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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Twitter historians are upset by an article in The Guardian headlined
WOMAN DISCOVERS RENAISSANCE MASTERPIECE IN KITCHEN
An early Renaissance masterpiece by the Florentine painter Cimabue has been discovered in a kitchen on the outskirts of a town north of Paris, where it might have been binned during a house clearance if an auctioneer had not spotted it.
Christ Mocked, by the 13th-century artist who taught Giotto, is estimated to be worth €4m-€6m (£3.5m-£5.3m). |
Historians were objecting because the artist is described as Renaissance instead of 'medieval'. But, pardon my ignorance, who's Cimabue? Wiki gives his bio but sounds a cautious note
| Little is known about Cimabue's early life. One source that recounts his career is Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, but its accuracy is uncertain. |
Cimabue, aka Cenni di Pepo. or maybe Cenni di Pepi, is said to have flourished in the 1270s/1280s and to have had a massive influence on later painters. Finding a work by him is of course incredibly exciting
The painting was deemed to be a rare work by the Florence-born Cimabue, also known as Cenni di Pepo, one of the pioneering artists of the early Italian Renaissance.
It is thought to be part of a large diptych dating from 1280, when Cimabue painted eight scenes depicting Christ’s passion and crucifixion. |
Deemed to be/ attributed to/ thought to be part of aren't reassuring. Neither is the context in which it was found
The work had for years gone unnoticed in the house of a woman in her 90s near the northern French town of Compiègne. It had been hanging between her open-plan kitchen and her living room, arousing little interest from the family, who assumed it was a standard religious icon. Although it was placed directly above a hotplate for cooking food, the picture was in good condition
The woman and her family have insisted on remaining anonymous. But they told the auction house that for years they had thought it was simply a old religious icon from Russia. The painting had hung on the wall for so long that the women said she no idea where it had come from or how it had come into the family’s hands. |
So how did art experts, or the auctioneer, decide what seemed to be 'a standard religious icon' was in fact a work by Cimabue?
| The French art expert Eric Turquin, who studied and valued the painting, said tests using infrared light found that there was “no disputing that the painting was done by the same hand†as other known works by Cimabue. |
But there aren't any known works by him, at least not in his name
| Only 11 works painted on wood have been attributed to him, none of them signed. |
You only get an auctioneer attending a house clearance if the owner is known or expected to have stuff worth auctioning.
A very similar situation occurred in 2000 in a Suffolk country house, also reported by The Guardian
A lost masterpiece, one of the few surviving works by the 13th-century Italian artist Cimabue, was handed to the National Gallery yesterday, saved for the nation as payment of £7.2m in death duties. .... Rupert Charlton-Jones, of Sotheby's, who spotted it in a routine valuation of the contents of Benacre Hall in Suffolk, said he was left weak at the knees when he guessed what it might be.
It was the only Cimabue believed left in private hands, and one of a handful of his works to survive anywhere. He is renowned as the father of the Renaissance, the tutor of Duccio and Giotto, but almost nothing by him is left. |
The Benacre Hall 'Cimabue' is reported to have been rescued from a fire. Presumably it wasn't included in any insurance pay-outs since its attribution hadn't yet been guessed.
| Cimabues have been lost in wars, floods and earthquakes. This one survived a major fire at Benacre Hall in the 1920s, when it was among piles of furniture and books dragged by the servants out of the burning house and heaped up on the lawn. ... The family believes it may been bought by Sir Edward Sherlock Booth in Florence in the 19th century. | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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What a ramp. These people don't even have the decency to be ashamed of themselves.
1. How come you can infra-red a pic (to show it's like something else) but you can't carbon date it (to show what age it is)? Well, that would put the kybosh on the other eleven paintings, wouldn't it? And don't give me any bollocks about destructive testing of a fleck of paint when the whole damn thing has spent its life over a hotplate. (Memo to forgers: that's a good wheeze for hiding cracks, making cracks, explaining cracks. No need to put it in the oven, chaps.)
