal Poggetto and Paolo Dal Poggetto,
Milano, Electa, 1977, 2 volumes, 663 pages. First volume, pages 32-34
Review by Francesco Mazzaferro
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| Fig. 1) The writings in honour of Ugo Procacci |
In 1977 André Chastel (1912-1990) published a short
article about Cennini in a series of writings in hono,ur of Ugo Procacci
(1905-1991). Procacci dedicated his life to the study and restoration of
medieval art, also working with art history sources of that period. Not
surprisingly, Chastel, one of the maître
à penser of French and European art history in the twentieth century,
dedicated to him a reflection about Cennino: according to Chastel, in fact,
Procacci was the greatest scholar of history of art sources and painting
techniques in Tuscany after Gaetano Milanesi (1813-1895). The text of Chastel on
Cennino is really difficult to find for those who do not have immediate access
to large libraries, and we hope to make something useful by offering a summary thereof
to the reader of this blog.
What is, first of all, the meaning of the
title? The article is in French, but the title refers to a very short passage
in Tuscan by Cennino, in the first chapter of the Book of Art. The title should
therefore read, in English: "The «As
he pleases» by Cennini". The
reference is to this passage of the first chapter of Cennino’s treatise: "This is why: because the poet, through his
intellectual activity, through one that he has, makes himself privileged and
free to be able to compose and link things up or not as he pleases"
(Translation of Lara Broecke 2015). Cennino is reflecting on the parallel
between poetry and painting, and explains that the painter, in common with the
poet, has the ability to represent things and beings that are not real like,
for instance, the centaurs. This is the theme of imagination in painting (and poetry).
The painter can thus compose whatever he likes.
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| Fig. 2) Ugo Procacci 1978 |
In a series of posts published on this blog during the last years, we have already seen that the views of scholars
on this passage markedly diverged, designing two different interpretations.
Lionello Venturi [1] was the first to propose, already in 1925, a 'modernist' theory considering
Cennino as one of the first theorists of the composition and of the autonomy of
art. In parallel, Julius von Schlosser [2] read Cennino as the first author proposing a
tentative to elaborate an autonomous language to write on art. This view was
reinforced by Boskovits [3] in 1971, and more recently by Latifah Troncelliti [4] and
by the catalogue of the Berlin exhibition on Cennino 2008 [5]. It is also in line with this
interpretation the recent English translation of Lara Broecke [6], who has considered
the Treaty as a, perhaps unsuccessful, attempt by Cennino to position himself in the discussions of Paduan humanismts on art, proposing himself as a writer on art.
Differently from this modernist theory, an
opposite interpretation of Cennino is that he was an author anchored to the
medieval world and unable to develop any innovative interpretation of the
composition and artistic creation. This reading was elaborated by Albert Ilg
[7] in 1871 and had more recently found the support by Rudolf Kuhn [8] and Peter Seiler
[9].
The article by André Chastel was part of this
second school of thought, although it qualified it. We all know - he wrote - the
first chapter of the Book of Art. However, are we able to understand it
properly? And in particular, can we fully understand why Cennino quoted the poetic
freedom of the artists and the ability of painters to make use of their
imagination in order to produce images of beings that go beyond the existent?
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| Fig. 3) André Chastel, in a photo on the cover of a recent book on him in 2015 |
The reference to imagination, wrote Chastel, was
actually a commonplace in all the authors of the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance: unlike what Venturi thought [10], Cennino did not make any affirmation of the
autonomy of art, as indeed any such statement can neither be found through the
Renaissance. These were rhetorical elements in the Latin and medieval culture,
that Cennino used doing a deliberate profession of humility, which was instead
mistakenly misunderstood by many as a mere exercise to capture the goodwill of
the audience (captatio benevolentiae).
"Cennino was fully conscious of
producing, a manual of recipes without seeking the slightest originality; his
interest was to pin down the technique of a profession at a time of its expansion."
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| Fig. 4) Cennino Cennini (attributed to), Madonna and Child, Angels and Saints, around 1400, Moretti Gallery, Florence. Sources: Wikicommons |
According to Chastel, "we must therefore not be under any illusions
about the novelty and the revolutionary character of the quotes by Cennini".
The article by Chastel demolished both interpretations by Boskovits and
Schlosser. The former, for example, read the text of Cennino as the
proclamation of a new style, with reference to certain 'expressionist' aspects
of his paintings (or at least of what he attributed to him). Schlosser, on his part,
explained Cennino’s expression "as
he pleases" as a quotation of Horace text "quidlibet audendi semper fuit potestas", namely the
recognition of the power that is awarded to poets and painters to dare anything
they can think of. Even with his limitations, Cennino displayed then, according
to Schlosser, new aspects with regard to his attempt to promote painting as an intellectually
and socially superior activity. As to the first aspect, the so-called
“expressionism” identified by Boskovits was a feature of all of Western
painting, not just in Tuscany, at the entrance of 1400, in the direction of
"more capricious shapes, more
piquant situations, more airy colours." As to the second aspect, these
were formulae widely used in the Western world for hundreds of years, for
example in the canonical works of the theologian William During (1230-1296),
and now repeated without the possibility to give them any autonomous meaning.
