Review of The Book of the Art (ca. 1400)
Cennino Cennini (writer).
Read in 2025.
Read half in a 1947 translation to Swedish, half in Christiana J. Herringham’s 1899 translation to English.
How to do late-Medieval drawing, painting, and related crafts, including some gilding and casting.
Cennini is charming, partly because he is a child of his time, completely ignorant of the innovations that would follow in tools, styles, and motifs. The chief medium of paint is still tempera (egg yolk), though oil is mentioned in passing. He advices his readers to go out and buy certain products instead of making them, but he’s still old-school enough to talk about climbing the hills to find veins of minerals for pigment, and to bind his own brushes from squirrel-tails. Accordingly, he gives concrete advice on how to paint the robes of Mary, the Madonna. This was one of the Christian gods of the time: A motif so common that Cennini does not have to explain why he’s mentioning it. On female anatomy, he laments that, like non-human anatomy, it is too irregular for the easy formulae of male anatomy, but he does say that all men lack a rib on one side: A complete fiction, mindlessly repeated from a fable in Genesis (ca. 500–400 BCE). I thought a painter would know better. Cennini does say to study nature, but he didn’t actually count ribs, just like he didn’t invent Caravaggio’s light. He expresses a simpler ethic, where you try to find pleasure in work, try to avoid poisonous pigments based on arsenic (without knowing that flake white is also poisonous), and generally spend your time filling a niche in the relatively static society of the late Middle Ages, with all its misogyny and mindless obeisance to a higher caste that had to have its plaster mixed with rose water for fragrance.