2. Historians gets antsy about how far you can push back the Renaissance in case it gets tangled up with that other infinitely movable and expandable feast, the Middle Ages. "It's what we say it is now not what we taught you it was before." © Kate Wiles
3. Far and away the most interesting titbit for me was the news that Italians had modern names in the thirteenth century. Cenni de Pepi makes a change from Guy of Lombardy.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| (Memo to forgers: that's a good wheeze for hiding cracks, making cracks, explaining cracks. No need to put it in the oven, chaps.) |
Would steam/fumes from cooking skew carbon dating results? Does church incense and/or candle smoke have an effect too? In the French case of course, the painting had been both 'a standard religious icon' and kept in the kitchen.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | 3. Far and away the most interesting titbit for me was the news that Italians had modern names in the thirteenth century. Cenni de Pepi makes a change from Guy of Lombardy. |
It's doubtful whether there was a Cimabue/Cenni de Pepi at all The only written mention of him is some three hundred years later, in Vasari's rackety account of Italian artists, 'The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects'
| Vasari's biographies are interspersed with amusing gossip. Many of his anecdotes have the ring of truth, although likely inventions. Others are generic fictions, such as the tale of young Giotto painting a fly on the surface of a painting by Cimabue that the older master repeatedly tried to brush away, a genre tale that echoes anecdotes told of the Greek painter Apelles. |
Vasari is credited with being the first author to produce a book on Italian art history; it's still referred to as a reliable source, even though interspersed with gossip and inaccuracies over minor biographical details such as dates
| As the first Italian art historian, Vasari initiated the genre of an encyclopaedia of artistic biographies that continues today. Vasari's work was first published in 1550 by Lorenzo Torrentino in Florence, and dedicated to Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. It included a valuable treatise on the technical methods employed in the arts. It was partly rewritten and enlarged in 1568 and provided with woodcut portraits of artists (some conjectural). | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I bet Cosimo de Medici had a fair few Cenni di Pepi's in his collection. Or soon would have when the catalogue came out.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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A Google search reveals that the earliest reference to Cimabove, Pictore de Florencia is a legal document dated 1272, kept in the archive of the papal basilica Santa Maria de Maggiore, which 'Cimabove' signed as a witness. Having looked at numerous witness-lists in charters, we're all too well aware that witness names cannot automatically be assumed to be the names of real people.
Another reference to Cimabue occurs thirty years later, in a contract for him and an assistant to complete a mosaic in the apse of Pisa cathedral with a figure of St John. To be honest it's not certain whether this mosaic of St John was completed by Cimabue since it has been 'restored' (by whom and when isn't stated)
| It is a figure that from a stylistic point of view differs significantly from the rest of the mosaic, completely restored, depicting Christ enthroned with the Virgin and, precisely, St. John, while a lost inscription recalls that the figure of the Virgin was completed not before 1321. |
It seems a bit of a stretch to call a mosaicist, no matter how highly regarded, a 'painter'. I am not alone in this concern
| The Saint John in the cathedral of Pisa is Cimabue's single surviving documented work; it provides such a frail scaffold on which to hang an artistic career that German scholars in the early twentieth century thought Cimabue to have been a legendary figure |
Accepting that a Florentine mosaicist called Cimabue carried out an unspecified number of commissions in 1302-3, how did he manage to become the 'father of the Renaissance'? It was a fellow-Florentine, Giorgio Vasari, who made the connection
| Vasari, who considered Cimabue the founder of Italian painting (his sequence of Lives begins with a biography of Cimabue), observed that although Cimabue imitated the work of the Greeks very well, he greatly improved on their art, eliminating a great deal of their awkwardness. |
It sounds like 'work of the Greeks' in Vasari's account simply means mosaics. Either way, there is no other medium in which Cimabue is known to have worked, not that this lack of painterly evidence has prevented art historians from attributing paintings to him on stylistic grounds!
A number of works survive, however, which correlate stylistically with the figure of Saint John; and most recent scholars agree that these constitute a core body of works definitively attributable to Cimabue
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| Hatty wrote: | | Accepting that a Florentine mosaicist called Cimabue carried out an unspecified number of commissions in 1302-3 |
Acceptance may have to be put on hold. The main basis for Cimabue's claim to fame is an altarpiece, which is a major commission. Or would be, if he had indeed got the job
| On 1 November 1301, as "Magister Cenni dictus Cimabue pictore condam Pepi de Florentia", C. signed a contract for the construction of a majestic altarpiece for the hospital of S. Chiara in Pisa, for a total compensation of one hundred and five lire, of which the first forty were paid four days later, long before the end of the month, a term that was instead foreseen by the contract (Pisa, State Arch., S. Chiara Hospital). |
Out of curiosity, how does an altarpiece get lost? The usual scenario for vanished church objects is their destruction and/or theft in the Second World War or some earlier cataclysm, and altarpieces take a bit more effort to nick than reliquaries and candlesticks. Santa Chiara Hospital never seems to have been ransacked or even damaged since its foundation in 1257 in the 'Great Interregnum' (some sources say in 325 AD by Constantine).
