Cennino Cennini. [The Book of the Art: a workshop book for today's practice?]. Edited by Aline Ehrhardt

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Cennino Cennini
Das Buch von der Kunst oder Il Libro dell'Arte: Ein Werkstattbuch für die heutige Praxis?
[The Book of the Art: a workshop book for today's practice?]
Edited by Aline Ehrhardt

Freiburg, Cenninas Verlag, 2015, 199 pages

Review by Francesco Mazzaferro

Fig. 1) The 2005 German edition of the Book of the Art by Cennino Cennini, edited by Aline Ehrhardt

We have already had the opportunity to systematically survey the printed editions of Cennino Cennini's Book of the Art on this blog. For completeness, we are adding here two recent developments in Germany.

The first is that since 2015 in Freiburg, the charming university city in Southern Germany, there is an albeit tiny publishing house whose name makes clear reference to Cennino Cennini. In addition to publishing books on artistic techniques (actually there are only two books in the catalogues), Cenninas Verlag also applies medieval techniques to produce natural pigments in ultramarine blue for painters and restorers.

The second is that this publishing house has produced a new German edition of Cennino Cennini's Book of the Art, edited by Aline Ehrhardt, a scholar of ancient painting techniques and animator of training courses on the subject. Ms Ehrardt also curated in 2019 (as second volume of Cenninas Verlag) a reprint of the Treatise on the silverpoint [1] by Joseph Meder (1857-1934), the Austrian art historian and director of the Cabinet of drawings of the Albertina in Vienna between 1905 and 1923. The text, originally published in 1909, illustrated the techniques used by Dürer and his contemporaries in drawing.

Fig. 2) Joseph Meder's original edition of the Little Treatise on the Silverpoint of 1914 and the 2019 reprint by Aline Ehrhardt

Ms Ehrhardt’s edition of the Book of the Art by Cennino Cennini is based on the first German translation of the work, which Albert Ilg (1847-1896) completed in 1871. Compared to Ilg’s version, the curator modernized the language and updated the technical knowledge (without however signalling to the reader the changes she did).

We have reviewed in this blog Ilg’s edition of the Book of the Art and saw how it presented two very different aspects: on the one hand the Austrian scholar was full aware of offering to the German-speaking public the availability of an unique document on medieval pictorial techniques, on the other one he fundamentally disdained Cennino, whom he considered a man tied to the past, unable to grasp the stimuli of humanism and tied to the idea of painting as a repetitive activity.
 

Fig. 3) Albert Ilg's translation (1871) in the Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttechnik des Mittealters und der Renaissance series (reprint of the publisher Wagener, 2008)

Ms Ehrhardt wrote on the subject in the preface: "As I was about to achieve this task, I realized Albert Ilg's negative assessment of Cennini in his introduction to the Book of Art. After a deeper consideration, I cannot share that opinion at all. Compared to the recognition that Cennini still enjoys in the Italian linguistic framework, it seems to me an old-minded attitude" [2]. The idea of the new edition came to the curator observing how the recent version of Cennino's treatise by Fabio Frezzato could be purchased without too many problems in an Italian bookstore, while in Germany the only possible solution to read the text was to visit a specialized library.

The curator also spent a few pages to challenge Vasari's negative image of Cennino Cennini. The underestimation of both the painter and the treatise (which Vasari had certainly read, since he mentioned it with great precision) was in her view mainly explained by the ideological structure underlying his art history, articulated in three phases: Cennino represented the conclusion of a cycle, opened with Giotto, which cannot be considered by the author of the Lives as worthy of continuation. An unbiased comparison of the texts of Cennino and Vasari, based on the role of drawing and fantasy, would instead place Cennini as a forerunner of Renaissance theories [3]. Using around 1400 a terminology which would then be developed by Leonardo and showing admiration for oil painting - Ehrhardt continued - Cennino is actually a modern [4]. As well known (think, for instance, of the exhibition on Cennino Cennini held in Berlin in 2008), this is a thesis very present in German art criticism, which has always debated the issue of whether Cennini is an exponent of the past or an innovator.

A full reconsideration of the figure of Cennini would indeed require - as the curator wrote - a new translation and a real critical comment. This is not the purpose of the publication, which admittedly is all aimed at supporting practical activity by providing readers with a simpler text and an easier-to-find booklet in bookshops. The same subtitle, albeit in an interrogative form, proposes the idea that the treatise, written as a 'workshop book' (Werkstattbuch), can serve to support current practice (heutige Praxis). Here one should not understand simply the work of restorers (and unfortunately of forgers), but even the creations of contemporary artists. "In this sense, I am not referring to a romantic incentive, which the reading of Cennini's book could strengthen, nor to the ability to learn the art of copying a historical content, but to the urgent need to enrich the pictorial techniques for contemporary artistic creation" [5].

Contemporary art is in fact characterized, to Ms Ehrhardt's eyes, by a serious impoverishment in the choice of techniques and materials. For painters, learning to paint in tempera and to produce their own materials is a huge enrichment compared to the use of spray cans. Moreover (and this is how the curator concludes), Cennini wrote his treatise in vernacular, and not in Latin, as an input by a colleague for his colleagues, and as such should also be read by contemporary painters.

Fig. 4) The edition of the Book of the Art edited by Jan Verkade in 1914

Finally, it is surprising that the authoress did not quote at all the second German translation by Jan Verkade (1868-1946), a Benedictine painter and monk. It seems that the memory of the medieval Cennino, pious and religious painter, proposed by Verkade in 1914 has been almost totally lost also among the most passionate scholars.

NOTES

[1] Meder, Joseph - Das Büchlein vom Silbersteft: ein Tractätlein für Moler. Beschreiben zu Nutz allen , so zu dieser Kunst Lieb tragen. Gerlach & Wiedling, Wien, 1909

[2] Cennini, Cennino  - Das Buch von der Kunst oder Il Libro dell'Arte: Ein Werkstattbuch für die heutige Praxis? Edited by Aline Ehrhardt, Freiburg, Cenninas Verlag, 2015, 199 pages. Quotation at page 99.

[3] Cennini, Cennino  - Das Buch von der Kunst oder Il Libro dell'Arte (quoted), p. 34.

[4] Cennini, Cennino  - Das Buch von der Kunst oder Il Libro dell'Arte (quoted), p. 34

[5] Cennini, Cennino  - Das Buch von der Kunst oder Il Libro dell'Arte (quoted), p. 14