Giovanni Mazzaferro. Mary P. Merrifield and the First English Translation of Cennino Cennini's 'Book of the Art': the Press Reviews. Part Two

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Giovanni Mazzaferro
Mary P. Merrifield and the First English Translation of Cennino Cennini's Book of the Art: the Press Reviews.
Part Two

Fig. 12) Bonamico Buffalmacco, Triumph of death. Detail: The Living and the Dead. Camposanto in Pisa
Source: Saijlko (Francesco Bini) via Wikimedia Commons

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The review in Athenaeum

I ignore who reviewed the translation of Cennino’s treatise in the weekly Athenæum on March 15, 1845. Whoever he or she was, one thing is certain: it was a born polemicist. The prose was completely different, if compared to the others examined in this post; imbued by an often very sharp ironic vein, it was however fed - to tell the truth – by a remarkable series of clichés. In fact, the magazine, directed at the time by Charles Wentwoth Dilke (1789-1864), was known for the ferociousness (or the sincerity, according to taste) with which it reviewed publications.

At least three points are worth highlighting in assessing the text.

First, the author marked immediately his fundamental stance, expressing pure feelings of romanticism: "We are well-known admirers of the Antique; we esteem the Giotteschi superior artists to the Caracci [sic], and prefer the Campo Santo [note of the editor: in Pisa] to the Nunziata Cloister [note of the editor: the cloister of the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata in Florence]… We should rather possess semi-Byzantine Cimabue’s ‘Virgin and Four Prophets’ [n.d.r. Santa Trinita Maestà] in all their antiquated sublimity, than a Carlo Maratti’s very best painted Madonna". For the reviewer, then, the old [the Antique] was the fourteenth century and had to be separated from ancient Greek and Roman antiquity [the Ancient]. Still, he preferred the simple world of the Middle Ages. For this reason, of course, he warmly welcomed the book of Cennino; but he went by far beyond stylistic aspects and dwelled on the theme of spirituality in art and love of art for art: “There is an artistical principle which Cennini’s book enjoins collaterally, and which we wish his example could inspire, because a deep source of artistical power: we mean earnestness. British artists, no doubt, are earnest enough in various ways: earnest for gain, earnest for fame (the ready of both much preferred), earnest for beating the French at design, for triumphing over the German at fresco, - divers kinds of earnestness, yet not one the kind we have specified […]. Earnest love for Art, for its perfection’s sake alone, that is the earnestness we so desire to see! […] Let genuine, fervent, high-minded love of Art itself prevail over all, or farewell to hope of its greatness here!” As we said, it was a totally romantic approach; somehow, it recalled some themes which would be dear later on to the Pre-Raphaelites (to be however mentioned, the direction of the magazine changed in 1846; with the new management, the magazine took a critical approach to the Raphaelites, when they established themselves in 1848).

Fig. 13) Cimabue, Santa Trinita Maestà, Florence, Uffizi Gallery
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The second aspect is very different in nature and concerns a real impatience with the discussions on the primacy in the discovery of oil painting. In this specific case, the reviewer took issue only with Tambroni and his most useless and long introduction, in which he was arguing that oil painting was invented in Italy. The author did not hesitate to resort to colourful expressions on this; he said, for example, that all these were 'Rialto-talk-familiar truths', i.e. chats to do on the Rialto Bridge (the term referred to Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice) and then asked: why all this? Why to propose anew the umpteenth rehash now, when we know everything? The answer was cryptic, and indicative of the writer’s style: "Why, because as idle English gentlemen must produce, for notoriety’s sake, a three volumed novel, a book of travels, or five acts of unactable dulness called legitimate drama […] so the dolce-far-niente Italian must compose his dozen-dozen sonnets, his pompous dissertation upon Dante, or his minute critique upon the Belli-Arti [sic]" (p. 274).

The last question is the one deserving most attention, because it directly involved Merrifield (and this time in a negative critical sense). The reviewer began with general remarks: "Translation of modern languages has lately become the Amazonian domain of literature, where males are only now and then admitted for very urgent purposes". Of course, he noted the Victorian phenomenon of female translations, which I alread ymentioned in the first part of this post. Basically – he continued - if you want to be 'liberal' today, you have to talk positively about this trend, but with a very similar attitude to those who are making charity. Instead – he claimed – I am doing assessments on real facts; the very fact that I am not sparing anything confirms the respect that I have for the female gender. And here he began listing a series of (totally true) severe blunders in Ms Merrifield’s translation, starting with the most important sentence of the first part, in which Cennino said that Giotto changed the way of painting from Greek to Latin and turned it to the modern manner. Merrifield misinterpreted the sentence and translated instead: "Giotto introduced the Greek manner of painting among the Latins and united it with the modern school ". How is it possible - the reviewer rhetorically asked – to make mistakes like that? Merrifield acted "like an unskilful engineer, who instead of the object, damages herself ". And, again, how could she write that Giotto decorated with a mosaic the nave of St. Peter in Rome, when in fact the “nave di mosaico” was not a nave, but the mosaic of the Navicella ("little ship")? Or, to assign a picture of van Eyck to Andrea del Castagno? "Was it precipitation or semi-competence that occasioned Mrs. Merrifield’s strange dance through the maze of errors we must enumerate?". Here came the final touch, which demented exactly what the reviewer was quick to state beforehand, or that he was not biased against women: the truth is that "the memoirs, the letters of women abound with graces beyond the reach of art, they also abound with subtle inferences far beyond the reach of logic". Mind you – I should repeat that the errors reported by the reviewer were all factual and proved what has not been made clear about Mrs. Merrifield up to that moment: she was neither a philologist nor an art historian, but a researcher and a woman of science. To the writer in Athenæum this was however an occasion to condemn the excessive presence of women in the translation sector; like saying (coming to the present day): I'm not racist, but jobs must go first to Italians. 