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| Fig. 5) Cennini (attributed to), Madonna and Child among seraphims and cherubims (detail), Siena, Art Collection Monte Paschi di Siena, without any indication of date, Source: Wikicommons |
"There
is obviously no sort of 'humanistic' claim by Cennino". Indeed,
Chastel considered any different interpretation as even "abhorrent". However, there was an
interesting aspect. "The theologians
had accompanied the development of visual art, from the twelfth century, with
protests against the depiction of seductive or suspicious forms. The
condemnation of the vana curiositas [note of the editor: the vain
curiosity] and of the concupiscientia oculorum [note of
the editor: the lust of the eyes], as
clear as by Saint Bernard who defended the purity of the monastic rule, had
been regularly picked up by doctors as Jearn Gerson and St. Antoninus Pierozzi,
as the church had taken more intrusive aspects within society." For
Chastel, therefore, to affirm the artist's ability to create unreal creatures
according to their imagination was nothing but a form of defence of the painters
against the pressure of the theologians, especially against the purist
movements spreading in the church, which were increasingly critical of
giottismo.
There was a chronologically subsequent case,
which according to Chastel can serve however as a basis for comparison. The
mid-sixteenth century theologians of the Counterreformation (Catarino, Conrado
and Gilio) very strongly condemned any sort of quidlibet audendi potestas (the power to dare anything) They railed
particularly against Francisco de Holanda who, in his Dialogues, let Michelangelo
say that Horace gives to the painter, like the poet, full freedom. That of de
Holanda was a far more challenging statement than the declaration by Cennino.
And yet, concluded Chastel, "seen in
this long-term perspective, the intervention of Cennini at the dawn of the
fifteenth century and his modest ‘as he pleases’ become worthy of attention."
NOTES
[1] Venturi, Lionello – La
critica d’arte alla fine del Trecento (Filippo Villani e Cennino Cennini) (Art
criticism at the end of the XIV century: Filippo Villani and Cennino Cennini),
in: L’Arte, Rivista di Storia Medievale e Moderna, No. 4, 1925, pp. 233-244. See:
[2] Von Schlosser, Julius -
La letteratura artistica: manuale delle fonti della storia dell'arte moderna
(Art Literature: treatise on the sources of modern art history), Translation in
Italian by Filippo Rossi, Firenze, La Nuova Italia, 2001, 792 pages.
[3] Boskovits, Miklós - Cennino
Cennini - pittore nonconformista (Cennino Cennini – a non-conformist painter),
in: Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 17. volume N. 2/3
(1973), pp. 201-222, published by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. See: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27652330.
[4] Troncelliti, Latifah – The Two Parallel
Realities of Alberti and Cennini. The Power of Writing and the Visual Arts in
the Italian Quattrocento, Lewiston, Edwin Mellin Press, 2004
[5] Fantasie und Handwerk” – Cennino Cennini und
die Tradition der toskanischen Malerei von Giotto bis Lorenzo Monaco (Fantasy
and manual skill: Cennino Cennini and the tradition of Tuscan painting from
Giotto to Lorenzo Monaco), edited by Wolf-Dietrich Löhr and Stefan Weppelmann,
Munich, Hirmer Verlag and State Museums in Berlin, 2008. See
[6] Broecke, Lara - Cennino
Cennini’s Il libro dell’arte. A
new English translation and commentary with Italian transcription, Londra,
Archetype Publications Ltd, 2015, 248 pages.
[7] Cennini, Cennino - Das Buch von der Kunst oder
Tractat der Malerei des Cennino Cennini da Colle di Valdelsa, translation by
Albert Ilg, Vienna, Braumüller, 1871, 188 pages.
[8] Kuhn, Rudolf - Cennino Cennini. Sein
Verständnis dessen, was die Kunst in der Malerei sei, und seine Lehre vom
Entwurfs- und vom Werkprozeß (Cennino Cennini – His understanding of what is
art in painting, and his doctrine on planning and implementation processes). In: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und
allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Vol. 36, 1991, pp. 104-153.
Available online at
http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/4689/
[9] Seiler, Peter - Giotto – das unerreichte Vorbild? Elemente
antiker imitatio auctorum-Lehren in Cennino Cenninis Libro dell’Arte (Giotto: A
never equaled model? Elements of the ancient doctrine of the imitation of
authors in the Book of the art by Cennino Cennini), in: Ursula Rombach e Peter
Seiler, Imitation als Transformation: Theorie und Praxis der Antikennachahmung
in der frühen Neuzeit, Petersberg, Imhof Verlag, 2012, 173 pagine, pp. 44-86
[10] Venturi,
Lionello – Storia della Critica d’Arte (History of Art Criticism), Einaudi,
Torino, 1964, 388 pages. Quotation at page 90.
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