| Although concerning a lost work, this document, whose relevance has not been fully recognized, is undoubtedly one of the most important of those preserved between the 13th and 14th century. First, it shows that, for an age whose works of art have probably been preserved for less than 1% of the actual total, the story reconstructed based on a small fragment can be extremely misleading. |
Why would a completely standard contract be described as 'one of the most important' documents of the 13th and 14th centuries? It is clearly rare/important enough to end up in Pisa's state archive, though it's not at all clear who put it there or when, but here's a possible clue:
| The lost altarpiece had to contain a painting depicting a Majesty with the Virgin, saints and apostles. In the lower part it had to be furnished with a historiated predella, the first example of this kind, a year earlier than the predella of a lost Majesty of Duccio for the chapel of the Nove in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena. |
It's a first example so worth double-checking. In this case the first example of 'a predella' which Wiki defines as
| In painting, the predella is the painting or sculpture along the frame at the bottom of an altarpiece. |
Sounds like Pisa and Siena are vying for the kudos of inventing this feature in altarpiece decoration, i.e. probably neither of them (both of the cited works went.AWOL!). The Cimabue contract note in the Pisa archive is the equivalent of a catalogue entry in an art house; it's easy as pie to forge.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Oh no! Hatty’s been banned again. What’s she been up to this time? It all started with this harmless article in the Guardian
As we all know our lords and masters are obsessed with the correct identifying of historical periods rather than the correct identifying of historical artefacts so it was no surprise when one of their number, James D’Emilio, tweeted
| I retweeted this without comment, but it bugs me. Cimabue is no Renaissance painter; his art, the places he worked, and those he worked for are at the heart of medieval. Would it be less valuable called "medieval"? |
Hatty checked it out, felt her nose twitching and took the great man severely to task
| No-one knows if 'Cimabue' painted anything since nothing is signed by him and the few "maybes" are 'attributed' to him. This painting was reportedly purchased in the 1960s as a 'standard religious icon'. |
James thought he was dealing with an errant colleague
| True, but he's named in Rome as a Florentine painter in 1272, linked by documents to (restored) Pisa mosaic, and had later fame. Works assigned to him, rightly or not, by style (S Trinita panel, Assisi frescoes), fit in their medieval time. No need to invoke the Renaissance. |
Hatty speedily disposed of that fond assumption
| No he wasn't named in Rome in 1272. The only source is 300 years later in Florence, in Vasari's rackety account of Italian art. Forget Cimabue. Just carbon date a fleck of paint. I bet the painting noticed by an auctioneer above a French hotplate isn't Renaissance nor medieval. |
Professor D’Emilio belatedly realised he was dealing with a fly that needed swatting
Hatty then swatted him
| No, James, 1272.6.18 only cites 'Cimabove' as a witness to the signing of a legal document. Anyone familiar with witness-lists in charters knows to be wary of treating witness names as real people. There aren't even any extant panels painted by Cimabue to confirm your thesis. |
But our academic luminary realised that being swatted might not look too good on his resumé so deleted this post, banned Hatty from making any more but failed to mention he had done so. The net result is that it looks for all the world that he swatted a fly and the fly was so thoroughly swatted she went off to bother someone else. Quite masterful.
https://twitter.com/DEmiliopics/status/1176509721445928961
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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It is worth remembering, before you take the trouble to post up a link, that it's a good idea to read the contents first. The link provided by D'Emilio was extremely helpful as the article said what I tried to say only much more authoritatively. Surely even he can see the significance of these two sentences
| As no signed work has been preserved, only the stylistic comparison with that one, fragmentary mosaic image of St. John in the apse of the cathedral of Pisa offers a secure basis for consistently building a catalog of Cimabue's surviving works. Among these the most important are undoubtedly the frescoes of the choir and the transept arms of the upper basilica of S. Francesco in Assisi, attributed to him for the first time in 1550 by Vasari, which describes them as consumed by time and dust. |
http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/cimabue_%28Enciclopedia-dell%27-Arte-Medievale%29/
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Oera Linda
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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There was a similar story in the Guardian in April. So what, Wiles?, you might say.