Fig. 14) Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini portrait, London, National Gallery
Source: Wikimedia Commons

John Eagles in the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine

The long review written by the artist and art critic John Eagles for the Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine undoubtedly presented the most detailed scientific content, to denote the author's knowledge on chemistry, in many ways similar to Mrs. Merrifield. One thing is worth saying: most of the article, which went from p. 717 to 730 of the June issue, concerned oil painting. Eagles began by recalling what he wrote on the occasion of the publication, in 1839, of the English translation of De la Peinture à l'Huile by J.F. Mérimée (under the title On Oil Painting and with the translation by Sarsfield Taylor). Eagles radically rejected the recommended practices by Mérimée, in particular the use of mixing paints and oil in order to achieve a particularly brilliant painting. This use had caused - as Eagles claimed - the rapid deterioration of the oil paintings of the eighteenth century English painters (first of all Joshua Reynolds). There was a term that Eagles really hated: megilp. It was a vehicle consisting of a mixture of paint and oil, which in his opinion caused the ruin of paintings. Eagles was therefore grateful to Merrifield (to whom he turned great compliments) for a translation, which was allowing him to return discussing again the matter. And here he came back to a theme that we have already seen with Egerton, i.e. the secret of the Old Masters: "For it appears incontestable that there was a period when the art of painting, through the discovery of a vehicle, broke forth into uncommon splendour and beauty, which splendour and beauty remain in works fresh and perfect to his day" (p. 718). To understand it, it was sufficient just to compare their artworks with the most recent paintings. By way of curiosity, it is worth noting that Eagles quoted works which had just entered the National Gallery, and which obviously left their mark, such as the Arnolfini Portrait by van Eyck (which arrived in London in 1842) and the portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan by Giovanni Bellini (1844). There was nothing surprising about the loss of past methodologies, because that was a world of secrets transmitted within workshops, often only when the master abandoned art activity and to the benefit of a single disciple. What one needed to look at, that is the secret, were those "other mixtures" mentioned by Vasari about van Eyck, saying that, when boiling them with linseed and walnut oil, they gave birth to a paint that had been desired by all painters in the world. Hence Eagles started with a series of considerations and technical hypotheses which I will spare the reader. They were however substantiated by laboratory experiments, either personally or in collaboration with chemist friends. His viewpoint, in essence, was the same as with Mrs. Merrifield, when she wrote her books: experimental research of a 'secret' and comparison with the sources of the time, which should lead, read together in harmony, to the ability to perfectly reproduce the paintings of ancient masters. 

Fig. 15) Giovanni Bellini, Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan, London, National Gallery
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Today we would be surprised by a review of that kind, if you think that Cennino spoke about oil painting only across two pages (or six chapters) of his work. At Eagles’ time, evidently, priorities were different and, beyond contingencies (i.e. the achievement of Westminster frescoes) the real issue was to understand oil techniques. This was confirmed, as obvious, by the publication of the first volume by Eastlake on Materials For a History of Oil Painting in 1847 and Mrs. Merrifield’s Original Treatises in 1849, two texts that have made history. I do not know the details of Mr Eagles’ biography. What is certain is that he made - like many others - the Italian tour, and there acquired an out-of-common knowledge of our language and dialects, then obviously cultivated over the years. The fact is that towards the end of the article, he cited four verses from the Carta del navegar pitoresco (Map of Pictorial Navigation) by Marco Boschini (1660), famously written in Venetian dialect. I have no difficulty in saying that today the reading is tricky to any Italian (including myself). The quote, however, was perfectly fitting, sign of a not common culture [7].

NOTES

[6] The attribution of the authorship of the article to Eagles is not only related to the fact that he was the official art critic of the magazine. References in the article link it to previous articles, and allow establishing it with certainty (see, for example, the quotation of a letter addressed to Art Union and signed J.E.).

[7] There is evidence that a copy of the Carta del navegar pitoresco was part of the private library of Charles Lock Eastlake, which can be consulted today in the website of Memofonte. At least in principle, I cannot exclude that the quotation may have been earlier signalled to Eagles by Eastlake.