This time the painting was discovered in a French attic (the attic is a famous repository of many lost masterpieces) and was claimed to be a Caravaggio, no less. The unknown family who owned the painting believe it may have been brought to France by one of their ancestors, an officer in Napoleon’s army.
https://bit.ly/2mJWizS
I say the story is similar as it was sent off to the same painting expert Eric Turquin as the Cimabue, who staked his reputation on it. Anyway, now being a Caravaggio, it was auctioned for $170 million dollars -- only it wasn't -- very mysteriously it was bought by an unnamed buyer for an undisclosed sum the day before the auction. So the reputation of Monseigneur Turquin and the auction house remain intact.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| Boreades wrote: | | Oera Linda |
I had to look this up on Wiki. I found it's described as a C19 forgery, author unknown
| The Oera Linda Book is a manuscript written in a form of Old Frisian, purporting to cover historical, mythological, and religious themes of remote antiquity, from 2194 BCE to 803 CE. Among academics in Germanic philology, the document is widely considered to be a hoax or forgery. |
The Dutch and the English were much more accepting of the manuscript's authenticity
The Oera Linda Book, known in Old Frisian as Thet Oera Linda Bok, came to light in 1867 when Cornelis Over de Linden (1811–1874) handed the manuscript, which he claimed to have inherited from his grandfather, via his aunt, over to Eelco Verwijs (1830–1880), the provincial librarian of Friesland, for translation and publication. Verwijs rejected the manuscript, but in 1872 Jan Gerhardus Ottema (1804–1879), a prominent member of the Frisian Society for History and Culture, published a Dutch translation. Ottema believed it to be written in authentic Old Frisian.
The book was subsequently translated into English by William Sandbach in 1876, and published by Trübner & Co. of London. |
We'd only heard of Trubner because of his full-length, unexpectedly detailed, review of the first volume of the 'memoirs' of F. A. Brockhaus, published by Brockhaus's grandson in 1872.
Theo Besterman’s 1934 book on Annie Besant was published by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & co. (Trubner's umlaut was quietly dropped during the First World War and by 1912 K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & co. had merged with Routledge, which is huge in the publishing world).
Nicholas Trubner's own biography was not unlike that of Besterman
TRÜBNER, NICHOLAS (Nikolaus), (1817–1884), publisher, the eldest of four sons of a Heidelberg goldsmith, was born at Heidelberg on 17 June 1817, and educated at the gymnasium.
He early showed an eager taste for study, and his parents, being unable to afford him a university training, placed him in 1831 in the shop of Mohr, the Heidelberg bookseller. .... At Frankfurt William Longman was struck with young Trübner's ability, and offered him the post of foreign corresponding clerk in his own business. It was eagerly accepted, and Nicholas arrived in London in 1843 with 30s. in his pocket. At Longman's he soon learnt the English language and book trade, and prepared himself for the position of a leading publisher.
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To read that Trubner became 'a household name' might be surprising but spiritualism, antiquarianism, orientalism &c. were perfectly kosher -isms in academic circles
On 16 March 1865 appeared the first monthly number of ‘Trübner's American and Oriental Record,’ which did invaluable service in keeping scholars all over the world in touch with him and with each other. In 1878 began the issue of ‘Trübner's Oriental Series,’ a collection of works by the leading authorities on all branches of Eastern learning, of which he lived to see nearly fifty volumes published.
His ‘British and Foreign Philosophical Library’ fulfilled a similar purpose for another branch of study. His keen interest in linguistic research led to his preparing in 1872 his ‘Catalogue of Dictionaries and Grammars of the principal Languages and Dialects of the World,’ of which an enlarged edition appeared in 1882. He also published numerous useful class catalogues of various languages and branches of study. He was publisher for government state papers and for various learned societies, such as the Royal Asiatic and the Early English Text, and added to these the ordinary business of a general publisher and foreign agent.
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German philologists might have baulked at endorsing an 'Old Frisian' manuscript but joined the queue to bestow honours on Trubner
His services to learning were recognised by foreign rulers, who bestowed on him the orders of the crown of Prussia, Ernestine Branch of Saxony, Francis Joseph of Austria, St. Olaf of Norway, the Lion of Zähringen, and the White Elephant of Siam.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Goodness gracious. If only we could piece together a giant conspiracy theory instead of drearily cataloguing the sheer incompetence of academics whenever they are confronted by fraudsters. The presence of Longmans is very significant because they, like Brockhaus Verlag, became 'the biggest publisher in the world' officially via encyclopaedias, dictionaries, academic journals and text books but with the hooky gear firmly in the background.
I think they are one now but I haven't checked lately, my own dealings with Penguin Random House being too depressing for me to keep up with who's who in the wacky world of 'straight' publishing.
PS James d'Emilio has now banned me!
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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It's worth mentioning -- it drove me nuts for months -- that when you click on one of these Twitter sub-URLs you see the last bit of it immediately but if you wait for about thirty seconds you get the whole thing. There is nothing to indicate you should, but you should. We might have a whip-round and send it to them so they can get it fixed. As for the time it takes for anything on Facebook to happen, don't get me started. I know for a fact that they've got a few bob since they just overtook Warren Buffet Inc as the fourth biggest company in the world. Maybe a whip-round for Warren though if he's a bit down in the dumps.
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